Links and Notes for May 13th, 2022

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Programming

Economy & Finance

Is This the Beginning of the End for Crypto? by Hadas Thier (Jacobin)

“One is through a backing reserve, where each digital coin represents a dollar held in the bank. Tether uses this model, though nobody knows exactly how much of a dollar reserve they actually have. They’ve been investigated by the New York attorney general, who said that Tether had “recklessly and unlawfully covered-up massive financial losses to keep their scheme going and protect their bottom lines. . . . Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie.””

Elon Musk Trolls Twitter by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Elon Musk has made it very clear that the rule of law simply does not apply to him, and this has worked well for him. If he wants to ignore the merger agreement that he signed, he will. If you take him to court, he will put up a brutal fight and make things as unpleasant as possible for you. This puts his counterparties, like Twitter, in a tough position. They have a contract. But so what? The third, most obvious possibility is that Musk is going to make use of that uncertainty to renegotiate the price. “I’d like to pay $42 instead of $54.20,” he can say to Twitter’s board, “and if you say no I will walk away and you can sue me and, while you will be right, I will make your life horrible and might even win.””

“My thesis here is in essence: Elon Musk is obligated to close his deal with Twitter at $54.20, but he’s obligated to follow lots of other rules too, and he doesn’t, and gets away with it, which means that if he ignores this obligation he’ll probably get away with it too. That is a terrible thesis! And yet.”

“Luna really did lose almost all of its value almost overnight. A week ago there were about 343 million Luna outstanding with a total value of $26.5 billion, today there are 6.5 trillion Luna outstanding with a total value of, let’s face it, nothing. (CoinMarketCap says about $540 million, but that does not reflect the price at which you could sell a trillion Luna.) A $26 billion ecosystem completely evaporated.”

Crypto Could Be Contagious by Matt Levine (Bloomberg)

“Five years ago, if every cryptocurrency went to zero, a lot of people would have lost a lot of money. But they would mostly be crypto people: Some individuals and some hedge funds that bought crypto would lose their money. The contagion to the real financial system would have been small. Lamborghini dealerships would have a rough year. But most people would barely notice.”

“The notion that Tether could, if push came to shove, offload chunks of its claimed $24bn stash of commercial paper, $35bn hoard of US Treasury bills or $4bn pile of “corporate bonds, funds and precious metals” into these market conditions is potentially unhelpful.”

“Tether has refused to disclose details on its $40bn hoard of US government bonds for fear of revealing its “secret sauce”, even as one of the world’s most important crypto assets comes under strain from heavy selling pressure. Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief technology officer, said on Thursday that the group cannot provide information on which organisation is providing custody of its Treasuries holdings, nor where the assets are stored or which firms handle trading on its behalf.”

Ha! Sounds fine. Totally on-the-level.

“The basic idea of an algorithmic stablecoin is that you can always exchange one UST for $1 worth of Luna, Terraform’s other cryptocurrency, which is meant to guarantee that UST always trades at $1. The risk with this sort of algorithmic stablecoin is that nothing props up the price of Luna, and so if people get worried about UST and try to cash out, they will get $1 worth of Luna, which they will sell, which will drive down the price of Luna, which will make people more worried, which will lead more of them to cash out UST and sell Luna, which will further drive down the price of Luna, etc., in what is known as a death spiral. Eventually cashing out $1 of UST might get you, like, a trillion Luna that no one will want to buy, and the whole thing might collapse.”

Public Policy & Politics

US Air Force’s British Expansion by Matt Kennard (Scheer Post)

“But there are significant downsides. “The rental prices are absolutely sky high because the Air Force gets a housing allowance which can be two or three thousand a month, so obviously if you’ve got a two-bedroom bungalow, why let it to an English person for £800 a month when you get two thousand from an American?””

“She adds another negative. “Americans can’t drive very well on the roads. Apart from driving skills, it’s because a lot of them bring over their American cars, which are left-hand drive, so that can be awkward.””

Just gobsmacking the waste. They get their shitty cars shipped all over the world. As a perk. We are doomed.

Sri Lanka is the first domino to fall in the face of a global debt crisis by Larry Elliot (The Guardian)

“For months there has been speculation that Turkey would be the first domino to fall, but despite an annual inflation rate of 70% and an unconventional approach to economic management, it is still standing. Unlike some other countries under threat, Turkey is able to feed its own people.”

War by Another Name by Joshua Craze (The Baffler)

“Like sieges, country-wide sanctions do not distinguish between armed actors and civilians, and all too often lead to starvation. Yet they are held out as a gentler alternative to open conflict—as if destroying a country’s economy could be a peaceful gesture. Easy to implement and apparently “bloodless,” they hold a particular appeal for the American political establishment, whose public has tired of maintaining an empire abroad. Obama created 2,350 new sanctions during his second term; Trump added another 3,800.”

“The longest running sanctions regime in the world is el bloqueo: America’s embargo of Cuba, which began in 1958 as a ban on arms and was expanded in 1962 to include almost everything else, remaining in place ever since, even as the UN General Assembly has passed a motion every year since 1992 calling for its end. The cost to Cuba, which is hotly debated, surely runs into the billions of dollars.”

“UNSC Resolution 661, passed in August 1990, shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait, banned all UN member states from trading with Saddam Hussein’s regime, with some exceptions for medicine and food. The move was intended to force him to withdraw from Kuwait, but that required an American-led invasion. Yet sanctions remained in place for another thirteen years, backed by an ever-changing set of justifications.”

“It was during the war on terror that the Treasury first claimed to have jurisdiction over dollar-denominated transactions made anywhere in the world, requiring foreign individuals to comply with American sanctions—a move bitterly resisted by the EU until recent measures taken against Russia.”

“According to the U.S. Treasury review, sanctions should have “a clear policy objective within a broader U.S. government strategy.” Yet there are no conditions enabling the sanctions on Russia to be lifted. Instead, the sanctions regime is intended to permanently “weaken” Russia, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin suggested on a visit to Kyiv in late April. It’s hard not to see this as a spectacle of American power, designed as a warning shot across China’s bow. As Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, noted in a letter to his shareholders on March 24: “Access to capital markets is a privilege, not a right.””

“It is possible to imagine a modern avatar of Keynes’s tea-sipper, now ensconced in New York. Satisfied with the removal of Russia from the global economy and certain that things are under control, he looks at his Bloomberg terminal with growing alarm, as the price of nickel surges to record highs, dashing his hopes of buying a new Tesla (nickel is an integral ingredient in lithium-ion batteries). Meanwhile, gas prices climb in America, and wheat and corn futures surge. The global economy, which our businessman once thought was his to turn on and off, turns out to have escaped his grasp. The cost of that self-satisfaction will be very high, and the balance sheet is not in yet.”

Jesus, Endless War, and the Rise of American Fascism by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“We saw the consequences of this dysfunction in Weimar Germany and Yugoslavia, a conflict I covered for The New York Times. Political stagnation and economic misery breeds rage, despair, and cynicism. It gives rise to demagogues, charlatans, and con artists. Hatred drives political discourse. Violence is the primary form of communication. Vengeance is the highest good. War is the chief occupation of the state. It is the vulnerable and weak who pay.”

When Is the US at War? Russia’s Red Line by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“The West told Ukraine not to end the war by accomplishing its job and replaced the Ukrainian job with the West’s job. Ukrainian media reports that “as soon as” Ukraine and Russia, “following the outcome of Istanbul, had agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning.” Johnson rushed in with the demand that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” Don’t negotiate Ukraine’s goals, fight for the West’s goals. Johnson told Zelensky that the war presents a chance to “press” Putin and that the West wanted to use that opportunity, according to one of Zelensky’s “close associates.””

The Lawyers Who Ate California: Epilogue by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Institutions everywhere are filling up with employees bearing skills “orthogonal” to the bureaucratic mission, part of what’s been packaged as progress but feels more like a vast jobs program for otherwise unemployable pseudo-intellectuals. “Hire us, pay us, give us and our clients sinecures at your expense,” Kyeyune writes, “or we will make life difficult for you.””

Fresh Hell by Jason Arias (The Baffler)

“On Wednesday afternoon, in ruling on Jarkesy v. SEC, a few supple-minded creatives in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, fatigued by the cumbersome constraints of common law precedent, effectively declared the modern administrative state null and void. The decision, involving a hedge funder accused of deceiving investors to raise some $24 million, seeks to dispossess federal agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of their ability to enforce long-standing laws. It’s a wonder the SEC’s flagrant disregard of the constitution is only now being corrected, for which we have to thank the two hyper-partisan judges in the majority, previously known for their brave efforts to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act and strip social media companies of their First Amendment rights. The ruling comes ahead of an expected decision from the Supreme Court that, given the conservative majority’s deep skepticism of the state’s power to take any action whatsoever to address the interlocking existential crises facing society, will all but certainly gut the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. However grim this may seem, there is a firm bipartisan consensus that Congress’s purview should, at this time, be restricted to sending big, large guns to Ukraine.”

Journalism & Media

Democratic Disney vs. Republican Disney by ReasonTV (YouTube)

Science & Nature

US Bureau of Reclamation fudges water levels in Lake Mead to avoid implementing additional water cuts by Alex Findjis (WSWS)

“Agriculture is by far the largest consumer of water in the West, accounting for almost 70 percent all water consumption. While improvements in water conservation have been made in recent years, it has been too little to combat the profit interests in the agricultural industry. Agriculture generates $23 billion a year in Arizona and $50 billion in California. Both states dedicate a considerable amount of land and water to growing high-water-use crops such as alfalfa (a feed crop for cattle and dairy cows), cotton, rice and almonds.”

“Under proper scientific and basin wide water planning, these lands, some of the most productive in the country, could grow food and commercial crops in an environmentally sustainable way. But under the anarchy of the capitalist system, farmers are encouraged to pour their resources into profitable but water-guzzling cash crops.”

Feast your eyes on the first image of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way by Jennifer Ouellette (Ars Technica)

“In 2019, the EHT announced the first direct image ever taken of a black hole at the center of an elliptical galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), located in the constellation of Virgo some 55 million light-years away. This image would have been impossible a mere generation ago, and it was made possible by technological breakthroughs, innovative new algorithms, and (of course) connecting several of the world’s best radio observatories. The image confirmed that the object at the center of M87 is indeed a black hole.”

Art & Literature

The Mohole by Justin E.H. Smith (The Hinternet)

“I was frustrated with my pointless job, with all the noise of public debate, the dumb jabbering that men mistake for “having opinions”, the despicable wars, the ruin and waste of precisely all of human history — nearly all of which, it suddenly dawned on me, had unfolded at the very most superficial level of the earth’s crust.”

“I grabbed my headlamp, my ropes, and my new iron pickaxe, and I set out from Poë and I went back down. I sunk through the strata and saw flatworms and roundworms and ∞-worms and ****worms that defied all geometrical specification; the Mephisto nematodes grew ever bigger and brighter. I slid down through the earth’s matrices like some innocent kit or cub, some universal animal, born again and again. I slid and slid for what seemed a supereon, until at last I hit a membrane. I knew at once this was the “integument” conjectured in the anonymous desideratum. Beneath it there coursed a fluid nothing at all like boiling asphaltic caramel, but, I could tell, rather more like blood. This was the mantle. My hole was now a Mohole, or was about to be, as soon as I punctured through it with my pick. Like a clumsy new father, thumb pressed upon the fragile fontanelle, I felt around. O Earth, place of skulls, I have barely known you.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Pennsylvania, So Far by Peter Welch (Still Drinking)

“I see incredible technology coming out and know that it will immediately be used to distract and oppress1 in equal measure, and our helplessness in the face of the oppression eats up the entertainment for a trickle of escape. The last decade of global system shocks were all things most people saw coming. We were hoping another generation would have to deal with it.

“More surprising is the question of which kind of dystopia we would hit as a species has been answered: all of them. Russia doing its best 1984 impression, America is somewhere between Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale, China is cribbing off Black Mirror, and we’re all well on our way to Waterworld at worst and Bladerunner at best.”

Programming

Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust by Raph Levien

“The main tool for stitching together components is the Adapt view node. This node is so named because it adapts between one app state type and another, using a closure that takes mutable access to the parent state, and calls into a child (through a “thunk”, which is just a callback for continuing the propagation to child nodes) with a mutable reference to the child state. We can then define a “component” in the Xilem world as a body of code that outputs a view tree with a different app state type than its parent component.”

“In Elm terminology, the Adapt node is similar to Html map, though it manipulates mutable references to state, as opposed to being a pure functional mapping between message types. It is also quite similar to the “lens” concept from the existing Druid architecture, and has some resemblance to Binding in SwiftUI as well.”

“So far, I haven’t deeply explored styling and theming. These operations also potentially ride on an incremental change propagation system, especially because dynamic changes to the style or theme may propagate in nontrivial ways to affect the final appearance.”

This honestly seems to be reinventing HTML/CSS implementations. When I see how complex and rich the APIs are for HTML/DOM/CSS/JS, I wonder whether any other rendering framework can ever come close to competing. The CSS API is damned rich now that you can control an incredible amount of the layout and animation and rendering. Building in any other API will feel limiting or needlessly burdensome.

“An especially difficult challenge in UI toolkits is sparse scrolling, where there is the illusion of a very large number of child widgets in the scroll area, but in reality only a small subset of the widgets outside the visible viewport are materialized.”

I read and re-read Flyweight/Glyph papers from the early 90s and even ended up using some of these concepts in renderers I’ve written over the years. This is established research. There are other interesting libraries and papers—e.g. Interviews or Fresco or anything by Paul Calder, who did a lot of seminal post-graduate research in this area— see Glyphs: flyweight objects for user interfaces for a good intro/example. I have many more papers in this area that I read religiously in the mid-90s.