<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 <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</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="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h><span id="economy">Economy & Finance</span></h> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/science/bitcoin-nakamoto-blackburn-crypto.html" author="Siobhan Roberts" source="NY Times">How ‘Trustless’ Is Bitcoin, Really?</a> <bq>Although the analysis showed that the big players numbered 64 over two years, at any given moment, according to the researchers’ modeling, the effective size of that population was only five or six. And <b>on many occasions, just one or two people held most of the mining power.</b></bq> <bq>She found that within a few months of the cryptocurrency’s introduction — and contrary to Bitcoin’s egalitarian promise — <b>a classic distribution of income inequality emerged</b>: A small fraction of the miners held most of the wealth and power.</bq> <bq><b>Mr. Lanier called it “decentralization theater.”</b> Cryptocurrencies create an illusion: “‘Now we’re in utopia. Everything’s decentralized. Everybody’s equal.’ There’s this notion of democracy without annoyance.” But, he said, these systems end up hiding a new elite, which is <b>probably just an old elite in a new arena.</b> And the technology cuts both ways. “Whatever you think you can achieve using new algorithms, or big data, or whatever, can also be used against you,” Mr. Lanier said. “The same algorithms can be used by scientists to interrogate and investigate these castles that are put up by the new elite.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/america-this-week-october-2-8-2022" author="Matt Taibbi & Eric Salzman" source="TK News">America This Week, October 2-8, 2022</a> <bq>Unfortunately for Wall Street banks, Twitter represents another $12.5 billion of debt they have to finance or sell to investors. The banks already have about $51 billion of Leveraged Buyout (LBO) deals to finance or sell before the year is out and right now, nobody wants what they’re selling. Since the Fed started significantly tightening monetary policy, <b>Wall Street has had a difficult time selling debt from buyouts they agreed to finance earlier in the year. What could have been sold in April at a price close to 100 can now be sold at 80 or lower, and sometimes it can’t be sold at all.</b> Last week a large, highly publicized debt sale, led by Apollo Global Management was scrapped altogether due to “market conditions,” leaving the banks holding all the debt. It’s estimated that Wall Street will lose billions on these deals. <b>Now the on-again Twitter deal will need to be funded after all and the “best case” estimate is a realized and unrealized loss of about $1.6 billion for banks.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/10/shhh-dont-tell-the-fed-or-mainstream-media-that-systemic-contagion-at-wall-street-banks-is-already-here/" author="Pam and Russ Martens" source="Wall Street on Parade">Shhh! Don’t Tell the Fed or Mainstream Media that Systemic Contagion at Wall Street Banks Is Already Here</a> <bq>And if all of this wasn’t sickening enough, the Fed Chairman who set the Fed on the course of endless Wall Street bailouts, quantitative easing, and destructive meddling in markets — Ben Bernanke — was one of three receiving the Nobel Prize in economic sciences this morning. (You can’t make this stuff up.)</bq> That matches their acuity in choose peace-prize candidates. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/11/the-good-news-about-the-economy-you-are-not-hearing/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">The Good News About the Economy You are Not Hearing</a> <bq>The fact that a country as rich as ours does not have decent welfare state provisions that can ensure people adequate housing, food, and health care is an outrage. But that is a longer-term story, not something that just happened in the last year and a half. <b>When the media suddenly choose to emphasize the struggling population, in ways that they have not done in the past, that is a political decision on their part, not one responding to a new economic reality.</b></bq> I suppose that's the right way of looking at it. It's sad that we can't just wish that the focus on the poor is real. <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/08/patrick-lawrence-sins-of-silence-or-silence-by-design/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Sins of Silence, OR Silence by Design</a> <bq>I have thought a lot recently about the Tad Szulc piece and Kennedy’s reproach to Turner Catledge for removing its incisors. <b>Keeping Americans in the dark as the Cold War proceeded was key to the national-security state’s ability to operate without concern for civilian oversight or political interference.</b> This, the sin of silence, was among the press’s gravest transgressions of many during the Cold War decades, in my book. (And I have just finished one taking up this topic).</bq> <bq>Alert readers will recall the long story of Washington’s opposition to the Nord Stream II pipeline. This came to the surface as it neared completion during the Trump administration. The immediate intent, as many reports indicated at the time, was to deprive Russia of Europe’s large market for natural gas and secure this market for vastly more expensive American LNG. <b>The larger objective was to disrupt the growing economic interdependence of Europe and Russia, so blocking the natural drift toward a unified Eurasian landmass with Europe as its westernmost flank.</b></bq> <bq><b>Now we read that the Russians probably sabotaged a pipeline in which they invested, along with the Europeans, roughly $11 billion, and from which they expected to derive many more billions in foreign exchange earnings.</b> Chances for a negotiated settlement were also sabotaged, as was the rising chorus of voices in Germany and elsewhere calling for Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II to be reopened and opened respectively.</bq> <bq>The Ukraine conflict has just spread to Europe, as John Helmer, the longtime Moscow correspondent, asserted the other day. <b>The Americans seem determined to stop at no risk or any amount of destruction as they press their campaign against Russia: There is no limit</b>, we are now on notice, and the Europeans leadership seems to have no intention of imposing one. All frightening.</bq> <bq>As the Kyiv regime’s leading sponsors, they have stood by silently as Ukrainian forces shell the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. <b>If this isn’t nuclear terrorism, Zakharova asks, what is? “Radiation doesn’t care where it comes from.”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/protest-and-exodus" source="Russian Dissent" author="Boris Kagarlitsky">Protest and Exodus</a> <bq>It is expected that instead of the officially announced 300,000, they will be able to call up between 140,000 and 150,000. But even this is too much, given the current state of infrastructure, state organization and industry. Having already received more than a hundred thousand new conscripts, <b>the military and officials can neither properly provide them with everything necessary, nor organize them into combat-ready units, nor equip them with modern weapons, nor even transport them to the place of combat operations.</b></bq> <bq>The newly mobilized will have to be kept somewhere in the rear, scattered across training camps and barracks throughout the vast country. They sit idle or go through meaningless and poorly organized training, because <b>there is not enough equipment, competent instructors, or commanders.</b></bq> <bq>It is often written that mobilization foretells a genocide of small peoples. In fact, officials are not interested in the fate of the Yakuts, Buryats, Tuvans or Avars, but only in indicators. According to information circulating on the net, <b>the authorities, fearing discontent in big cities, are directing their main efforts towards mobilization in rural areas and in small urban settlements.</b></bq> The U.S. learned how to do this long ago. I'm sure Russia isn't doing it for the first time, either. You look to the most desperate and economically disadvantaged to find people who've got nothing to lose. <bq>Until now, the Russian authorities have shown an amazing ability to get away with it, to climb out of even the deepest holes they dug themselves. True, <b>each time, having got out of the latest crisis provoked by their own decisions, they emerged convinced of their invulnerability and immediately began to dig a new hole.</b> Sooner or later they will dig too deep.</bq> The similarities to the U.S. elites are profound. <hr> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/headscarf-games-zakaria" source="The Baffler" author="Rafia Zakaria">Headscarf Games</a> <bq>[...] the prudish Victorians forced a “blouse” on Indian women wearing the sari, so, too, has the “modern” West been enamored of removing veils, and saris, and the hijab as a way to celebrate the arrival of freedom and civilization. <b>Even the absurdity of French police patrolling Nice beaches to ensure no Muslim women have too much clothing on does not force any sort of retrospection of the Enlightenment airs put on by the French state.</b></bq> <bq>[...] even as Western commentators commend their bravery, they say little about economic hardships unrelated to the morality police. “Life,” for instance, would be a lot easier for the brave young people and revolutionary women <b>if they could have access to an economy that is less throttled by a world that has settled on Iran as the world’s perpetual bad guy.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/evidence-united-states-role-nord-stream-pipeline-blasts/282149/" source="Mint Press News" author="Jonathan Cook">Can Europe Afford To Turn A Blind Eye To Evidence Of A Us Role In Pipeline Blasts?</a> <bq><b>The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines</b> leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and <b>was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale.</b> The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.</bq> <bq>Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that <b>this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.</b></bq> It's pretty amazing how everyone pretty much knows it was the U.S., but no-one cares about it---because the U.S. did it and you're not allowed to pay attention to things that they'd rather you didn't notice. <bq>The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to competitors.</bq> <bq>Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the U.S. for its gas supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through Russia’s pipelines. <b>American energy firms may well be the biggest beneficiaries from the explosions.</b></bq> The attacks very clearly advance American imperial designs. The destruction of the environment increases directly, with the release of methane, but, also, indirectly with a much larger energy expenditure to deliver the costlier LNG. <bq author="Condaleeza Rice">She added: “You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia.”</bq> Why does anyone listen to these mad hatters? My God, Germany should have been offended to be ordered about like that but, instead, they said "thank you, ma'am, may I please have another?" <bq>“Sadly,” he added, “<b>due to the Western narrative that Ukraine is ‘winning’ the war against Moscow, the Biden administration appears to believe it can put enough pressure on Putin</b> with more weapons for Ukraine that he will give up his newly annexed territories and go home with his atomic tail between his legs.”</bq> <bq>Putin’s rhetoric has grown markedly sharper from February to last Friday. He has attacked the European Union for its “selfishness” and cowardice, the U.S. for its hegemonic aggression, including the genocide of Native Americans, and the West altogether for the “neocolonial” character of its relations with the non–West. <b>Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, used to refer to Western nations as “our partners.” As of last Friday, yesterday’s partners are Russia’s “enemies.”</b></bq> <bq><b>Putin has made this turn toward confrontation reluctantly and out of frustration with the West’s obstinate refusal to negotiate</b> the new security order that Europe so obviously needs. He is angry at the spectacle of wasteful violence and prolonged disorder.</bq> Neither can he back down if he sees Russia about to be steamrolled. He's not a hero, but the U.S. track record is clear. They want to subjugate Russia, sooner or later. There will be a lot of damage done as the U.S. most likely tries and fails to do this. <bq>In his Moscow address, he said: “<b>They do not wish us freedom, but they want to see us as a colony. They want not equal cooperation, but robbery.</b> They want to see us not as a free society, but as a crowd of soulless slaves.”</bq> It's really hard to disagree with Putin here. These are the espoused aims of the American administration. <bq>“Western countries have been repeating for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other peoples. Everything is exactly the opposite: instead of democracy – suppression and exploitation; instead of freedom – enslavement and violence. <b>The entire unipolar world order is inherently anti-democratic and not free, it is deceitful and hypocritical through and through.</b></bq> That's Putin? It sounds like Chomsky. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/05/patrick-lawrence-the-strong-and-the-merely-powerful/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The Strong, and the Merely Powerful</a> <bq>There are strong nations and there are the merely powerful. In the world order as we have it the powerful dominate — ever more evidently by force alone. In the world order now emerging, it is genuinely strong nations that will at last prevail over those reliant on power alone, and force will have little to do with it.</bq> <bq><b>Strong nations serve their people as their primary responsibility.</b> This is where I begin as I characterize them. They have a purpose, a telos , as the ancient Greeks put it, and a shared belief in the worth of their ideal. They have a commitment to advancing the well-being of their citizens — to constructive action in the interest of the commonweal. They value their cultures, their histories, their memories.</bq> <bq><b>I am of the view — and I realize there are others — that China does not use its power to malign purpose.</b> Remove the Sinophobia and anti–Chinese paranoia, and the record supports this. Power</bq> <bq>The rampant, perverse corporatization of every aspect of life in unduly powerful nations represents the institutionalization of these characteristics. <b>When everything is measured according to its potential to turn profit, we have to say that Margaret Thatcher was horribly right</b> when she asserted, “There is no society. There are only individuals.” This is a key feature of nations that are merely powerful. <b>They are gatherings of survivors in constant struggle against one another.</b></bq> <bq>I have long found <b>Putin</b>’s speeches, all available on the Kremlin web site, worth reading: Whatever else one may think of him, he <b>has an excellent grasp of history and the dynamics of international relations.</b></bq> <bq><b>That is when he said in effect, To hell with them. We will have to build a new world order on our own.</b> China, by that time, had already given up on the West, and it was then the Russians and Chinese took their great leap forward together.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/10/03/scott-ritter-the-onus-is-on-biden-putin/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">The Onus Is on Biden & Putin</a> <bq>Russia has also ordered a partial mobilization of some 300,000 troops which, once trained and deployed into the Ukraine theater of operations, <b>will provide sufficient military power to successfully complete Russia’s original tasks</b> — demilitarization and denazification.</bq> I'm surprised that Ritter doesn't question the feasibility of this. <bq>By ignoring stated Russian nuclear policy, and instead mirror-imaging U.S. nuclear policy onto Russian behavior, the U.S., NATO and Ukraine are setting themselves — and the world — up for disaster.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/10/russia-ukraine-war-explanation-class-conflict/" source="Jacobin" author="Volodymyr Ishchenko">Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict</a> <bq>Typically, in post-Soviet countries, the maidan revolutions only weakened the state and made local political capitalists more vulnerable to pressure from transnational capital — both directly and indirectly via pro-Western NGOs. For example, in Ukraine, after the Euromaidan revolution, a set of “anti-corruption” institutions has been stubbornly pushed forward by the IMF, G7, and civil society. They have failed to present any major case of corruption in the last eight years. However, <b>they have institutionalized oversight of key state enterprises and the court system by foreign nationals and anti-corruption activists, thus squeezing domestic political capitalists’ opportunities for reaping insider rents.</b> Russian political capitalists would have a good reason to be nervous with the troubles of Ukraine’s once-powerful oligarchs.</bq> Their country gets taken over by foreign technocrats and they're worried about where their rents com from? I think that's quite a stretch. The author seems to imply that any foreign oversight is necessarily better than local autonomy, for certain countries. That seems quite a colonial attitude, but maybe some countries have completely given up on ruling themselves. That they look to other countries for help that are ruled just as badly is sad, of course, but perhaps inevitable, given their desperation. Also, that political capitalists everywhere will have just as little allegiance to local autonomy, as long as they make money. Projecting from the multitude of western examples, I guess. <bq>By launching the war, the Kremlin sought to mitigate that threat for the foreseeable future, with the ultimate goal of the “multipolar” restructuring of the world order. As Branko Milanovic suggests, <b>the war provides legitimacy for the Russian decoupling from the West, despite the high costs</b>, and at the same time makes it extremely difficult to reverse it after the annexation of even more Ukrainian territory.</bq> Putin has forced the hand of the the West. They have made it unequivocal that there was never to be any solution but subjugation. This is a terrible strategy, doomed to failure. This doesn't mean that Russia will emerge victorious, but that everyone will be bloodied severely, if not annihilated. <hr> <a href="https://twitter.com/thecontentmines/status/1578410088959713282" author="Ian Stephens" source="Twitter">This guy nailed it.</a> <img attachment="what_i_don_t_like_about_nyc.jpg" align="left" caption="What I don't like about NYC">I thought the sentiment was interesting and transcribed it below. However, I wonder about the production quality. I see that the moderator was using an external microphone to interview the man. Maybe that accounts for the fact that the audio is not at all synced to the video. What I wonder, though, is whether people think that this increases or decreases the veracity. How can you tell the difference between this and a deep fake? Or something produced by an AI? Or just having a black-sounding man reading what you'd like people to hear while you show a relatively clean-cut, ostensibly homeless person, ostensibly from NYC in a video to lend veracity and context to a statement that he never made? <bq>There's a lot of things I don't like about NYC. They're always talking about the homeless and how NYC gets billions of dollars, every year, from the federal government, state government, to take care of the homeless---and it's gotta be about a billion dollars a year. And there's not even 100,000, maybe 200,000 homeless. Let's say it's 200,000. A billion dollars? 100,000 empty buildings in New York! They could just renovate them. But they'll take that money and buy a new van, get a kitchen somewhere, and get a paper bag, put a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in it, an apple and an apple juice, and ride around and give it you! And I'm wondering---I'm not wondering, I know---it's a business. They don't care about no homeless. They care about business. It's a business. And everybody is using the homeless---especially this city---I'm saying the city, the government, is <i>using</i> the homeless to line their pockets. That's exactly what ... so, I don't like that.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/07/thno-o07.html" author="Clara Weiss" source="WSWS">Amid deepening crisis of Putin regime, US steps up regime-change operation</a> <bq>To avoid being mobilized, more privileged layers of the middle class have left the country in a panic, with reports suggesting that as many as 400,000 men have fled to neighboring countries. In an indication of the social layer involved, the German magazine Spiegel ran a portrait of two young men involved in a bitcoin company who made it to Georgia under the headline “Latte Macchiato in Tiflis.” <b>Prior to their flight, they had each been earning $5,000 a month in Russia, more than many workers make in an entire year.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/11/fcqp-o11.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">US seeks “turning point” in Ukraine after Russian strikes</a> <bq>On Friday, the Ukrainian Special Forces orchestrated a terrorist suicide bombing on the Kerch Bridge, which connects Russia to Crimea. The move came after <b>the former commanding general of the US Army in Europe, General Ben Hodges, urged Ukraine to “drop” the bridge, and current US officials publicly gave a green light to attack it.</b> Days after the attack, the aim of the Kerch Bridge bombing comes into sharper view. Its purpose was to provoke a military response by Russia against civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, which could then be used to justify a massive increase in US-NATO involvement in the conflict. For months, US officials had been expressing concern that Russia had not been “provoked” into expanding the war into western Ukraine, which had been largely spared in recent months.</bq> The U.S. gets what it wants. Always. What is wants benefits only a tiny elite in the U.S. and, possibly, Europe. No-one else. If Russia doesn't respond, then it will have to just roll over and go home with its tail between its legs, with NATO hot on its heels. What would stop them then? There is no reason for Russia to believe that there is any other way out than "forward". But that way lies madness, as well. Russia must be made to suffer. An example must be made. And the provokers smile smugly and gather the adulation of the world to themselves, safe in the knowledge that they will never be made to answer for their provocation. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/12/ysao-o12.html" author="Peter Symonds" source="WSWS">US imposes crippling controls on export of advanced chips to China</a> <bq>The latest controls extend the measures imposed by the Trump administration on the Chinese hi-tech corporation, Huawei, that effectively ended its position as the leading manufacturer of mobile phones and networking equipment. Huawei’s founder reportedly told staff that the company’s survival was at stake. <b>Now the Biden administration is seeking to wreak devastation throughout hi-tech sectors of the Chinese economy.</b></bq> This has nothing to do with Xinjiang. This is pure economic war against an economic rival. It should be illegal to do this kind of thing. I wonder how the U.S. plans to impose the these restrictions on non-U.S. corporations? It is aimed at Taiwan, which will, of course, try to cooperate? What will Taiwan do? They have contracts with mainland China. Can they really just renege on them without repercussion, especially when they'd be doing so at the behest of the U.S.? <bq>By banning the export of the most advanced lithography equipment needed to etch chips, <b>the US export controls seek not only to block access to the latest chips but to obstruct Chinese efforts to develop its own chip manufacturing capacity.</b> The bans extend restrictions put in place in July requiring top US toolmakers—KLA Corp, Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc—to end exports of equipment capable of making 14nm or smaller chips to wholly Chinese-owned companies.</bq> There it is. <bq>China responded angrily to the new bans. “Out of the need to maintain its sci-tech hegemony, the US abuses export control measures to maliciously block and suppress Chinese companies,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told the media. “It will not only damage the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies, but also affect American companies’ interests.”</bq> You're right about that. Unfortunately, something will have to go boom before the U.S. slinks from the world stage. Right now, it's a bull in a china shop, dull-eyed and stupid, making kindergarten-level policy decisions. There are literally no adults in the room on that side. I can't even imagine how terrifying it is to have to deal with people like that, knowing that they wield so much power. <bq>The US measures designed to undermine the Chinese economy <b>go hand in hand with a US military build-up throughout the region</b>, along with military provocations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait close to the Chinese mainland. <b>Last century, the US provoked a war in the Pacific with Japan by imposing an oil embargo in the 1930s aimed at strangling the Japanese economy.</b> Likewise, the latest US export controls on computer chips point to the extreme tensions between the US and China and the advanced character of US war preparations.</bq> This is an excellent summary of the situation. <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2022/10/08/ai-is-coming-for-bullsht-jobs/" author="John Quiggin" source="Crooked Timber"> AI is coming for bullsh*t jobs</a> <bq>As an example, <b>a fair bit of the content of a typical newspaper consists of press releases that have been lightly edited and perhaps spiced up a bit.</b> With Jasper, the time taken for this task goes from an hour or so to a few minutes. For that matter, the press release itself can be generated from a few prompts in a similarly short time.</bq> This is not good journalistic practice. However, instead of eliminating it, we're automating it. We'll make it so cheap to churn out bullshit news that we can churn out even more of it! And people don't read it now anyhow. But we can establish facts on the ground by pretending that people <i>had read and understood it</i> and then claim that they'd known all along what was going on because we'd declared it publicly in newspapers that no-one reads. I'm going to coin a new rule of history: the H2G2 rule. "Every historical situation will eventually because so ridiculous and self-parodying that it will seem to have been prophesied in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." I might need to work on the wording, but that's the gist of it. The purpose our news serves is to retroactively justify horrific acts as if everyone should have seen where it was leading. In this case, it maps perfectly to the conversation in which Arthur learns that the destruction of the planet Earth to make way for a <i>Galactic Hyperspatial Express Route</i> was all above-board and had been communicated well in advance. <bq quote-style="none"><b>Functionary:</b> “But the plans were on display…” <b>Arthur Dent:</b> “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” <b>Functionary:</b> “That’s the display department.” <b>Arthur Dent:</b> “With a flashlight.” <b>Functionary:</b> “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” <b>Arthur Dent:</b> “So had the stairs.” <b>Functionary:</b> “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” <b>Arthur Dent:</b> “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”</bq> <bq>Lots of middle management jobs, for example, involve writing memos and reports justifying one corporate decision or another. After you read a few, they all seem the same. <b>AI can distil the essence well enough to mimic the style. After that, it’s just a matter of fitting the verbiage around the desired conclusion.</b></bq> The most that Quiggin can imagine is not that technology will help us improve our expressiveness or concision, but that it will help us create larger volumes of bullshit text <i>more quickly</i> and with <i>less human effort</i>. The fact remains that the information flood that has significantly impacted awareness among the most influential people on the planet. They are influential because they are wealthy and are winning the war against the unseen underclass, but they are influential nevertheless. They are also increasingly indoctrinated by a flood of information. This information will only get worse once AIs start "assisting" us in writing it. <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-john-lennons-birthday-a-few-words" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">On John Lennon's Birthday, a Few Words About War</a> <bq>They still suffer from the disease of modern American thought that endorses “regime change” as a solution to every real or imagined security threat, a reflex that, in case anyone forgot, has ended in tears every time it’s been tried in real life. They believe this is the only road out of the Russia-Ukraine mess. <b>They’re welcome to that belief, but those of us who’d like to note their long track records of being not just wrong but insanely so should be able to express ourselves without being branded traitors.</b> Yes, this time it really could be 1938. It could also be 1914, when a chain-reaction of lunatic escalations spun a localized conflict into a global conflagration costing millions of senseless deaths.</bq> <bq>The pair’s peace patter and naked photo shoots are still ridiculed as representative of antiwar activism that supposedly assumes the world runs on flowers, free love, and finger paints. <b>Even the dumbest pacifist, however, never did anything as stupid and destructive as the bombing of North Vietnam, the invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan</b>, or the “liberation” of Libya (or the invasions of Chechnya and Ukraine, for that matter).</bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CIpzeNxIhU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/1CIpzeNxIhU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Computerphile" caption="How AI Image Generators Work (Stable Diffusion / Dall-E)"> This is a great explanation of how the current image-generation AI models work. What is not mentioned is the degree to which these models "help themselves" to publicly available intellectual property. What's essentially happening is what always happens: someone or something (a company) steals a little bit from a lot of people in a way that would be completely infeasible to legally pursue, creates something centralized out of it and deems it their IP. From there, they defend the product they built on stolen loot vigorously even anyone even dares to steal from them. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RiAxvb_qI4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/0RiAxvb_qI4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sixty Symbols" caption="Spooky Action at a Distance (Bell's Inequality)"> A 23-minute explanation of some fascinating quantum-mechanical concepts. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpUe41EbHvQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/cpUe41EbHvQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Potholer54" caption="What the new “Climate Declaration” doesn't tell us (nudge nudge, wink wink)"> Another brilliant and measured analysis of the latest purported climate-change-debunking news. This time, it's about a "Climate Declaration" that will be (has been?) reported as a world-shattering shift in our understanding of climate science. It is not. (Spoiler alert.) <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbzcYQVrTxQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ZbzcYQVrTxQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sabine Hossfelder" caption="Cold Fusion is Back (there's just one problem)"> A 20-minute explanation of fusion, the strong force, cold fusion, LENR, and many ways people are trying to investigate inexpensive ways of producing energy. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/10/energy-prices-crisis-inflation-oil-opec-profits-price-fixing/" author="Tim Di Muzio & Matt Dow" source="Jacobin">The Only Long-Term Solution for the Energy Crisis Is Systemic Change</a> <bq>Another point we need to stress to avoid confusion is that <b>hydrogen and electricity are energy carriers, not sources of energy</b>. In other words, <b>hydrogen and electricity must be produced using some primary energy source</b>, be it renewable solar and wind or nonrenewable fossil fuels. Moreover, both hydrogen and renewable energy are <i>adding</i> energy, not <i>replacing</i> fossil fuels, to supply the world’s energy grid.</bq> <bq>More than a century ago, the economist Thorstein Veblen wrote a collection of papers, later published in 1919, entitled The <a href="https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/Engineers.pdf">Engineers and the Price System</a>. One of the primary points he made was that prices are largely a matter of profit targets and institutional power rather than an equilibrium between supply and demand. <b>Veblen recognized that firms charge what the traffic will bear and engage in strategic sabotage. By “sabotage,” Veblen chiefly meant the restriction of capacity</b> — or the incapacitation of production, which amounts to the same thing.</bq> <bq>Utility is based on individual preference, which is subjective, and therefore cannot be measured in any precise way. For example, <b>if a barrel of oil was worth $50 dollars yesterday and $100 dollars today, why the change? Did oil somehow double in its usefulness to everyone overnight?</b></bq> <bq>The last time an energy crisis of this magnitude took place, we saw a dramatic shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. We cannot allow the response to this crisis to take the form of more neoliberal extremism or looming fascism. <b>The biggest demand people should be making today is for their countries’ energy systems to be taken into public ownership.</b> This would increase democratic oversight and develop a more robust democracy based on clean energy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/is-the-age-of-fusion-upon-us" source="Tablet Magazine" author="Khaled Talaat">Is the Age of Fusion Upon Us?</a> <bq>In August of 2021, the NIF came close to plasma ignition <b>using intense lasers directed at a gold-coated depleted uranium cavity “hohlraum,” which releases intense X-rays that symmetrically ablate a diamond pellet shell containing deuterium-tritium fuel</b>, causing it to compress to high densities. Compression to high densities reduces the time required for plasma to reach ignition, which, if reached, would allow the reactions to produce more energy than the radiation losses associated with the temperature of the plasma—thereby maximizing the fraction of the fuel that is burned and potentially allowing for electricity production.</bq> Wow. When you've tried everything else. <bq>Recent advances in tokamak technology are worthy of our enthusiasm, particularly at a scientific level. But viable fusion energy systems will be very expensive due to the complexity of the technology and required materials, and in part due to its novelty and limited industrial supply of parts. Although we may be a few years away from self-sustainable plasma, and perhaps another two decades away from tokamak plants that produce net energy and electricity, assuming adequate funding is provided, <b>the technology will still need to go through an intense cost-reduction phase in order to compete with today’s nuclear fission systems.</b></bq> Why? They don't have the externalized cost of nuclear waste. Can't it be considered cheaper because it has fewer externalized costs? <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03%20-%20Novak-Parma%20-%20Onion%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf" author="" source="Supreme Court">BRIEF OF THE ONION AS AMICUS CURIAE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONER</a> The Onion has outdone itself. The entire <i>Amicus Curiae</i> is a work of art, in defense of free speech, of the right to parody. <bq>The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, <b>The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.</b> In addition to maintaining a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires, <b>The Onion supports more than 350,000 full- and part-time journalism jobs in its numerous news bureaus and manual labor camps stationed around the world</b>, and members of its editorial board have served with distinction in an advisory capacity for such nations as China, Syria, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union. On top of its journalistic pursuits, <b>The Onion also owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes</b>, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.</bq> <bq>This is not a mere linguistic anecdote. The point is instead that <b>without the capacity to fool someone, parody is functionally useless</b>, deprived of the tools inscribed in its very etymology that allow it, again and again, to perform this rhetorically powerful sleight-of-hand: <b>It adopts a particular form in order to critique it from within.</b></bq> <bq>The point of all this is not that it is funny when deluded figures of authority mistake satire for the actual news—even though that can be extremely funny. Rather, it’s that <b>the parody allows these figures to puncture their own sense of self-importance by falling for what any reasonable person would recognize as an absurd escalation of their own views.</b></bq> <bq>Not only is the Sixth Circuit on the wrong side of Twain, but <b>grafting onto the reasonable-reader test a requirement that parodists explicitly disclaim their own pretense to reality is a disservice to the American public.</b> It assumes that ordinary readers are less sophisticated and more humorless than they actually are. </bq> <bq><b>‘[T]he last thing we need, the last thing the First Amendment will tolerate, is a law that lets public figures keep people from mocking them.’</b> <i>Cardtoons, L.C. v. Major League Baseball Players Ass’n,</i> 95 F.3d 959, 972–73 (10th Cir. 1996) (quoting <i>White v. Samsung Elecs. Am., Inc.</i>, 989 F.2d 1512, 1519 (9th Cir. 1993) (Kozinski, J., dissenting)).</bq> <hr> <a href="https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/how-americans-edit-sex-out-of-my-writing/en" source="European Review of Books" author="Francesco Pacifico">How Americans edit sex out of my writing</a> <bq><b>The thing is, I wasn’t taking the scene anywhere. I was sketching a scene hanging in the air.</b> We’re in lockdown and we’re drinking day and night, we’re spent and miserable, and one morning [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/marvin-gaye-at-the-franprix" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">Marvin Gaye at the Franprix</a> <bq>But I can’t help who I am, and <b>instead of going to the open-air market, and to the fromagerie and the fruiterie and the others, where you are supposed to be grateful that you can still pay separately for each category of food, I go to Franprix.</b></bq> <bq>Alright, <b>I’m embellishing just a little bit, but only in order to get across the deeper truth that what I am talking about here is a transfigured space, outside of ordinary reality.</b> I am always primed, when I enter it, to be moved, by the music, by memory, by desire, which appear, when we are down at that level of truth I’m trying to sound, to be different manifestations of the same thing.</bq> I love this guy. Don't ever change. <bq>And so when, a few days ago, I went in for a kilo of “Leader Price” store-brand petits pois congelés and a bag of amandes décortiquées and I heard “Ooh baby, I’m hot just like an oven”, it should not be so surprising that this was enough to make time-travel possible, to make it 1982 again, 1984 again, to make Marvin Gaye die at his father’s hands again, eternal as a Greek tragic hero, to disclose to me my own oven-nature, and the oven-nature of all my fellow beings: all hot for each other, even beyond death. How did he do it? <b>How did he get into the solid-state FM radio on the kitchen counter in Rio Linda, California, into Casey Kasem’s weekly countdown, only to weave his way, across the years and across the globe, into my Franprix?</b> One must be very hot indeed to pull that off.</bq> This is a work of art. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/03/oneh-o03.html" source="WSWS" author="Robert Campion">Amazon Prime’s<i>The Rings of Power</i>: One show to ruin them all</a> <bq><b>Not only is it stunningly boring, but it suffers from sophomoric writing, one-dimensional characters, and contrived plot points.</b> At the time of this writing, a leading review site reveals an audience score of 38 percent, with professional critics giving it 84 percent.</bq> <bq><b>Tolkien wrote sophisticated fantasy literature replete with poems, songs, thousands of years of history and even entire languages.</b> His writing was not without limitations , however, and suffused with elegies to the past. Growing up in England in the early 20th century, the experience of two world wars weighed heavily upon him, and he steered into Luddite conceptions that the bloody conflicts were caused by the industrialisation of society rather than the explosive contradictions of capitalism. At any rate, <b>the sensitivity and sophistication in his work is altogether absent from Rings of Power.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2022/10/02/sergio-aragones-mad-magazine/" source="Washington Post" author="Michael Cavna">Mad magazine’s oldest active artist still spoofs what makes us human</a> <bq>Aragonés’s high standard for consistent creativity is legendary. For decades, he only missed contributing to a single issue, and that was because the mail from Europe was slow in the 1960s. The cartoonist, who also produces the fantasy comic book series “Groo the Wanderer,” <b>attributes his mental fertility to mixing things up creatively, from narrative stories to the wordless art for the MAD margins, his signature domain.</b> “The variety of my field,” he says with gusto, “allows me to never get tired of it.”</bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-achieve-absurdly-fast-algorithm-for-network-flow-20220608/" source="Quanta" author="Erica Klarreich">Researchers Achieve ‘Absurdly Fast’ Algorithm for Network Flow</a> <bq>Their algorithm provides a novel way to use a “low-stretch spanning tree” — a sort of internal backbone that captures many of the network’s most salient features. Given such a tree, there’s always at least one good cycle you can build by adding a single link from outside the tree. So having a low-stretch spanning tree drastically reduces the number of cycles you need to consider. Even then, <b>for the algorithm to run quickly, the team couldn’t afford to build a brand new spanning tree at every step. Instead, they had to ensure that each new cycle caused only minor ripple effects in the spanning trees, so they could reuse most of their previous computations.</b></bq> That reminds me very much of the flyweight/glyph pattern, keeping changes to a document tree as localized as possible, from bubbling out layout changes further than absolutely necessary. <hr> <a href="http://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/1/software-engineering-practices/" source="" author="Simon Willison">Software engineering practices</a> <bq>These templates need to be maintained and kept up-to-date. The best way to do that is to make sure they are being used—<b>every time a new project is created is a chance to revise the template and make sure it still reflects the recommended way to do things.</b></bq> <bq>The process needs to be: <b>Design a new schema change that can be applied without changing the application code that uses it. Ship that change to production, upgrading your database while keeping the old code working. Now ship new application code that uses the new schema. Ship a new schema change that cleans up any remaining work—dropping columns that are no longer used, for example.</b> This process is a pain. It’s difficult to get right. The only way to get good at it is to practice it a lot over time.</bq>