<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 and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-fascism-came" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">How Fascism Came</a> <bq><b>President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy.</b> He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity , unchecked predatory corporations , including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are <b>a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful.</b> The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.</bq> <bq>“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear <b>figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible</b>, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. <b>Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.</b>”</bq> <bq>“We live in a two-tiered legal system, one where <b>poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions</b>, such as selling loose cigarettes — which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014 — <b>while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations</b>, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth, <b>are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines, and civil enforcement</b> that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.”</bq> <bq><b>Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals.</b> They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true for the Christian right as it is for the corporatists that preach the free market and globalization.</bq> <bq>“The cult of the self dominates our cultural landscape,” I wrote in “Empire of Illusion”: This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: <b>superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism.</b> It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. <b>Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2024/12/a-few-lessons-that-anti-imperialists.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">A Few Lessons that Anti-Imperialists Should Learn from the Collapse of Assad</a> <bq>[...] <b>the seemingly indestructible regime of the Baathist Assad Dynasty collapsed like a rusty lawn chair</b> after a 12-day putsch from an al-Qaeda derived coalition of Salafi throat slitters who have never governed a territory larger than Cleveland.</bq> <bq>Naturally, America seems pretty fucking pumped and why not, they've invested a pretty hefty portion of the national debt in this shitshow and <b>now they're breaking both arms jerking themselves off for finally winning a prize.</b> They even let Biden out of his cryogenic chamber to take credit for the birth of a kinder, gentler Islamic State as if he had planned it out this way all along.</bq> <bq><b>Destabilize the shit out of an entire fucking time zone with a gory smorgasbord of genocide, famine, sanctions, quagmires, and other sundry imperial curiosities and even Denmark could fall to jihadi pirates</b>, let alone a third world gangster state run by a cut-rate Corleone with a rapist's moustache.</bq> <bq>After decades of building one of the largest and most heavily armed war machines in the Middle East, Assad's Baathist regime crumbled like sand because that is precisely what <b>Syria is</b>. It is not a nation, at least not by the Spenglerian definition of a people united by common cause and culture. It is <b>a series of lines that some Englishman drew all over the map in blood after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.</b> You cannot expect anyone who isn't a certified borderline personality to die for something so synthetic.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/12/22/how-to-understand-the-change-of-government-in-syria/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">How to Understand the Change of Government in Syria</a> <bq>Since the United States and Israel are basically one country when it comes to geopolitics, Israel’s victory is a victory for the United States. The change of government in Syria has not only weakened Iran in the short term but has also weakened Russia (a long-term strategic goal of the United States), which previously used Syrian airports to refuel its supply planes en route to various African countries. It is no longer possible for Russia to use these bases, and it remains unclear where Russian military aircraft will be able to refuel for journeys into the region, notably to countries in the Sahel. This will <b>provide the United States with an opportunity to push the countries that border the Sahel, such as Nigeria and Benin, to launch operations against the governments of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. This will require a close watch.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/12/mayotte-cyclone-macron-france-migration/" source="Jacobin" author="Romain Chauvet">The Devastation in Mayotte Isn’t Just a Natural Disaster</a> <bq>The devastation is total in Mayotte, which is by far France’s poorest territory . <b>Mayotte has suffered for years from extreme poverty and deep structural vulnerability — even before the cyclone, 77 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, while 29 percent of households had no access to running water.</b></bq> This is part of France. They just don't care. <bq><b>Mayotte is the only part of the Comoros archipelago that did not opt for independence in 1973</b>, following French colonization in the nineteenth century. It voted to remain part of France in a 1974 referendum as the rest of the islands became the independent nation of Comoros. In 2011, <b>Mayotte officially became the 101st French département.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/12/21/the-wests-romance-with-elections-is-dead-the-rules-based-order-killed-it/" source="Scheer Post" author="Eve Ottenberg">The West’s Romance With Elections Is Dead—the Rules-Based Order Killed It</a> <bq>[...] western democracies’ storied enchantment with elections is over. As western populations grow sick and tired of their political class and vote against it, what are elites to do? <b>Annul, cancel, overturn and ignore the elections, that’s what. The problem, for the west, is the voters.</b></bq> <bq>you can’t blame European honchos for ditching elections. They’re just following Washington’s lead. After all, <b>the post-2016 phony Russiagate hysteria may not have succeeded in ousting Trump, as was intended, but it did provide the template for American vassals</b>. The four years of lawfare against Trump (and then another four after he left office) blazed the trail for Europe, so that now, if a candidate not favored by political bigwigs wins, <b>all they have to do is scream “Russian influence!” to dump the election.</b> In other words, democracy is dying in the west.</bq> <bq>[...] the U.S., aka NATO, built <b>its biggest military airbase in Europe – where? You got it, Romania. So Washington can’t have just anybody running that country.</b> It must be someone who will keep everything copacetic with the U.S. A nationalist opposed to Washington’s pet proxy war in Ukraine is not that someone.</bq> <bq>Lastly of course we have <b>Ukraine</b>, that shining example of democracy, where <b>its president rules illegally, having cancelled elections, banned the opposition, throttled the press, exiled the church, jailed anyone he doesn’t like</b> and press-ganged thousands of vehemently objecting Ukrainian men into the military. All this while ferociously <b>lining his pockets with western, mainly American, funds.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=126683" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Leo Ensel">„Die Überlebenden werden die Toten beneiden!“ – Über den verordneten neuen Bunkerbauboom</a> <bq><b>Wirkliche Abhilfe, wirklichen Schutz schaffen kann allein die Wiederaufnahme der Diplomatie, die Rekonstruktion des Vertrauens und substanzielle Abrüstung</b>, kurz: eine „Entspannungspolitik 2.0“ mit dem Ziel einer neuen globalen Sicherheitsstruktur nach dem Prinzip der „Gemeinsamen Sicherheit“. Und zwar nicht irgendwann, sondern so schnell wie möglich!</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/30/ybep-d30.html" author="Sandy English" source="WSWS">Bodycam footage shows New York state correction officers beating prisoner to death</a> There is a two-minute video that is incredibly damning. The guy was sitting on what looks like medical bed with his hands cuffed behind his back. There are four or five guys around him at all times, just pounding on him. Just savage. Like apes crashing down on him. It's hard to explain their rage. It's hard to explain how they would just keep beating on him like he was a tackling dummy. He never struck back. Two guys held him from the sides while another struggled to get his leg up high enough to stomp on his groin. It's nearly unreal. <bq><b>Thirteen correction officers and a prison nurse have been terminated from their jobs for the killing.</b> The FBI and the state attorney general’s office are investigating the incident, although as of this writing charges have not been brought against the guards.</bq> They were fired but not charged. That's a free pass for assault and murder, if all you psychopaths are listening. You can even film it and it won't matter. You just literally get away with murder. <bq><b>The brutalization of human beings in the huge American prison gulag</b>, with its nearly 2 million inmates, accounting for about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, <b>is entirely routine.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-empire-burns-the-middle-east" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">The Empire Burns The Middle East While US Homelessness Surges</a> <bq>A recent report from Drop Site News cites <b>more than a dozen BBC staff who say all the British state media outlet’s reporting on Israel and Palestine is ultimately controlled by a single editor named Raffi Berg, who previously worked for the CIA.</b> The BBC reporters told Drop Site News that Berg consistently manipulates headlines and reporting in a way that benefits the information interests of the Israeli government. An anti-Assad outlet called Verify Syria has found that viral video footage purporting to show women and children being freed from Sednaya Prison after Assad’s ouster actually showed no such thing. In reality <b>the location where the terrified women and children were filmed was a family charity facility called the Dafa Association, and they were terrified because the facility was being attacked by armed “revolutionaries”.</b></bq> People will remember the "freeing prisoners from Assad's jails" story, as instructed. Carry on. <bq>The US empire is up to its elbows in the middle east working frenetically to manipulate what happens there, while in the United States itself homelessness has taken another record-shattering leap forward. <b>Homelessness in the US has increased by a staggering 18 percent since last year — and last year also saw a giant spike in homelessness of 12 percent from the year before.</b> Officially there are now around 770,000 homeless Americans, though the real number is likely several times higher.</bq> Is that Bidenomics or will our fearless leaders find a way to blame that on Trump? Can't we just agree that they're all money-grubbing assholes and that the economy is being run for only a handful of people who can't ever seem to get enough? Isn't it time to "mow the lawn" of a few thousand sociopaths? <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/31/xzke-d31.html" author="Patrick Martin" source="WSWS">The right-wing legacy of Jimmy Carter</a> <bq>The question for the working class is not to evaluate Carter as a human being in comparison to those who succeeded him in the White House. The downward curve is unmistakable, reflecting the decline of the American ruling class as a whole, culminating in the senile warmonger Biden and the demented fascist Trump.</bq> <bq>[...] in the wake of the open criminality and corruption of the Nixon administration, <b>Carter projected an image of piety and personal modesty and pledged to establish a government that would “never lie to you.”</b> At the time he announced his candidacy for the US presidency, in late 1974, it would be no exaggeration to describe Carter as an entirely unknown quantity to the American public. A former aide recalled that <b>Carter went on the popular quiz show “What’s My Line?” and none of the contestants could identify him as the governor of Georgia.</b></bq> <bq>The crises in Iran and Afghanistan led to two important Carter decisions on national security policy. The first, made in the wake of a failed hostage rescue raid that ended in a helicopter crash in the Iranian desert in which eight soldiers died, was <b>the creation of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). This is the counterterrorism force which now includes the Navy Seals, Army Rangers and other elite killer units.</b> The second was the initiation of a <b>worldwide campaign against the USSR</b>, ranging from the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to a massive strategic weapons buildup, which foreshadowed the policies carried out by the Reagan administration. So much for Carter the “peacemaker,” as the New York Times headlined its obituary.</bq> <bq>[...] the central political issue facing the American working class today, as it did during Carter’s presidency: the urgent necessity of breaking free of the political straitjacket of the Democratic Party and the whole corporate-controlled two-party system, and establishing its political independence through the building of a mass movement of the working class for socialism.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/gesetz-zur-burka-initiative-bis-zu-1000-franken-busse-fuer-verstoesse-gegen-verhuellungsverbot" author="" source="SRF">Bis zu 1000 Franken Busse für Verstösse gegen Verhüllungsverbot</a> <bq>Das neue Gesetz betrifft nicht nur religiöse Gesichtsschleier, sondern auch vermummte Hooligans oder Demonstrierende.</bq> This is one of the stupidest and most offensive things that this country has done since the Minaret ban, which I'm not sure was ever put into effect. This one, though, seems like it <i>will be enforced</i>, both on people in niqabs (targeted by the ignorant) and people in hoodies and masks (targeted by the state surveillance apparatus). The latter is the more important target, as far as the police are concerned. The former is just going to cause trouble because it's stupid and discriminatory and, quite frankly, racist. This law goes into effect just a month after Switzerland also decided to prohibit discrimination against women to the same degree that it already does for religion, race, and sexual orientation. I don't see how that gels with telling women what they're allowed to wear, but I'm not as smart as I think I am. <bq>Zum Schutz der Grundrechte bauten Bundesrat und Parlament allerdings eine ganze Reihe von Ausnahmen ins Gesetz ein. Erlaubt bleibt die Verhüllung des Gesichts etwa in Gotteshäusern, an der Fasnacht, zum Schutz gegen Kälte oder zum Gesundheitsschutz. Weitere Ausnahmen gelten für Botschaften und Konsulate, für künstlerische Darbietungen und wenn jemand sein Gesicht zu Werbezwecken verhüllt.</bq> Of course you can continue to cover your face for "advertising purposes," but you can't do it out of religious conviction. Congratulations, Switzerland. You're a kowtowing, neoliberalist idiot. Also, you can cover your face for what we call "Fasnacht", but which is actually "Mardi Gras", which is actually "Fat Tuesday", which is actually the celebration of the end of the fasting time called "Lent" in the <i>Christian religion</i>. So, to recap: you can cover your face for Christianity but not for Islam. Congratulations, Switzerland. You're a big, fat hypocrite, too. <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageImperialism/comments/1hr2yu4/a_letter_of_gratitude_to_a_silent_world/" author="" source="Reddit">A Letter of Gratitude to a Silent World</a> <bq><b>Thank you to the silent world that remains unmoved by the killings, exterminations, and displacement we endure.</b> Thank you for witnessing our suffering in silence, while we cry out for help with no one to hear us or support us. Thank you for letting us die every day while you are busy with your celebrations and distractions. [...] <b>We are not asking for the impossible. We are simply asking for a dignified life.</b> We are asking to live as humans and to find someone who stands with us in this hardship. If you are listening, if there is even a sliver of mercy in your hearts, please, do not leave us to face this fate alone.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1hsdjwv/american_activist_lorraine_fontana/" author="" source="Reddit">American activist Lorraine Fontana.</a> <img src="{att_link}you_re_pro-birth,_not_pro-life.jpg" href="{att_link}you_re_pro-birth,_not_pro-life.jpg" align="none" caption="You're pro-birth, not pro-life" scale="75%"> <bq>Wanting a child born is <u>pro-birth</u> wanting a child fed housed educated with parents who earn a living wage is <u>pro-life</u>!</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/27/americas-invisible-sports-betting-epidemic/" source="CounterPunch" author="Stewart Lawrence">America’s Invisible Sports Betting Epidemic</a> <bq>Since then, <b>38 states, including Nevada, New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as Washington, DC have legalized the practice, with another 21 states considering similar laws.</b> It won’t be long, industry experts say, before sports betting is as commonplace — and frequent – as purchasing a ticket to a movie.</bq> Wait. What? There aren't 59 states. Am I reading that incorrectly? <bq>Despite acknowledging a growing problem, the sports betting world is divided over whether and how to regulate <b>an industry that is being fueled by an insatiable popular demand.</b></bq> Demand that is, in turn, driven by incessant advertising. <bq>New York, for example, earned $700 million in taxes from sports gambling in 2022.</bq> This is odd. The author just wrote that sports betting isn't legal in New York State yet. Is this AI-"assisted" article? <hr> <a href="https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-long-shadow-of-checks/" source="Bits about Money" author="Patrick McKenzie">The Long Shadow of Checks</a> <bq>The most lastingly important thing in the UCC is that it standardized checks. Instead of them being creatures of state contract law, dragging decades of precedent and complex bespoke negotiations behind every specimen, they became almost exactly describable by recounting a short description of the face of the check. <b>We (very intentionally!) made checks “dumb” to allow the system around them to be much smarter.</b></bq> <bq><b>The UCC facilitated banks clearing each others’ checks.</b> (“Clearing” is a magic finance word. Clearing a check refers to completing the process which the check agrees to: the writer sees money leave their account and the person depositing the check sees it enter theirs. This is <b>much more complicated than it sounds</b> in this quick gloss.)</bq> No kidding. <bq>Why accept mere promises, promises conditional on unobservable future events? Because systematically taking relatively small amounts of risk created immense value. Groceries prefer selling more groceries to selling less. <b>Extending consumers credit tends to increase the number of chicken breasts they consume at the margin. Consumers prefer to eat chicken versus going hungry. Chicken do not get a vote.</b></bq> <bq>This made collecting payment more efficient: <b>instead of frequently having money move between banks</b>, you could total up all of the incoming payments (checks presented by your customers drawn against the other bank today), total up all of the previous period’s outgoing payments (checks presented by the other bank’s customers drawn against you a while ago), “net” those against each other, and then <b>make a single internal accounting entry against your correspondent’s vostro.</b> Your two banks would then only periodically rebalance where they held their money, which in the old days involved sometimes literally sending a stagecoach over with gold or silver and in more recent days would <b>typically take the form of a wire transfer.</b></bq> <bq>Check 21 said “OK, the rest of the industry hears that explanation, and we actually sympathize a bit, but we won’t let you block an industry-wide improvement. We will instead give you a carve-out: you and you alone will still get the daily delivery of a lot of paper. It will just be new paper, with substitute checks printed on it, from a printer we have arranged to locate very close to your check processing address. <b>We will legally compel you to treat that paper exactly like the special magically formatted check paper.</b> You are very good at processing that sort of paper, because you’ve done so for decades; even though you are small, you are still a bank and still operationally competent.”</bq> <bq><b>"Creditworthy" sounds like a value judgement but is, simultaneously, just a prediction about the weather.</b> Some places see more rain; some customers see more credit losses. Frequently advocates who want to bank the un- or underbanked are also simultaneously furious at the banking industry for improvidently extending credit.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/americas-health-insurance-grinches-a-scathing-indictment-of-market-economics/" source="Z Network" author="Lynn Parramore">America’s Health Insurance Grinches: A Scathing Indictment of “Market” Economics</a> <bq>[...] of the top four companies by revenues over the most recent decade, UnitedHealth, CVS Health, Elevance, and Cigna, average annual buybacks were a stunning $3.7 billion. “Ultimately, <b>the manipulative boosts that these buybacks give to the health insurers’ stock prices come out of the pockets of U.S. households in the form of higher insurance premiums</b>,”</bq> <bq>The administrative costs of private insurers are staggering compared to single-payer systems. According to a 2018 study in The Lancet, <b>the U.S. spends 8% of total national health expenditures on activities related to planning, regulating, and managing health systems and services, compared to an average of only 3% spent in single-payer systems.</b> The excess administrative burden in the U.S. is a direct consequence of having to navigate a fragmented system with multiple insurers, each with its own rules, coverage policies, and approval processes.</bq> <bq><b>Until the U.S. abandons its current insurance model, we’ll remain stuck with a system that enriches a few while exploiting the many</b>—and the many are well and truly sick of it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/31/yhjz-d31.html" author="Jerry White" source="WSWS">US credit card defaults at highest level since Great Recession</a> <bq><b>“Nearly half of Americans still have debt from the holidays from last year,”</b> said WalletHub writer and analyst Chip Lupo, adding that a third of respondents to his organization’s survey reported they would spend less this year on holiday shopping. Unable to pay off their balances in full, borrowers sent the <b>credit card companies $170 billion in interest payments in 2024.</b> As of last Friday, the average credit card interest rate was 20.35 percent, according to Bankrate. These loan shark rates have allowed the biggest credit card lenders—Visa, Mastercard and Capital One—to reap record profits. <b>Visa, the largest, booked $19.7 billion in 2024 profits (up 16 percent from FY 2023) and enjoyed a 55 percent profit margin (up from 52 percent in FY 2023);</b> 2024 revenues shot up 10 percent to $35.9 billion.</bq> <bq>“Many Americans spend a sizable amount of their income to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table and a means of transportation,” the Bankrate article on the government’s household survey noted. “Inflation has cooled significantly from its 40-year-high in 2022, yet <b>prices remain elevated on various goods and services, leaving consumers with less money in their budgets for such financial matters as savings and debt repayment.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/31/qbrl-d31.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">High interest rates in US starting to bite</a> <bq>The head of Moody Analytics, Mark Zandi, told the FT: “High-income households are fine, but <b>the bottom third of US consumers are tapped out. Their savings rate right now is zero.</b>”</bq> <bq>The effects of the higher interest rate regime are starting to show up in the US corporate debt market as well. It was reported just before Christmas that <b>defaults</b> in the global leveraged loan market, according to Moody’s, <b>were up by 7.2 percent in the year to October as interest rates hit indebted businesses.</b> Leveraged loans have floating interest rates and, as the FT reported, <b>many companies that “took on debt when rates were ultra low during the pandemic have struggled under high borrowing costs in recent years.</b> Many are now showing signs of pain even as the Federal Reserve bring rates back down.”</bq> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageImperialism/comments/1hrxuok/mainstream_economists_unironically_believe_this/" author="" source="Reddit">Mainstream economists unironically believe this.</a> <img src="{att_link}and_then_i_told_them....jpg" href="{att_link}and_then_i_told_them....jpg" align="none" caption="And then I told them..." scale="75%"> <bq>And then I told them... ...if your cost of living reduces too much, the economy will collapse!</bq> Yeah, this is a good one. The only that collapses is profits, as all of our necessities are provided for with less effort. Our system simply has no idea how to distribute resources because it's obsessed with eliminating "mooching." Some people are going to end up doing a lot less than spending every waking moment producing stuff. That drives some people absolutely nuts. Maybe they'll just do all of the stuff that the economy currently considers worthless? Like walking their kids to school? Or popping in on an older relative for a coffee? <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/27/zcpn-d27.html" source="WSWS" author="Philip Guelpa">What makes human culture unique from culture of other animals?</a> <bq>Attempts to teach chimps and gorillas more complex sequences of tool manufacture or human language have met with limited success. By contrast, <b>humans have the ability to conceive of behavioral modules as abstractions which can be mentally manipulated and recombined almost without limit</b>, enabling them to address new phenomena and novel situations. This is what the authors term open-endedness.</bq> <bq>It is not surprising that that our closest evolutionary relatives—chimpanzees—possess at least the beginnings of the mental capacity that underlies human cultural uniqueness. This ability, at least at a rudimentary level, would appear to have existed in the last common ancestor of humans and chimps. Evolution usually works on existing “raw material.” It rarely starts from scratch. <b>The next big question is how did the capacity for open-endedness expand so tremendously among humans but remain at a low level among chimpanzees?</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2024/12/29/what-exactly-is-a-second/" author="John D. Cook, PhD" source="">What exactly is a second?</a> <bq>the common definition of Unix time as “the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 GMT” and why it’s not exactly true. It was true for a couple years before we started inserting leap seconds. <b>Strictly speaking, Unix time is the number of <i>non-leap seconds</i> since January 1, 1970.</b></bq> <bq>The second is not defined in terms of motions inside an atom, but by the frequency of the radiation produced by changes in an atom. Specifically, a second has been defined since 1967 as<bq><b>the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.</b></bq>Incidentally, <b>“cesium” is the American English spelling of the name of atomic element 55, and “caesium” is the IUPAC spelling.</b></bq> <bq>The time chosen for backward compatibility was basically <b>the length of the year 1900.</b> Technically, the number of periods was chosen so that a second would be<bq><b>the fraction 1/31556925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time.</b></bq>Here <b>“tropical year” means the time it took earth to orbit the sun from the perspective of the “fixed stars,”</b> i.e. from a vantage point so far away that it doesn’t matter exactly how far away it is. The length of a year varies slightly, and that’s why they had to pick a particular one.</bq> This is a short entry in which each sentence tells you that something you've been casually saying or relying on, has been and remains slightly wrong. <h id="art">Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/23/looking-backward-autobiographically/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">Looking Backward, Autobiographically</a> <bq>A few years later, with my cousin at Times Square, I recall collecting money to “Save Madrid!” – and admiring the Soviets for trying to help do just that, alone (with Mexico) for two years against all the other countries. (And, also largely alone, for bypassing the Depression, <b>building the giant Dnepropetrovsk dam and the model Moscow marble subway stations at New York’s World Fair</b>.</bq> <bq>I was happy that the Wall barrier separating families and friends opened up, but very bitter about <b>the swift, total colonization of what I still see as a noble experiment which, like perhaps no other country, almost completely abolished poverty, evictions and homelessness, payment for medicine, health care, child care, abortions, all education levels, while keeping prices on rent, carfare, food staples and necessities to a bare minimum.</b> I also saw and despaired the bad sides, but where are they absent?</bq> <bq>I see a growing gap between rich and poor, and if theories of cyclical crises again prove correct, a possible economic depression ahead, conceivably worse than ever before. More certainly by far, they all <b>face seeming inevitable ecological disaster.</b> And worse, far worse and closer, though amazingly ignored, downplayed or accelerated by some, l see the <b>menace of annihilating war, even atomic war.</b> And bound up closely with all three menaces I see the rapid growth of the bloodiest elements of repression – modern forms of fascism – and already gaining strength in many countries. Behind every one of these menaces I see <b>a limited cabal, once of millionaires, now billionaires, sometimes rivals but united in their hopes of controlling not half the world’s fortune but all of it</b>, determining the direction of every government no matter what its changes and overturns. Clusters of three, six, eight conglomerates now dominate almost every field of human endeavor in so much of this world. And they want it all!</bq> <bq>What will the future hold? I won’t see all too much of it. But I can be grateful that, aside from losing my Renate far too early, <b>I’ve been lucky to have had a good, always interesting life, spared from want and disaster but witness to amazing slices of the world and its history.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/12/23/christmas-tree-diary/" source="The Paris Review" author="Jake Maynard">Christmas Tree Diary</a> <bq quote-style="none">I nipped the bottom branches and made a fresh cut on the trunk to help the tree absorb water. <b>Because they were watching, I ran my fingers over the fresh cut and nodded in thoughtful approval.</b> “It must be delivered during the day,” the husband said. “Not after dark.” “Last year, you brought the tree at night, and a bat got inside our home.” “That can’t happen again.” “Yes,” I said, pretending to take notes. “No bats.” No tip.</bq> <bq><b>The most annoying man on earth was wearing a Matisyahu hoodie and a pair of white sneakers, freshly scrubbed.</b> He had three sons in prep school sweats and broccoli cuts who ignored him and stood around the fire, flashing their phones to each other and laughing in that particularly sinister way that teen boys laugh.</bq> <bq quote-style="none"><b>Today an eighteen-month-old baby with perfect angel cheeks sang “Jingle Bells” to me from her car seat while I tied a tree to the top of the newish Volvo.</b> Later, a little boy walked over to the barrel fire, looked inside, and said, “Orange flames. Poor combustion.” Brian said, “You’re a smart kid.” He said, “I know.”</bq> <bq>Other people buy trees with bald spots or crooked tops because <b>they feel bad for ugly trees.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_-t3i6ipz4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/L_-t3i6ipz4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Cinema Cartography" caption="Nothing is punk anymore..."> Excellent video essay about art, punk, edginess, featuring many of my favorite directors, musicians, and comedians. I can't remember everyone but man, there's Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Frank Zappa, Marilyn Manson, Patrice O'Neal, John Waters, Lars von Trier, Bill Hicks (<iq>an anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian dark poet</iq>), Paul Mooney, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky...the list goes on. Bill Hicks, at <b>33:35</b> (cited from <i>Rants in E-Minor</i>), <bq>Let me tell you something right now and you can print this in stone and don't you ever forget it; Any, <i>ANY</i> performer that ever sells a product on television is---for now and all eternity---removed from the artistic world. I don't care if you shit Mona Lisas out of your ass on cue; you've made your fucking choice.</bq> I weep when I watch television in the States and watch one actor, comedian, and musician after another hawk mobile-phone services, financial services, and mediacations. It's a tragedy. I always think of Bill Hicks. Good thing pancreatic cancer took him young---before he could sell out. <bq>Why are all these millionaires selling us insurance? And clothes? What? They don't have enough money?</bq> <bq>People miss out on so many things, they don't know they don't know.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7InE1zXAY4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/z7InE1zXAY4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="" caption="Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants - Magic show"> There has never been and will never be anyone like Ricky Jay. He was a polymath. He was erudite. He spoke in clipped tones, with words like "disapprobation". He cited 15th-century poetry from memory, as part of his show. He cites George Bernard Shaw, <iq>Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.</iq> He was the most brilliant playing-card prestidigitator the world has ever seen. He knew more about tricks and magicians and the history thereof than anyone else before or since. A large part of this show is explaining how to cheat, how to prestidigitate, all the while doing tricks that cannot be explained. He keeps up a non-stop, relevant, and sophisticated patter while pulling aces from the deck without looking at his hands or the deck. He demonstrates the kind of "card control" that you can only get when you've done it a million times. Probably literally. It's a friendly reminder that you should never, ever play cards with anyone you don't know, or whose skills you don't know. I have written about him before, <ul> In 2018, I <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3621">mentioned</a> a long-form essay about him, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/ricky-jay-magician-secrets-profile" author="" source="New Yorker" date="1993">Secrets of the Magus</a> He was a favorite of David Mamet, so he appeared in his movies <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=2902" date="2008">Redbelt</a>, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3196" date="1987">House of Games</a>, and <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=2488">Heist</a>. </ul> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/warm-holiday-greetings-from-the-hinternet" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">Warm Holiday Greetings from The Hinternet</a> <bq>[...] <b>it’s hard, hard, to see our beloved past subducted into oblivion</b>, as it is no doubt for every generation, but for some more than others.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://allenpike.com/2024/an-unreasonable-amount-of-time" author="Allen Pike" source="">An Unreasonable Amount of Time</a> <bq>Teller [of Penn and Teller] describes the underlying principle like so:<bq><b>Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.</b></bq></bq> <bq>It can be difficult, psychologically, to commit yourself to spend an extreme amount of time and attention towards a goal, no matter how worthwhile. [...] <b>Eventually, years in, this will culminate in overnight success.</b> You’ll have achieved something that seems magical – impossible, even. It just takes some time.</bq> That's why it's so much easier if you can enjoy the journey rather than just anticipate the destination. It takes a lot more willpower to stick with something if you don't enjoy doing it, or if you don't get a feeling of accomplishment from completing a piece of it. Nothing worth doing can be done quickly. If it seems impossible or would take years, consider what it would look like from the perspective of your future self. I you don't start now, that future self won't be able to benefit from the investment that you made. But that sounds so f'ing self-help-y that I'm mad at myself a little bit. <hr> A friend sent me a racist meme that a colleague of his had forwarded to him. It was a white woman holding a black baby. It doesn't matter what it was; it wasn't even so egregious. I wrote him back, So much hatred in this post. The meme just tells its own story, nearly entirely divorced from what is actually happening in the picture. The lady might have been sneezing. She may not have even published the photo. She may not even exist. I, for one, welcome a world where racist pinheads like the author can generate a literal fuck-ton of content that then enrages them into writing "poems" that they share with their low-browed cohorts online. Then they can break both their arms jerking off to the idea of how evil all black babies are. This will allow us to more easily identify whom we shouldn't waste time talking to: anyone with two broken arms. He wrote back quite eloquently, <bq>It just screams of a sad person who would long for the warm embrace of a woman, and thinks that it has been stolen from him. I am all for humor and art, but you can right out tell the pain that was put into the comment a shame</bq> Oh, absolutely, agreed, you can say racist things that are funny. But the sheer self-satisfaction this person (c'mon, who are we kidding? It's a guy.) oozes when he writes "niglet" makes me shrink away instead, like from a diseased animal. You know? It's like how other animals know to stay away from the one with rabies (<i>Tollwut</i>). <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://minds.md/zakirullin/cognitive" source="Minds" author="Artem Zakirullin">Cognitive load is what matters</a> <bq>The Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate argued that Linux's monolithic design was flawed and obsolete, and that a microkernel architecture should be used instead. Indeed, the microkernel design seemed to be superior "from a theoretical and aesthetical" point of view. On the practical side of things - three decades on, <b>microkernel-based GNU Hurd is still in development, and monolithic Linux is everywhere. This page is powered by Linux, your smart teapot is powered by Linux. By monolithic Linux.</b></bq> <bq><b>A well-crafted monolith with truly isolated modules is often much more flexible than a bunch of microservices.</b> It also requires far less cognitive effort to maintain. It's only when the need for separate deployments becomes crucial, such as scaling the development team, that you should consider adding a network layer between the modules, future microservices.</bq> <bq>P.S. It's often mentally taxing to distinguish between "authentication" and "authorization". <b>We can use simpler terms like "login" and "permissions" to reduce the cognitive load.</b></bq> I guess you could but you seem to understand that cognitive load arises when you encounter terms that you don't know. Why are login/permissions more intuitive than authentication/authorization? Especially when the latter pair is used everywhere, in every specification, in every API. Why change things now because there's a new group of wanna-be programmers coming up who don't like learning new things? You know, the ones who call anything that taxes them a little bit "cognitive load." Even if you can build a little world where you're using your own terms, as soon as you interface with external systems like openid or proxies, you'll have to know what you're doing, you'll have to know the difference between authentication and authorization and know which one means "login" and which one means "permissions." In fact, this notion of coming up with your own terminology smacks a bit of the "framework" the author outlines below, disparaging frameworks for their tendency to introduce new concepts that much be learned in order to use them. If you use too many custom terms, you're building a framework of concepts, not software, but you're still increasing the cognitive load needed in order to work with your software. <bq>People spend time arguing between 401 and 403, making decisions based on their own mental models.</bq> This is mostly due to people who don't know what they're doing being employed in the industry. He calls everything cognitive load. Some of it is precise definitions of concepts that have intrinsic complexity. <bq><b>These architectures are not fundamental, they are just subjective, biased consequences of more fundamental principles.</b> Why rely on those subjective interpretations? Follow the fundamental rules instead: dependency inversion principle, cognitive load and information hiding. Discuss . Do not add layers of abstractions for the sake of an architecture. Add them whenever you need an extension point that is justified for practical reasons. Layers of abstraction aren't free of charge , they are to be held in our working memory .</bq> Sure, but what is added value if you aren't encapsulating and abstracting away complexity. <bq>I've personally witnessed cases where junior engineers either implemented completely non-functional solutions or created unnecessarily complex implementations due to following AI suggestions without proper understanding. This reinforces the importance of strong fundamentals and critical review skills.</bq> I mean, of course you do. You can't just hand someone a nail gun and let them run onto the building site, satisfying their every whim. How is this revelatory? <hr> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241230-00/?p=110692" author="Raymond Chen" source="The Old New Thing">How various git diff viewers represent file encoding changes in pull requests</a> The article shows that GitHub, Visual Studio, and Azure DevOps are all distinctly lacking in their ability to detect and display an encoding or BOM change in a file. <i>Beyond Compare</i> shows BOM and encoding changes, exactly as expected. The built-in differ for <i>SmartGit</i> does not. I also relearned the word <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake" author="" source="Wikipedia">Mojibake</a>, which, <bq>[...] is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding.</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://theonion.com/48-year-old-rabbit-finally-finishes-the-job/" author="" source="The Onion">48-Year-Old Rabbit Finally Finishes The Job</a> This turns out to be a nearly laughably deep cut, referring to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident" author="" source="Wikipedia">Jimmy Carter rabbit incident</a>. <bq>Carter was fishing in a johnboat (sometimes erroneously described as a canoe)[1] in a pond in his farm, when he saw a swamp rabbit, which Carter later speculated was fleeing from a predator, swimming in the water and making its way towards him, "hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared" [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1hpukic/this_groundhog_has_been_stealing_a_farmers_crop/" author="" source="Reddit">this groundhog has been stealing a farmer's crop for years and eats it in front of his camera</a> The is (A) old and (B) the title is not true---the clips are from a channel about "chunks". That groundhog chomping on vegetables is adorable, though. Here's an explainer: <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNdts2P-djg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/SNdts2P-djg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Dodo" caption="Guy Builds Veggie Garden For Family Of Groundhogs"> If you can't get enough, I think a bunch of the clips came from this video. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFuKI1rCejg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/lFuKI1rCejg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Chunk The Groundhog" caption="See Ya 2020! Best Of The Chunks"> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1hpucbi/piplup/" author="" source="Reddit">Piplup</a> Piplup is a cartoon penguin. I honestly think that the Internet would be a better place if more of it were like piplup. My favorites are, <ul>"Piplup considers some jorts" "piplup studies plein air" "piplup goes overboard at shopping therapy"</ul> Is it unusual? Yes. Is it wonderful that someone took the time to make this? Absolutely. <img src="{att_link}piplup_considers_some_jorts.webp" href="{att_link}piplup_considers_some_jorts.webp" align="none" caption="Piplup considers some jorts" scale="50%"> <img src="{att_link}piplup_goes_overboard_at_shopping_therapy.webp" href="{att_link}piplup_goes_overboard_at_shopping_therapy.webp" align="none" caption="Piplup goes overboard at shopping therapy" scale="50%"> <img src="{att_link}piplup_studies_plein_air.webp" href="{att_link}piplup_studies_plein_air.webp" align="none" caption="Piplup studies plein air" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1hpvczw/cute_bunny/" author="" source="Reddit">Cute bunny</a> <img src="{att_link}little_man_is_chuffed.jpg" href="{att_link}little_man_is_chuffed.jpg" align="none" caption="Little man is chuffed" scale="50%" title="Picture of a rabbit sitting on a carpet in his well-furnished domain"> <bq>I sold a rug to someone on marketplace and they just sent me this picture with the message "little man is chuffed"</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1hre0gd/%E0%B8%85%EF%BB%8C%E0%B8%85/" author="" source="Reddit">ฅ⁠^⁠•⁠ﻌ⁠•⁠^⁠ฅ</a> This is a short conversation showing what it would be like if my partner were the technically savvy one and I were hopelessly lost. <img src="{att_link}roles_reversed_1.jpg" href="{att_link}roles_reversed_1.jpg" align="none" caption="Roles Reversed 1" scale="50%"> <img src="{att_link}roles_reversed_2.jpg" href="{att_link}roles_reversed_2.jpg" align="none" caption="Roles Reversed 2" scale="50%"> I don’t think most people realize what a national treasure Tumblr actually is. Most of the things I like the best on Reddit are screenshots from Tumblr. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52_7UcvHw1Y" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/52_7UcvHw1Y" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Patton Oswalt" caption="I Tell A Story About Birth Control And Deal With A Retarded Heckler"> The whole skit is good, but the bit at <b>4:58</b> is devastating, <bq>Because if you're ever wondering, 'should I have a baby?' go to a Wal-Mart or a K-Mart on a Sunday and look at these dead-eyed 25-year-olds, trudging around, with their little broods of failure trailing behind them. You will pay a skinhead to kick your girlfriend in the stomach, that is how bad it is. Oh yes. Oh yes. 'Here's a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, now <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Karate_Kid#Cultural_influence">sweep the leg, Johnny!</a>' </bq> This segment is from "Werewolves and Lollipops" from 2007. I'd forgotten how amazing this stand-up set is.