“For... [More]”

The article Roaming Charges: From of the Mouths of Madness by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) discussed several interesting news items.

ICE

St. Clair started off with a few items about immigration:

“Cost of painting Trump’s border wall black: $500 million.

“ICE recently shelled out $2.4 million for a fleet of new trucks and SUVs, which were custom detailed with gold wraps reading “DEFEND THE HOMELAND, INTEGRITY, COURAGE, and ENDURANCE.”

“ICE has lowered the hiring standards (it will no longer require agents working the... [More]”

The article That Big, Beautiful Summit in Alaska by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post), although informative, ascribes much more consistency and reasoning to ‘Trump and his administration’s actions than the situation warrants. For example, much is made of Trump’s statement that he wants to end the war in Ukraine.

“No Western leader, if you have not noticed, has ever called for an end to the war. None among them has ever mentioned a peace accord for the simple reason the Western powers do not want peace with Russia. It is with this... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

This is a lament from the beginning of 2024 but it still applied in 2025 and will probably still apply in 2026.

It’s the start of a new year, so it’s time to download the yearly salary certificate.

I checked out the web site.

EnshittificationThe generated-documents folder is empty. Reload. Nothing. Switch to a different folder. Switch back. Now there are two folders, one for 2023 and one for 2024.

The documents are all called the same thing. If you download the document out of the app, it gets a... [More]

Neutrality means sending aid—food, water, medicine, doctors—where it’s needed, condemning crimes where they occur, and working diplomatically toward a ceasefire, then peace accords. The only thing neutrality excludes is military participation—sending weapons and/or troops. And yet. there is always a laser-like focus on that part.

Switzerland is a neutral country but no-one can stand it. Each “side” claims that there is no such thing as neutrality, that there is only the side of good,... [More]

One thing that I’ve noticed that’s changed from when I was younger is that I’m genuinely no longer threatened by people living lives different from mine anymore. That is, I’m not threatened by simply knowing that there are other people out there doing things differently, or believing different things, or simply finding solace or reassurance in things that I think are completely unfounded in reality or foolish. I haven’t stopped feeling that they’d be foolish for me; I just realize that it... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

We have chosen this because we all think we’re in the in-group, or that we will soon be in the in-group. We do not care about the out-group because we all egotistically and absolutely immorally believe that we are only “temporarily embarrassed” out-groupers (to steal part of a quote from John Steinbeck[1]).

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Judah Friedlander − World Champion

His hat says WORLD CHAMPION in morse code.

.-- --- .-. .-.. -..   -.-. .... .- -- .--. .. --- -.

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

LinkedIn is an enshittified dumpster fire.

I recently set up 2FA for my LinkedIn account. Then I changed the email address associated with that account because the old one was an ancient throwaway that I’m phasing out. Not long after, LinkedIn blocked my account,... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third in a series of reviews that so far includes Book 1 and Book 2. Carl recieves the titular Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, which is a special book that only he can read. It’s a compendium of the experiences of dozens if not hundreds of other crawlers throughout the myriad seasons that passed before the Earth season chronicled in these books.

The book introduces itself to him,

The article Military Industrial Simple by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indi.ca) describes the U.S. empire in terms of a “bust out”, which is what an organization like the mafia does to businesses that they’ve otherwise bled dry. The bust-out is then setting the business premises on fire to collect the insurance money. He writes,

“LIghting the joint on fireA bust-out works where the mafia takes control of your restaurant (say), runs up bills on the joints credit, steals or sells goods out the back, and never pays the debt back. When it all goes to shit, they... [More]”

The article ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ Is Inferior To Science by Thomas R. Wells (3QuarksDaily) has two main thrusts: the primacy of scientific thinking and the degeneracy of preferring something for nonscientific reasons. On second that, those are two sides of the same coin.

Science is knowledge that deserves to be believed

The following citations illustrate the point as Wells put it,

“[…] knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be... [More]”

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is book two of the Dungeon-Crawler Carl series. I’d read Dungeon Crawler Carl: Book 1 and moved on immediately to this book. This is a really, really fun series, written by a smart and funny author who has a good amount of world experience that he brings to his wild and complex stories about an Earth-sized dungeon that’s been built on the remains of Earth for the sole purpose of galaxy-wide entertainment.

This is not hard sci-fi! The books don’t bother explaining how... [More]

The article Function calling using LLMs by Kiran Prakash describes an approach that works very well when you don’t have a testing environment: build a plan, evaluate validity of the plan, and then apply the plan after verification. You should also be able to slice the work into sub-tasks to make verification more reliable.

This is the approach I took for a PowerShell script that runs against ADOS (Azure DevOps): it’s production data, so you really want to be sure what is going to be executed, but you have no... [More]

The article A Critical Look at MCP by Rasmus Holm (Raz Blog) discussing many of the drawbacks of MCP as it is currently conceived. One of them is the push to build everything in Python, which is a dynamic language that’s better-designed than JavaScript, but isn’t a lot better at helping users write maintainable code.

“Am I being pretentious/judgmental in thinking that people in AI only really know Python, and the “well, it works on my computer” approach is still considered acceptable? This should be glaringly obvious to... [More]”

This video is a wonderful discussion of what it will mean to offload knowledge and wisdom to machines. Professor Asma discusses how humans have always offloaded to the environment to a certain degree. He argues that offloading to LLMs is like “the man in Searle’s Chinese Room”. I think that this offloading of knowledge and still believing that it would be a path to wisdom already began with the “just Google it” generation.

AI and the Post-Knowledge World by Professor Asma (YouTube)

The trend toward offloading knowledge—a little something called... [More]

Almost as usual, this interview with Mark Blyth doesn’t exactly go where the interviewer thinks that it’s going to go. They discuss jobs, AI, and scams. They discuss Britain’s idiotic economic policy—but Blyth levels that accusation against most of Europe and the West (e.g., Germany and the U.S., the two countries with which he’s the most familiar).

The interviewer tries to steer things to tried and true liberal topics—I don’t know why; had he never seen Blyth speak before? Or didn’t he... [More]