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Links and Notes for November 25th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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.bostonreview.net/articles/how-capitalism-not-a-few-bad-actors-destroyed-the-internet/" source="Boston Review" author="Matthew Crain">How Capitalism—Not a Few Bad Actors—Destroyed the Internet</a> <bq>Through bouts of competition and collaboration, private and public sector interests steered digital networks toward maximizing their monitoring and influence capacities, tilling the soil for all manner of deceptive communication practices and wreaking havoc on less invasive media business models. The legacy of this period is the concentration of surveillance capacity in corporate hands and the normalization of consumer monitoring across all digital media platforms we have come to know today.</bq> <bq>Leveraging surveillance to strategically target vulnerable audiences is not some rogue use of digital advertising technology; it is its very nature. As Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott put it in their summary of the election scandals, this stuff is “digital marketing 101.”</bq> <bq>A study of 1 million popular websites found that nearly 90 percent collect and exchange data with external third parties of which most users are unaware. From period-tracker apps to porn sites, ad platforms scoop up all manner of sensitive personal information in order to power their “digital influence machine.” Privacy has been obliterated as surveillance advertisers have created countless ways to link online and offline information.</bq> Can't killing third-party cookies stop this? What about do-not-track? <bq>Surveillance advertising has never existed outside of politics. On the contrary, like every other communications system in existence, the Internet’s prevailing economic structure has been heavily shaped by public policy.</bq> <bq>Various forms of legislation, regulation, and government subsidy were foundational to the establishment of U.S. commercial broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, for example. It was the Federal Radio Commission, at the behest of Congress and the executive branch, that “cleared the dial” of many public and nonprofit broadcasters to give exclusive licenses (for free) to some of the nation’s most powerful technology companies, as Tim Wu has noted. From that point forward, broadcasting proceeded almost entirely on advertising-supported basis.</bq> <bq>Beginning in the late 1980s, federal policy makers worked closely with a range of commercial interests to establish what was framed as a “non-regulatory, market oriented” approach to Internet policy. The guiding principle was that the private sector would lead Internet system development, and the government’s primary role was to facilitate private profits. This left a regulatory vacuum around consumer data collection and gave the nascent online advertising industry free rein to build business models around hidden surveillance.</bq> <bq>Though largely overshadowed by the web’s mythos of “friction-free” markets and entrepreneurialism, the regulatory foundations of modern commercial Internet surveillance were forged in this period through negotiations over privacy policies, user consent, data merging, and industry self-regulation, which became the baseline policy framework for online data collection in the twenty-first century. The neoliberal consensus was that commercial surveillance on the Internet was a business like any other: best to let the market sort out the details.</bq> <bq>Although the magnitude of contemporary commercial surveillance is certainly mind-bending, the system reflects enduring structural imperatives within a capitalist political economy dependent on perpetual growth.</bq> <bq>Concentrating on bad actors often means ignoring the political economic forces that have incentivized surveillance advertising and so fabulously rewarded its most successful practitioners.</bq> <bq>Rather than a break from the past, supercharged online surveillance is better understood as an acceleration of capitalism’s longstanding imperative to produce consumer demand.</bq> <bq>During this period, audience fragmentation and the shifting demographics of the U.S. population put national mass advertising under increasing strain. In 1965 an ad campaign could reach 80 percent of eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old women by purchasing three television commercials; a few decades later, it required nearly a hundred prime-time spots to achieve the same result. For major marketers, these trends threatened a loss of control over a changing media system that had long been dictated by their interests.</bq> <bq>Of course, efforts to make ads “relevant” hinged on two things: the technical capacity to collect, exchange, and monetize consumer data at unprecedented scale, and the freedom to do so unhindered by regulatory safeguards around such outdated notions as privacy.</bq> <bq>the FTC noted that privacy concerns were “not unique to Google and DoubleClick,” but rather “extend to the entire online advertising marketplace.” In other words, the FTC argued that consumer monitoring was already so well established that it did not make much sense to question the institutional build-up of surveillance capacity that would result from the merger. Equally significant, the commissioners admitted that even if they had wanted to consider data collection and privacy issues as part of the merger review, they simply had little jurisdiction over such matters. Consumer surveillance on the Internet is industry’s domain; the private sector is in charge. This is the political legacy of the dotcom era.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2022/12/01/the-labor-market-is-broken/" author="Katherine Mangu-Ward" source="Reason">The Labor Market Is Broken</a> <bq>A substantial number of younger people are not, in fact, keen to get hitched with an employer. In 2022, "for every [25- to 54-year-old] guy who is out of work and looking for a job," American Enterprise Institute economist Nicholas Eberstadt told the Fifth Column podcast, "there are four guys who are neither working nor looking for work."</bq> I don't know how people can believe statistics like this. Sure, it's the AEI, which has a reputation for absolutely hating the working class. And it's Mangu-Ward, who despises them all as shiftless moochers. But, c'mon. Who believes that 80% of the smack-dab-middle of the potential job-seeking pool has checked out---other than a dyed-in-the-wool ideologue? You really have to hate people with a passion to believe something so obviously untrue about them. I also heard that 80% of CIS-white-straight-males are pedophiles. Saw it on Twitter. <hr> <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/12/credit-default-swaps-blow-out-on-credit-suisse-as-its-stock-price-hits-an-all-time-low-of-2-82/" author="Pam and Russ Martens" source="Wall Street on Parade">Credit Default Swaps Blow Out on Credit Suisse as its Stock Price Hits an All-Time Low of $2.82</a> <bq>5-year Credit Default Swaps (CDS) on Credit Suisse blew out to 446 basis points. That’s up from 55 basis points in January and more than five times where CDS on its peer Swiss bank, UBS, are trading. The price of a Credit Default Swap reflects the cost of insuring oneself against a debt default by the bank. Who might be desperate to buy protection against a default by Credit Suisse and driving up the cost of that protection? The mega banks on Wall Street that are counterparties to its derivative trades come to mind, as well as hedge fund speculators. Things don’t look any brighter this morning for Credit Suisse. Its shares are trading in Europe at 2.67 Swiss Francs or approximately $2.82 – an all-time low. Year-to-date, shares of Credit Suisse have lost 66 percent of their value as of yesterday’s close on the New York Stock Exchange.</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/25/patrick-lawrence-why-do-nations-erase-the-past/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Why Do Nations Erase the Past?</a> <bq>By then I had heard the old Soviet joke many times, as some readers may have. The future is set, Soviet citizens used to say. It is the past that is always uncertain. This was a reference to all the airbrushing of photographs, the rewriting of texts, and the corrupting of archives that went on during the Stalin years.</bq> <bq>[...] we have watched these past seven years as the West has become more and more Soviet in its disrespect and abuse of the past. Since the Russian intervention in Ukraine last February, this kind of inexcusable conduct has been rampant—made all the worse as Western leaders and institutions indulge in it with no compunction, no conscience, and certainly no embarrassment.</bq> <bq>Ernest Renan, the French historian, biblical scholar, philosopher, philologist, critic, and so on—people did a lot of different things before our civilization packed knowledge into silos—delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1882 that has come down to us and is still quoted from time to time. He called it Qu’est-ce que une nation? —“What Is a Nation?” Among its notable passages is this: “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation…The essence of a nation is that all of its individual members have a great deal in common and also that they have forgotten many things.” Renan had particular reasons for advancing these surprisingly forthright thoughts. By the 1880s, France was busily making itself a modern nation. Its regional identities and dialects—Brittany and Breton, Alsace and Alcacien, Occitanie and Languedoc, and so on—were pre-modern impediments to the project. They had to be subdued and over time removed from the national discourse, as if they were undesirable statues. I have always found Renan’s thoughts on nationality disagreeable and diabolically true all at once.</bq> Switzerland is different. It would rather integrate than forget, elide, or erase. <bq>The forgetting of our time is of a different order, it seems to me. It is much more insidious. The objective is to create a new consciousness, as it was in Renan’s time, but in our 21st century case this is to be done by way of a radical narrowing of our minds, a radical impoverishment of thought in the name of a neoliberal hegemony, in this way a radical stripping away of possibilities, a radical confinement within the walls of another bifurcated world order wherein neither side can see over these walls into the other side. In this world, if we collectively accept it without resistance, the future will be set and the past always uncertain.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/22/scott-ritter-the-back-channel/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">The Back Channel</a> <bq>The conditions for a settlement on U.S. and Ukrainian terms — such as Russia withdrawing from the four territories it recently annexed as well as Crimea, paying reparations and turning over senior military and civilian leaders for prosecution as war criminals — have almost no chance of happening.</bq> It's a good starting position, though, isn't it?. Ask high, compromise lower. I don't know why entering a discussion with unreasonable expectations can't just be accepted. Are people worried about wasting a flight? Or that the other side will also be just as unwilling to compromise and that discussions would be useless? <bq>The notion that Russia is somehow losing its military conflict with NATO-backed Ukraine, and its economic war with the West, is belied by the increasing desperation inherent in the growing calls for a negotiated settlement by senior U.S. officials.</bq> <bq>NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who on Nov. 14, while speaking to the heads of the foreign and defense ministries of the Netherlands, declared: “The only way to achieve a solution to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is on the battlefield. Many conflicts are resolved at the negotiating table, but this is not the case, and Ukraine must win, so we will support it for as long as it takes.”</bq> Jesus what a dangerous animal to have in charge. An absolute raving lunatic, like McArthur or LeMay. <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2022/11/22/no-one-should-have-to-earn-a-living" source="" author="Ted Rall">No One Should Have To Earn a Living</a> <bq>Higher education has become an essential need as well. Before the first settlement in Mesopotamia, people proved their suitability for mating by exhibiting skills like hunting, sewing and cooking. In America today, millions of men remain involuntarily single because women are more likely to have a college degree; they refuse to date “down” to a guy with a GED. A four-year degree at a private college can easily run a quarter million dollars.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/11/world-cup-human-rights-qatar-2022-economic-social-justice-migrant-workers/" source="Jacobin" author="Neil Vallelly">The World Cup Should Make Us Rethink Our Understanding of Human Rights</a> <bq>Whether spectators care or not is a different question, of course. But the signs are that most football fans would prefer that the World Cup was not taking place in a country with such a terrible human rights record.</bq> People don't care enough about human rights to have said anything if the World Cup would have been in the U.S. Qatar is an easy and acceptable target. Everyone can congratulate themselves on standing up now, when it's easy. No uproar when America hosts or takes part with a dozen active wars of aggression. Hell, I just found out today that the next <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_World_Cup_hosts#2026_FIFA_World_Cup">World Cup in 2026</a> will take place in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Nobody cares how many wars of aggression that U.S. has carried out, how many millions its killed and starved, how it treats its own people, how it treats labor. None of that matters because the world doesn't have principles. It just does things that benefit itself. Hating whichever enemy the U.S. empire has selected to hate is what they do. It has nothing to do with principle. 2022 is a grand year for hypocritical and partisan virtue-signaling, starting with the collective west suddenly gaining a distaste for invasions, but, as with world cup, only if the perpetrator is an approved villain. <bq>Strong welfare states, high taxations systems, and wealth redistribution policies had not prevented economic downturns and their associated social ills, such as unemployment and growing poverty.</bq> JFC that's an absolutely ignorant statement. <bq>By placing individual rights, like the right to private property, above all forms of collective rights, neoliberal intellectuals and politicians used the language of human rights to insist that any policies of wealth redistribution or social welfare were effectively a violation of an individual’s right to accumulate their own wealth at the expense of others.</bq> <bq>[...] when human rights are invoked today, including in the context of the Qatar World Cup, it is first and foremost civil and political rights that are deemed to have been violated, such as the right to express one’s sexuality in public without fear of punishment. While these rights are of course essential, the process by which human rights melded with neoliberalism shows us that civil and political rights can exist alongside other forms of exploitation and deprivation if economic and social human rights are not deemed essential to a functioning society.</bq> <bq>These workers could have been granted the freedom to move while in Qatar, for example, but few would possess the freedom to stay in their homelands precisely because their own states have not adequately delivered their human rights to food, housing, education, and other social necessities.</bq> <bq>Appeals to end human rights violations in Qatar focus on the instances of repression without reflecting on the structural causes of that repression.</bq> <bq>They can choose who they want to be, but they cannot choose to avoid being a victim of austerity. In an alternate universe, one where economic and social rights carry as much weight as civil and political rights, we would be castigating these so-called developed nations for their human rights abuses as well.</bq> That the U.S. has so many poor people has been called a human rights violation. The problem is that people are generally unprincipled. They only really care about causes that will not affect their own living standards at all. <bq>The food banks of Britain form part of the same global tapestry into which the building sites of Qatar are sewn. We must keep this in mind throughout and beyond the World Cup.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/pushing-everyone-into-college-was" source="SubStack" author="Freddie DeBoer">Pushing Everyone Into College was a Policy Response to Other Policy</a> <bq>I would argue that young people were relentlessly told in their youths that education is the only path to prosperity, and I would further argue that a changing economy left them with few stable ways to secure a middle-class existence other than college. Indeed, the titular “cult of smart” in my book refers to precisely this dynamic, both the ways that our economy funneled more and more students into college and the attendant ideology that suggests that one’s worth is equal to their academic ability.</bq> <bq>[...] when automation creates jobs it doesn’t usually create jobs for the same people. The net increase in jobs might not look so bad. The trouble is that the people who lose their jobs to automation are not the ones who will likely get the new jobs created by automation. A lifelong machinist with no degree is not likely to get a job servicing the complicated electronics of the new robotic machinery that has replaced him. Telling that person that the net impact on jobs of automation isn’t that bad is cold comfort.</bq> <bq>[...] the median American school, and the median American student, is doing fine. Our top 1% or 5% or 10% are competitive with those of any other country in the world. The problem is that we have a relatively small number of schools, clustered in particular geographical locations, that have such terrible outcomes that they drag all of our averages down.</bq> The problem is an utterly pernicious---evil---inequality in education, as in everything else in that country. <bq>I worked in K-12 schools for several years, and was struck by two intertwined phenomena: the insistence that one’s outcomes were simplistically a product of their desire - that if you believe, you can achieve - and the belief that what young people should desire is to go to college.</bq> <bq>[...] there was something odd about the culture of school, something disquieting. I was disturbed, for lack of a better term, by the ideology of the place, by the implicit set of beliefs that it shared with almost every school I’ve ever stepped into. In particular, I was struck by the relentless repetition of a single message: that every student was constrained in their lives only by their will, that if they worked hard and never gave up on their dreams, they could do and have anything.</bq> <bq>It was Ronald Reagan, more than anyone, who reformulated the purpose of college education away from liberal values or the training of an enlightened citizenry and towards job creation.</bq> <bq>Drastic declines in per-pupil funding in public colleges could be papered over with easy access to federally-guaranteed loans - loans that would be, eventually, ineligible for discharge through the bankruptcy process. As a bonus, any failures with this model could be ascribed to public school teachers and their unions, which happen to be stalwart allies of the Democratic party.</bq> <bq>When people ask how so many young people could be so reckless in taking on so much student loan debt, I wonder if they’ve spent any time in this culture in the past 40 years. For decades, we’ve insisted to young people that education is the key, that the way to get ahead professionally or personally is to go out and get a college degree. Our K-12 schools (public or private or charter) are absolutely steeped in this rhetoric; it’s all-encompassing. The young people who have followed the advice they were given for a decade and a half of formal schooling can hardly be blamed for following it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/20/chris-hedges-reading-proust-in-war/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">Reading Proust in War</a> <bq>I was in Croatia as Serb villages were being ethnically cleansed by the Croatian army. I watched an elderly veteran of the partisan war being pushed out of his home, which he would never again inhabit, in a wheelchair, bedecked with his World War II medals on his chest. The rise of ethnic nationalism had extinguished the old Yugoslavia and with it his status and place in society.</bq> <bq>“For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike,” Proust notes. “And we all of us laugh at a person whom we see being made fun of, though it does not prevent us from venerating him ten years later in a circle where he is admired.”</bq> <bq>The death of the narrator’s grandmother, as well as the death of his lover Albertine, a version of Proust’s lover and chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli, who was killed in a plane crash in 1914, exposes the mutations of the self. Marcel, the narrator, does not lament grief, for it retains the connections to those we have lost. He laments the day he no longer grieves, the day the self that was in love no longer exists. He writes:<bq>I too still wept when I became once again for a moment the former friend of Albertine. But it was into a new personality that I was tending to change altogether. It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying. Albertine had no cause to reproach her friend. The man who was usurping his name was merely his heir. We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known. My new self, while it grew up in the shadow of the old, had often heard the other speak of Albertine; through that other self, through the stories it gathered from it, it thought that it knew her, it found her lovable, it loved her; but it was only a love at second hand.</bq></bq> <bq>Inanimate objects carry within them a mystical force that can awaken these lost feelings of grief, joy and love. They return, not by an act of will, but through involuntary memory. A smell, sight or a sound suddenly ignites what is buried and otherwise inaccessible, the most famous example being the dipping of the petite madeleine into the tea that evokes a sudden memory of Marcel’s childhood at Combray.</bq> Damn, I literally just wrote about this with the Adventskalender box that reminded me so strongly of Pierre that I choked up. The previous year, when Pierre was still with us, I'd gotten an advent calendar box from Kath. It's from VeloPlus. There is a little bike-related gift for each day. When I started opening the first package on the first day, Pierre came hustling over because he thought it was snacks for him. From that day forward, I got my gift and he got his snacks. He's been gone over eight months now and we've settled into a Pierre-less household, but seeing that box on the other couch, waiting for me, hit like a ton of bricks. Proust wrote 4,000 pages about that feeling. <bq>“I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate thing, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison,” Proust writes. “Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us.”</bq> With Chris Hedges and Justin E.H. Smith both quoting so eloquently from Proust, I'm almost moved to make reading À la recherche du temps perdu one of my goals for 2023. <bq>But when those first impressions have receded, there remains for our enjoyment some passage whose structure, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made it indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we had passed every day without knowing it, which had held itself in reserve for us, which by the sheer power of its beauty had become invisible and remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But we shall also relinquish it last. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it.</bq> <bq>Proust captures the disparity between the sensory world of war and the mythic version of war that plagues all conflicts, leading to a bitter alienation between those who experience war on the battlefield and those who celebrate it in safety. Those who imbibe the myth of war engage in an orgy of self-exaltation, not only because they believe they belong to a superior nation but because as members of that nation they are convinced that they are endowed with superior virtues.</bq> <bq>Enemies embody evil not solely because of the acts they commit but because of their intrinsic nature. Eradicating evil, therefore, requires the eradication of all those infected with vice. The only way to survive is to renounce and hide your essence.</bq> <bq>By immortalizing his vanished world, Proust exposes, and makes sacred, the vanishing world around us. His perceptions were a balm, a deep comfort, in the madness of war, where the mob bays for blood, death strikes at random, delusion is mistaken for reality and the impermanence of existence is terrifyingly palpable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1596174112006627328" author="Hassan Mafi" source="Twitter">Ghana plans to buy oil with gold instead of USD</a> (see <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/11/24/ghana-plans-to-buy-oil-with-gold-instead-of-dollars" author="" source="Al Jazeera">Ghana plans to buy oil with gold instead of dollars</a> for more details) <img src="{att_link}excuse_me,_sir._do_you_have_a_moment_to_talk_about_freedom_and_democracy.jpg" href="{att_link}excuse_me,_sir._do_you_have_a_moment_to_talk_about_freedom_and_democracy.jpg" align="none" caption="Excuse me, sir. Do you have a moment to talk about freedom and democracy?" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/S04261_Konsumwende_StudieEN_Mehr%20Schein_v9.pdf" source="Greenpeace Deutschland" author="Madeleine Cobbing, Viola Wohlgemuth, Lisa Panhuber">Taking the Shine off SHEIN</a> <bq>[...] the huge number of new designs that SHEIN puts on its website every week. SHEIN’s clever marketing bombards young people, under the radar of critical eyes, through novel social media platforms like TikTok, with glamorous looking products selling at rock-bottom prices, promoted by micro- and macro-influencers who get free products and other benefits in return for spreading the word. Yet the suppliers that make these products for SHEIN are shrouded in mystery; little is known about the thousands of cut and sew suppliers in Guangdong, China, which churn out orders 7 days a week, and even less about the factories that wash and dye their fabrics - the biggest contributors to SHEIN’s pollution footprint.</bq> <img attachment="image.jpg" align="left" caption="An Incomparable Churn"><bq>all of the brands targeted by the campaign, including fast fashion giants like Zara and H&M, have been working successfully for years to Detox their supply chains, with the positive effects that come with supply chain transparency. Nevertheless, these brands and others like them opened Pandora’s box many years ago by starting the fast fashion trend. While their business models still depend on non-circular fast fashion and can therefore never be sustainable, it’s shocking that the number of new designs they promote even looks small in comparison with the huge number of new designs that SHEIN puts on its website every week.</bq> <bq>Many fast fashion products are manufactured in high volumes and made to be disposable – a party top is used on average 1.7 times before being discarded – and recycling of textiles into new clothing is only a reality for less than 1% of clothes. Unsold or returned goods are also routinely destroyed – in Europe it is estimated that the products destroyed in 2020 alone would go around the world 1.5 times. So at the other end of the fashion cycle when clothes containing hazardous chemicals are thrown away, they will inevitably contaminate the truckload of textile waste which is either burnt or sent to landfill every second.</bq> <bq>If you are looking for new men‘s shoes for 7 euros or wedding dresses for 8 euros to wear once only, you will find them at SHEIN. Every day, the company puts an apparently unbelievable 6000 new articles online, with some of the styles and designs even stolen from designers, artists and other brands, with legal challenges a regular occurrence. These products are made at breakneck speed, using 5000 small and large factories in Guangdong, China, which are said to produce directly for the company.</bq> <bq>SHEIN promotes its services on platforms like Instagram, and is especially popular with young Gen Z shoppers on TikTok and YouTube, where it has become a trend for users to post $1,000 SHEIN “hauls,” or large purchases.89 And it works: the hashtag #SHEINhaul has a massive 4.3 billion90 views on TikTok alone, and on Youtube there are thousands more videos with hundreds of thousands of views each. Internationally, the marketing works through events like the SHEIN Together Fest – officially a charity event for the WHO, supported by the United Nations Foundation – where world stars like Katy Perry or Lil Nas X perform.</bq> <bq>its app was the most downloaded shopping app in the world, far ahead of Amazon, and has already been downloaded over 100 million times from Google Play alone.</bq> <bq>While the growth of its fast fashion competitors has stalled since the pandemic, SHEIN’s revenue has soared, with a turnover of nearly $16 billion in 2021. The company also benefited from the online shopping boom during the pandemic: sales tripled to around $10 billion. This makes SHEIN the largest online fashion retailer in the world. It is in talks with investors for a funding round that would value it at $100 billion - more than H&M and Zara combined.</bq> <img attachment="image_(1).jpg" align="right" caption="Overconsumption is not sustainable, even if you're buying from 'sustainable' brands"><bq>“At SHEIN, we believe it’s our responsibility to create fashion of the future while accelerating solutions to reduce textile waste,” said Adam Whinston, Global Head of ESG at SHEIN, announcing SHEIN’s latest initiative in the US, a new second hand community SHEIN Exchange, where customers can swap their used SHEIN clothes. But promoting the reuse of clothes, while continuing to make excessive volumes of clothes that are made to be disposable, is worse than greenwashing as it makes no sense at all.</bq> The screenshot to the right is from <a source="Reddit" author="Blue-_-Jay" href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Anticonsumption/comments/zdeap9/this/">Anticonsumption: This.</a> Every day, the company puts an apparently unbelievable 6000 new articles online." 😱 This report is absolutely horrifying. It's long and very well-researched and -sourced. I finally managed to finish reading it yesterday evening. While some are talking about circular economies, seeking a way out of the cul de sac that we're in--- companies like SHEIN jump into the gap and hyper-accelerate us further down the wrong road. They are celebrated as innovators. Of course there are other places in the world that are wasteful. The churn of electronics is also utterly unsustainable and also generates a lot of waste and pollution. But SHEIN's behavior seems so over-the-top, so in-your-face awful, that's grotesque. This company sounds like it has the power of FaceBook, but coupled with a mechanism that poisons not only the mind, but also the environment. Who says there's no progress? 🤔 How are they even allowed to sell or ship products to Europe? We all read horror stories of over-regulation in the EU (What is the maximum and minimum size of a cucumber?), but this company can apparently flood the market because it sells and markets online? The further you read, the worse it gets. Their tax structure is highly optimized. They are truly a juggernaut. Perhaps the only way to stop them is to kill the buying power of the European consumer. But I see that Europe is way ahead of me in this thinking... 🤨 <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2022/11/22/it-was-never-about-ukraine/" author="Ted Snider" source="Antiwar.com">It Was Never About Ukraine</a> <bq>Events in Ukraine in 2014 marked the end of the unipolar world of American hegemony. Russia drew the line and asserted itself as a new pole in a multipolar world order. That is why the war is “bigger than Ukraine,” in the words of the State Department. It is bigger than Ukraine because, in the eyes of Washington, it is the battle for US hegemony. That is why US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on November 13 that some of the sanctions on Russia could remain in place even after any eventual peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. The war has never just been about Ukraine: it is about US foreign policy aspirations that are bigger than Ukraine. Yellen said, “I suppose in the context of some peace agreement, adjustment of sanctions is possible and could be appropriate.” Sanctions could be adjusted when negotiations end the war, but, Yellen added, “We would probably feel, given what’s happened, that probably some sanctions should stay in place.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/ahmed-adel/2022/11/22/western-attempts-to-isolate-russia-at-g20-summit-failed/" author="Ahmed Adel" source="Antiwar.com">Western Attempts to Isolate Russia at G20 Summit Failed</a> <bq>It was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz who had to admit that they had failed to isolate Russia at the G20 summit in Bali. On the Ukraine issue, he had to admit that “there are different opinions on the matter”. There are several countries in the G20 that refuse to condemn Russia's special military operation in Ukraine and Scholz had to concede that it is very important to keep communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin open.</bq> <bq>The West’s failure against Russia at the G20 is evidenced by the joint statement given by partipating leaders. “There were other views and different assessments of the situation and sanctions. Recognising that the G20 is not the forum to resolve security issues, we acknowledge that security issues can have significant consequences for the global economy,” the G20 joint statement said in regards to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.</bq> <bq>In the past, Washington could, by threat, dictate to countries what positions they should adopt regarding certain issues. Now, the situation is changing, and contrary to Western desires, Russia is too important in the world economy and political system, making it impossible to isolate the country.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/23/rail-n23.html" author="Tom Hall" source="WSWS">President Biden intervenes in rail talks in last-ditch effort to head off national strike</a> <bq>Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg underlined this in comments to News Nation yesterday. “We’ve got to get to a solution that does not subject the American economy to the threat of a shutdown,” he said. “We don’t have enough trucks, or barges, or ships in this country to make up for the rail network.”</bq> Then concede to their very reasonable demands. What is the actual fucking problem? Is it that the elites can't be shown to have given in to the demands of the working class? Is that it? Is it that the elite politicians are in the back pocket of the private transportation corporations and nearly literally can't conceive of a solution that involves them actually serving the citizens who elected them rather than the corporations who fund them? They are more afraid of losing funding for the next campaign---and, almost certainly, huge personal kickbacks from their funders---than they are of the people who ostensibly elected them. These are functionaries who have no responsibility to the people. They care more about the profits of U.S. corporations than about the well-being of workers who the politicians, in the same breath, describe as absolutely essential. It's just that, when you're at the bottom of the heap and essential, no-one ever thinks that the solution is to pay you more or give in to your demands. Instead, they lead these poor people on and on, over months and months, then threaten them with being responsible for taking down the nation. As if that's not the politicians' responsibility. As if it's not their inability to conceive of doing the right thing that's the problem. Instead, they do things like this, <bq>In fact, through the veneer of “collective bargaining” with a union apparatus totally integrated with management and the state, the strategy of Biden has been to prevent a strike and impose a sellout. Meanwhile, Biden and the Democrats—together with the Republicans—have been preparing for months behind the scenes for congressional action to block a strike and unilaterally impose a deal if necessary.</bq> Because they only understand force when it comes to the working class. They absolutely fucking hate the working class. They hate the poor. The elites absolutely resent the fact their hallowed lives are bound up with these unwashed masses, that the unwashed masses can even conceive of having opinions of their own, instead of just suffering in silence and obscurity, while they provide the underpinnings of a society enjoyed by the 1% and suffered by everyone else. This is the concession that they've made so far: <bq>The only change was the addition of three unpaid sick days per year for doctors’ appointments—up from zero—which had to be scheduled between Tuesday and Thursday, at least one month in advance.</bq> Read that again. It's madness that this is even considered a concession. <ul> You "get" only three days per year You don't get paid for them. "Get" in this instance means that they can't officially fire you for going to the doctor. They have to think of some other excuse. You can only schedule them on certain days (because why not right? The point is to show these animals who's boss) You have to schedule at least a month in advance. Liver hurt? Fuck you. Drive the train for 30 more days before you can get it looked at. Oh, and good luck being back in the city where you made your appointment on the day when you have your appointment. </ul> Their union agreed to this. As I've told a colleague of mine who works as a teacher in the U.S.: if you're getting fucked over like this and you think you have a union, then think again. You're paying union dues, but you don't have a union. You're paying a union to work for your employer. <bq>A strike in the leadup to the Christmas holiday would have a particularly powerful effect, stopping the 40 percent of freight which is shipped on the railroads and costing roughly $2 billion a day.</bq> No kidding, really? Then do your job and give them what they want. They are not asking for the moon. They are asking for justice. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/29/rail-n29.html" author="Tom Hall" source="WSWS">Biden calls on Congress to impose rail contract, in a major assault on workers’ democratic rights</a> <bq>Biden justified the move on the basis of the major economic impact that a strike would have, which he claimed “would hurt millions of other working people and families.” This could be resolved tomorrow if the railroad industry, the most profitable in America, agreed to workers’ reasonable demands, including paid sick leave and schedules that leave them time to spend with their families. {...} Dripping with contempt for the railroaders, Biden concluded: “I share workers’ concern about the inability to take leave to recover from illness or care for a sick family member. … But at this critical moment for our economy, in the holiday season, we cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown.” In other words, the democratic will of workers should not be a barrier to their “enjoyment” of the terms of a sellout contract that they rejected.</bq> <bq>Monday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement cynically feigning concern for railroad workers while running roughshod over their right to reject a pro-company contract. “As we consider Congressional action, we must recognize that railroads have been selling out to Wall Street to boost their bottom lines, making obscene profits while demanding more and more from railroad workers. We are reluctant to bypass the standard ratification process for the Tentative Agreement,” she claimed, before declaring, “we must act to prevent a catastrophic nationwide rail strike.”</bq> So, order the companies to concede to the workers' demands. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/11/railworkers-strike-biden-sanders-sick-leave-gop/" author="Branko Marcetic" source="Jacobin">Democrats Were Dithering on Railworkers’ Rights. The Left Just Forced Their Hand.</a> <bq>The political malpractice on display here became clear when several Republicans used it as an opening to posture as pro-worker. Ted Cruz called railworker demands for sick leave “quite reasonable,” while, more significant, Marco Rubio put out a subtly union-bashing statement calling for both sides to “go back and negotiate a deal that the workers, not just the union bosses, will accept” and affirming he would “not vote to impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers.” Likewise, Josh Hawley, who has moved to brand himself as a pro-worker populist in advance of a planned 2024 run, stated that workers “said no and then Congress is gonna force it down their throats at the behest of this administration.” Even Colorado Democrat John Hickenlooper, hardly a progressive firebrand, saw which way the wind was blowing and affirmed that “any bill should include the SEVEN days of sick leave rail workers have asked for.” In other words, several Republicans and a guy who drank fracking fluid were to the left of the “most pro-union president” in history.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/12/railworkers-strike-biden-democrats-sick-leave/" author="Luke Savage" source="Jacobin">The Railway Labor Fight Is an Object Lesson in Democratic Party Hypocrisy</a> <bq>Earlier this week, the Biden White House issued a statement of thanks to Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives who had just voted to impose a contract without sick days on railworkers and override their right to strike.</bq> <bq>[...] legislation to impose a contract on railworkers meanwhile passed by a whopping margin of eighty to fifteen. Never let anyone tell you that bipartisanship is dead.</bq> They are all criminals. Utterly amoral criminals. Are they not afraid? They are not. They have literally no fear that their ordering "essential workers" to shut their fucking crybaby mouths and go back to work doing their essential things without a pay raise and without sick days and without any improvement in their abysmal working conditions. They are not afraid. They are the kind of people who annoy the waiter and are not afraid that anyone would every dare to piss in their soup. Oh, how we need Tyler Durden and his crew right now. There seems to be no other way. The arrogance of the elites is unbounded. Their support of corporate rights over basic human decency (and this, right before Christmas), is absolutely infinite. The only unions allowed to function in the U.S. are for firemen and police officers. What do the police do when they don't get what they want? They slow down. They stop doing their jobs. Are any of them ever fired? Of course not. They get what they want. Honestly, this is how it should work. But it only works like that for the hyper-militarized enforcement arm of elite America. Everyone else has to shut the fuck up and get in fucking line. I really, really hope these rail unions follow up on their statement to not follow the edicts of the Congress. By what right can Congress order them back to work? They conceded to none of their demands and told them to go back to work. This was Congress's answer:🖕 It should be the workers' answer to Congress as well. Slow down, don't show up, fucking ruin Christmas for everyone. Lose that $2B a day. Congress thinks they've avoided it because they sincerely believe that the world has to do what they say. Prove. Them. Wrong. <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-new-york-times-editorial-boards" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">The New York Times Editorial Board's Creepy Avengers Fantasy</a> <bq>A friend points out claiming an ancient responsibility to “guard” against the excesses of freedom is an odd position for a newspaper to take.</bq> Be careful that you don't just knee-jerk misinterpret the statement. It's pretty clear to me that the "systems" that the NYT sees itself as guarding against are the aforementioned "democracy and capitalism". They didn't write that they were guarding against an excess of "freedom" -- that's just what you read. I don't think they meant to write what they wrote, though. They probably meant that they're guarding against the excesses of capitalism (that's the most generous reading). But they did write "systems", so it's their own fault that it's confusing. They're supposed to be the writers. <bq>Even the idea that there’s natural tension between a “free” and “fair” world is strange.</bq> Of course there's a tension between the two. It's not just in the minds of the NYT Editorial Board that we have to limit freedom in order to provide a modicum of fairness. Or are we seriously considering a nation without laws to to prevent people from exercising their freedom to take whatever they want? Be careful of reacting so hard to the NYT that you sound just as bad as they do, just...different. <hr> <a href="https://taibbi.substack.com/p/be-it-resolved-dont-trust-mainstream" author="Matt Taibbi" source="TK News">Be it Resolved: Don't Trust Mainstream Media</a> <bq>This bifurcated system is fundamentally untrustworthy. When you decide in advance to forego half of your potential audience, to fulfill the aim of catering to the other half, you’re choosing in advance which facts to emphasize and which to downplay. You’re also choosing which stories to cover, and which ones to avoid, based on considerations other than truth or newsworthiness. This is not journalism. It’s political entertainment, and therefore unreliable. With editors now more concerned with retaining audience than getting things right, the defining characteristic across the business — from right to left — is inaccuracy.</bq> <bq>Think about another of these bombshells, the one in which Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen supposedly went to Prague to meet with Russian hackers. This story came from the now-disgraced dossier of former British spy Christopher Steele. It’s been refuted multiple times, including by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who flatly declared Cohen “never traveled to Prague.” Yet the tale will not die. From MSNBC to CNN to McClatchy we’ve had leading media outlets continue to take seriously the idea that Donald Trump’s lawyer traveled to Prague to scheme with “Kremlin Representatives” over how to fix the election using Romanian hackers, who according to Steele would afterward retreat to Bulgaria, and use that country as a “bolt hole” to “lie low.” If that’s not a conspiracy theory, I don’t know what is.</bq> <bq>No serious journalist would go near a story like this without a lot of evidence. Yet our leading media people believed it with none. Because they’re not doing journalism. They’re selling narrative, and this was good narrative.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/21/sgrn-n21.html" source="WSWS" author="Brian Dyne">Successful launch of Artemis I: In the footsteps of Apollo, but no further</a> <bq>President Biden placed identity politics front and center, declaring, “This ship will enable the first woman and the first person of color to set foot on the lunar surface.”</bq> Jesus. If that's the goal, then even I would say to feed the poor instead. What a spectacularly stupid thing to say. And anyone who ate it up is either themselves spectacularly stupid or sadly brainwashed or both. <bq>There have been attempts since the 1990s to prevent technical information related to space flight from reaching either the Chinese government or Chinese corporations. The Obama administration worked to codify these attempts into law and oversaw the passage of the Wolf Amendment in 2011, which formally prevents NASA from interacting “in any way” with the Chinese National Space Agency.</bq> Can't have anyone benefit without paying. What is the advantage of this behavior, for us, as a species? For society? You know, the people on this planet? Is there any benefit for us to have each group work on their own without any interaction or cooperation---indeed with active separation and suppression? It's like only providing medicine to those who can pay. Everyone else can just suffer and die. Don't we progress further and faster when we all work together, when we can benefit from bilateral knowhow and experience? SHUT UP YA FUCKIN' COMMIE. That just proves that the goal is to make a few elites richer and more powerful. Anything else, no matter how beneficial, is an optional side-effect. <bq>[...] despite vast increases in technology over the past several decades, including several in computing, miniaturization and 3D printing from which Musk can draw, the flagship Falcon Heavy is only 45 percent as capable as the Saturn V.</bq> <bq>Such is the logic of the Artemis project, and space exploration as a whole, under capitalism. What should be the continued expansion of humanity’s drive to understand and master nature is inevitably subordinated to the expansion of human exploitation and private profit.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNvSxD4RhNw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/JNvSxD4RhNw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="potholer54" caption="How did rocks become knobbly and bumpy? – a basic geology guide."> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fraZlsmCio" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/8fraZlsmCio" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="maiLab" caption="Wie viele Geschlechter gibt es?"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDUvCLAp0uU" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/aDUvCLAp0uU" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sabine Hossenfelder" caption="Nuclear Waste: What Do We Do With It?"> <hr> <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-news-11-24-22/id73801817?i=1000587518537" author="Doug Henwood" source="Behind the News (Apple Podcasts)">Behind the News, 24.11.22</a> The interview with Tina Gerhardt on the COP27 climate conference was quite good. <h>Art & Literature</h> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/corner-club-cathedral-cocoon-audiophilia-and-its-discontents/" source="Harper's Magazine" author="Sasha Frere-Jones">Corner Club Cathedral Cocoon</a> <bq>There are real physical differences between this older technology and the audio devices you can find in a Best Buy. Cheap new stuff is likely powered by a clutch of transistors driving small diaphragms that move a lot. By comparison, the older horn designs are very good at throwing sound while barely moving, partly because the music is being amplified by something called a compression driver—a thin metal diaphragm agitated by a magnet. The supersensitive horn-loaded speakers are driven by low-wattage amplifiers outfitted with single-ended triode vacuum tubes, the oldest and simplest of their kind.</bq> <bq>I found myself relating to Sauer. It is appealing to admit that you don’t know what you’re doing, while also reiterating that the project is worthwhile. There is nothing strange about spending a life immersed in recorded music and wanting to hear that music reproduced in an exceptional way. So why did it seem to lead to such an annoying milieu?</bq> <bq>I bought a Lodge cast-iron skillet that cost about forty dollars. It heats up quickly and evenly and can be easily cleaned. Our non-stick pan, by comparison, sheds its coating, and the handle keeps coming unscrewed. This is like the history of audio gear. The cast iron was sufficient, but an imaginary quality—stickiness—was being “solved” by new technology like Teflon. The new gear is fine, and works well in a couple of settings, but seems largely like an unnecessary innovation.</bq> <bq>Roberts and other enthusiasts I spoke to—several of whom reject the term “audiophile”—remind me of poets who have little access to money or prestige and fight one another with a particularly vigilant acrimony, though their professed goal is spiritual or intellectual elevation.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ferd.ca/hiding-theory-in-practice.html" source="My bad opinions" author="Fred Hebert">Hiding Theory in Practice</a> <bq>I've chosen this list because each of them is an absolutely common reaction, something so intuitive it will feel self-evident to people using them. Avoiding these requires a kind of unlearning, so that you can remove the usual framing you'd use to interpret events, and then gradually learning to re-construct them differently. This is challenging, and while this is something you and other self-labeled incident nerds can extensively discuss and debate as peers, it is not something you can reasonably expect others to go through in a natural post-incident setting. Most of the people with whom you will interact will never care about the theory as much as you do, almost by definition since you're likely to represent expertise for the whole organization on these topics.</bq> <bq>In short, you need to find how to act in a way that is coherent with the theory you hold as an inspiration while being flexible enough to not cause friction with others, nor requiring them to know everything you know for your own work to be effective.</bq> <bq>Strong emotional reactions are as good data as any architecture diagram for your work. They can highlight important and significant dynamics about your organization. Ignoring them is ignoring potentially useful data, and may damage the trust people put in you.</bq> <bq>There's a huge gap between the idealized higher level models and the mess (or richness) of the real world situations you'll be in. Navigating that gap is a skill you'll develop over time. Theory does not need to be complete to provide practical insights for problem resolution.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/starlink-speeds-in-us-dropped-from-105mbps-to-53mbps-in-the-past-year/" author="Jon Brodkin" source="Ars Technica">Starlink speeds in US dropped from 105Mbps to 53Mbps in the past year</a> <bq>Starlink Internet speeds are continuing to drop as more people use the service, new speed tests show. But SpaceX this week won approval to launch another 7,500 satellites, kicking off a second-generation deployment that will provide the broadband network more capacity in the long run.</bq> Why? For the love of God, just stop launching things. <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://jzhao.xyz/" source="" author="Jacky Zhao">Building a BFT JSON CRDT</a> <bq>Say that you have $100 in an account. You spend 70 on your laptop and another 40 on your phone at the same time. Without waiting on the other transaction to arrive, there is no way for the CRDT to know whether these are valid! Even though both transactions are valid on their own, when done concurrently, they decrease the value to a negative value. Thus, CRDTs cannot model anything that requires maintaining global invariants.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.plover.com/2022/12/04/#crap-warning-signs-2" author="Mark Dominus" source="The Universe of Discourse">Software horror show: SAP Concur</a> <bq>I would love to know how this happened. <a href="https://blog.plover.com/tech/stadiometer.html">I said a while back</a>:<bq>Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.</bq>I think this might be a useful counterexample. And if it isn't, if the individual decision-makers all made choices that were locally rational, it might be an instructive example on how an organization can be so dysfunctional and so filled with perverse incentives that it produces a stack of separately rational decisions that somehow add up to a failure to alphabetize a pick list.</bq>