Links and Notes for July 8th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Programming

COVID-19

Settling in for the long haul by Maria (Crooked Timber)

“[…] that’s not going to help the college student who’s returned home to a stalled life and a support system that seemed encompassing at first, but which is now coldly, methodically, pulling its arms away when the kid doesn’t recover in a socially acceptable period of time. (And that scenario, to be fair, is still the Cadillac of long covid support systems.)”

“Minute on minute, I could barely make the letters settle into words, forget about forming sentences or ideas, but day on day it turned out I could do it. It just took a higher threshold of discomfort than I’d previously believed manageable, and about eight times longer. I’m so glad I learnt this. The knowledge that impossibly difficult intellectual tasks can be worked through piecemeal – not in darts and dashes of caffeinated brilliance – was not natural to my temperament, and it’s why I can still do things.”

“(To imagine what that’s like, remember a time you had real, proper flu – not just a heavy cold – and bring yourself back to the first couple of days you were well enough to get out of bed but not to leave your home. How do I conduct what superficially looks like a normal life while counting the sometimes quite vicious opportunity cost of walking the dogs or buying groceries? Peaks, troughs and, especially, habituation. You’d be surprised what you can get used to, until you do.)”

“ME/CFS is defined by fatigue that isn’t cured by rest. A bone-deep resistance to rest sets in when you know how much time it demands and how it will never, ever be satisfied. The ultimate sick-hack is just pretending to be well, whatever the personal cost.”

“By year three I could routinely cosplay a well person for 8 hours of gainful employment a day.”

“I’m lucky that I have a difficult to replicate skill – writing – and a solid and unusual body of knowledge – technology policy – which mean I can sell my time at a premium and live on part-time earnings. I don’t have a recipe for achieving this that’s not ‘spend a decade and a half pretending to be well while acquiring high-value knowledge, skills and networks’.”

“People who live more or less normally get hurt when the thing I managed once or twice – by cutting out something else – turns out not to be something I can or will do regularly. I cut and hack and simplify, and in this way I reduce people’s social expectations of me to be someone who shows up. I sneak off-stage and just let people assume the hours and days they fill with activity are the same for me, but are spent with other people. In fact, I’ll be lying in a darkened room, recovering and trying to find the energy for the next normie cosplay activity.”

It must be hard to acquire real friends, I guess?

“[…] living like someone on their late eighties from when you’re twenty-six can make you look ever so slightly different to others your age.”

“So many millennials are ill with long covid and they just wouldn’t even think of hiding it, like it would never occur to them to accept accommodatory BS like the 2nd wave feminism my generation believed would somehow incrementally fix things. Good for them. I’m glad to see them making connections on social media and puzzling it through together. The fact of them and many others doing this means I’m now much more ‘out’ about my limits, something that feels weird and vulnerable and obscurely shaming, but which I have to think is healthier overall.”

“There’s no steady state. Covid is coming for all of us and each time it’s a roll of the dice. I’ve had it twice now. The first time knocked me out for about six months, and the second time did sharply alien and unpleasant things to my brain. I’m so scared that collectively all our brains are getting fucked, and we won’t be able to sustain concentration in the immersive and demanding story-webs I believe are necessary to keep imagining our large and interlinked society into existence.”

“I’m so glad Rebecca has her wheelchair and will get outside again. There’ll be stuff she can do that she hasn’t been able, and it will feel fabulous. And in each of those new excursions a mourning and disbelief for the life that went before and that still flows around her in the form of people with shopping bags and evening plans untouched and untroubled by the bony finger of fate.”

“(So much of this is both metaphor and heightened instance of other, more general human experiences; that there’s no going back before September 11 or the election of a fascist, that we blew past the exits to the climate and food and inequality crisis decades ago, that at every stage of life we’re mourning what’s no longer possible and trying to accommodate ourselves with all the grace we can muster to what is.)”

“We sense the other timelines running parallel in the semi-darkness, even if we can’t jump the tracks, the other people we could have been. They never really go away.”

I don’t know this feeling at all. I just assume I’m living my best life – if I think about it at all.

“He had suffered a lot in the past few years, his world getting smaller in sharp stutters – first walking places went, then public transport, then going somewhere with disabled access in a car, then in the last year walking to the end of the road, leaving the house, leaving his bed. He was grumpy but essentially habituated to that, but when he stopped being able to read and be incredibly well-informed to discuss politics and geo-politics, that’s when he started to feel enough was enough.”

“So, don’t rush toward acceptance. It’ll come, or it won’t. And maybe you will be one of the ones who gets well. I hope so hard for that. Sit with it. Lie down with it. Or float away on warm, imagined breezes. What else are you going to do with this time, anyway?”

Economy & Finance

Energy charter treaty makes climate action nearly illegal in 52 countries (Ars Technica)

“The energy charter treaty has 52 signatory countries which are mostly EU states but include the UK and Japan. The claimants are suing 12 of them including France, Germany and the UK—all countries in which energy companies are using the treaty to sue governments over policies that interfere with fossil fuel extraction. For example, the German company RWE is suing the Netherlands for 1.4 billion euros ($1.42 billion) because it plans to phase out coal.”

Tug of war on global financial markets by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The recessionary tendencies have led to the view in financial markets that the Fed will be forced to pull back on its interest hikes. In other words, after taking away the punchbowl of cheap money, the Fed will soon be forced to return it and the financial party, based on speculation, can resume after a brief hiatus. Stocks on Wall Street have been rising with the S&P 500 recording its largest increase this week since March and the interest-rate sensitive NASDAQ enjoying the same result. The uplift has also been reflected in highly speculative stocks such as GameStop which jumped by 15 percent on Thursday.”

The Financial Bubble Era Comes Full Circle by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“It may very well be that the same experience awaits anyone who pulls at threads like “100% backed” or “secure wallet” or other such catch-phrases from any one of dozens of crypto companies. In other words, these issues may not be unique to Circle. But make no mistake: this is the definition of an “opaque ledger.” If every crypto company will struggle this badly to answer basic questions like Where’s your money? or What’s your risk?, the storm hasn’t even started yet.”

“Using digital currencies to help the billions around the world with no access to banking services become participants in a system that has long excluded them is a great thing, in theory. The issue is the structure of these companies. If a stablecoin firm is taking your dollar and trying to make money lending it somewhere, they’re just “unregulated, uninsured, unaudited banks,” as one financial analyst puts it.”

“Referring to a story by the London Times about the 2008 crash, this genesis block was intended to make sure the world never forgot that a corruption-fueled financial bubble was essentially the inspiration for the cryptocurrency movement, or at least for the creation of the most famous of the cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin.”

“In theory, Blockchain really could break the grip powerful insiders have had on money and political power since time immemorial. The potential benefits even reach into areas like speech. If you can rely on a vast digital community to confirm you’re good for your dinner bill instead of a third-party guarantor like, say, the Visa corporation, then there would be no inaccessible, unaccountable payment processors to hold Internet speech or book sales hostage. As the former CEO of a major Internet company put it, commenting on a recent episode involving the freezing of PayPal accounts for alt-media firms, “Bitcoin is the only answer.””

“However, if the transparency goal isn’t maintained in crypto finance, and risk is allowed to exist that digital assets could end up fought over in something like a bankruptcy court, then you’ve just exchanged one brand of “centralized ledger” for another — maybe even a worse version.”

“It’s the perhaps-insuperable paradox hanging over this $3 trillion market. Are these firms really beacons of a new form of cryptographically guaranteed transparency, or are they just less-insured, less-regulated, less-audited versions of the same take-our-word-for-it securities and banking operations that melted down the world economy fourteen years ago?”

Ding, ding, ding. 🔔 🔔 🔔

“Similar sentiments were echoed at the 2022 meeting at Davos, where the current IMF chief urged those in attendance not to overreact. “I would beg you not to pull out of the importance of this world,” said Kristalina Georgieva, about cryptocurrency. “It offers us all faster service, much lower costs, and more inclusion, but only if we separate apples from oranges and bananas.””

What the fuck are you talking about? Can you please speak English? This is embarrassing. Jesus fucking Christ, this whole thing of putting the entire burden on me to figure out whether someone’s an idiot or whether they’re just an idiot in English is getting on my last nerve. I’m just going to assume that Georgieva is a con artist.

“The tragedy of a corrupted crypto universe is exactly the same story, of a “bespoke” financial market grown to fantastic dimensions in a regulatory dead zone, with a cash-fattened congress keeping questions to a minimum, and the same old insiders extracting billions before a crash that will inevitably be paid for by the rabble again.”

Atlanta Fed’s Model Forecasts GDP to Contract by -2.1 Percent in Second Quarter; Morgan Stanley Says S&P 500 Could Drop Another 22 Percent If that Happens by Pam & Russ Martens (Wall Street on Parade)

“The Nasdaq composite index closed out last year at a reading of 15,644.97. The Nasdaq closed Friday at 11,127.85 – a year-to-date decline of 29 percent. A GDP contraction would be likely to hit the Nasdaq much harder than the S&P 500 because the Nasdaq is stuffed with tech companies trading at lofty price-to-earnings multiples; numerous companies with negative earnings histories; many companies paying no dividends; and companies which should have never been brought to public markets in the first place.”

Public Policy & Politics

Noam Chomsky and the United Nations Warn of Collapse by Robert Hunziker (CounterPunch)

“According to Chomsky, for most of history Homo sapiens lived in harmony with nature, until Aug 6 1945 the day that taught two stark lessons: (1) Human capacity reached a level to destroy everything (2) Very few seemed to care. The upshot: “Now, we are at the point when the major institutions of organized society are intent on destroying organized human life on Earth and the millions of other species.” And, too few seem to care enough to stop it.”

““they discovered the means for self-annihilation but did not develop the moral capacity to prevent it. Perhaps that is inherent with higher intelligence. We are now confronted with whether that principle holds for modern humans.””

“The UN GAR2022 is a landmark document. It is the first time that the United Nations has clearly underscored the impending risk of “total societal collapse” if the human system continues to cross the planetary boundaries critical to maintaining a safe operating space for the earth system.”

“Either way, these UN documents show that recognizing the risk of collapse is not about doom mongering, but about understanding risks so we can make better choices and avoid worst-case outcomes. As the report acknowledges, there is still much that can be done. But the time for action is not after 2030. It’s now.”

Felix Beiderman on the FDA's War with Juul by Jacobin / Jen Pan (YouTube)

“I said that I have a philosophical objection to all of this. It’s that, in America, the ethos for so many is that you’re on your own. Go find your own fuckin’ health care plan, go find your own income, go find your own job, go find your own housing—figure it the fuck out. There are barely any rules around any of this. Someone can screw you out of your retirement. There are more ways to get screwed and to get fooled in this country than any other first-world nation on Earth, but, when it comes to these individual behavioral choices, it’s highly limited. And it’s not just smoking or E-Cigs or things like that—we have more limitations on more things than any other place.”

Abortion and Democracy in America by Peter Singer (Project Syndicate)

“The Supreme Court exercised that power in a way that gave US women a legal right that they should have. Roe spared millions of women the distress of carrying to term and giving birth to a child whom they did not want to carry to term or give birth to. It dramatically reduced the number of deaths and injuries occurring at that time, when there were no drugs that reliably and safely induced abortion. Desperate women who were unable to get a safe, legal abortion from properly trained medical professionals would try to do it themselves, or go to back-alley abortionists, all too often with serious, and sometimes fatal, consequences.

“None of that, however, resolves the larger question: do we want courts or legislatures to make such decisions? Here I agree with Justice Samuel Alito, who, writing for the majority in Dobbs, approvingly quotes Justice Antonin Scalia’s view that: “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.””

“[…] a sensible application of Scalia’s comment on how the question of abortion should be resolved would have been to leave the regulation of guns to democratic processes.”

“There is an even more radical implication of the view that courts should not assume powers that are not specified in the Constitution: the Supreme Court’s power to strike down legislation is not in the Constitution. Not until 1803, fifteen years after the ratification of the Constitution, did Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison, unilaterally assert that the Court can determine the constitutionality of legislation and of actions taken by the executive branch. If the exercise of raw judicial power is a sin, then Marshall’s arrogation to the court of the authority to strike down legislation is the Supreme Court’s original sin.”

“Supreme Court decisions cannot easily be reversed, even if it becomes clear that their consequences are overwhelmingly negative. Striking down the decisions of legislatures on controversial issues like abortion and gun control politicizes the courts, and leads presidents to focus on appointing judges who may not be the best legal minds, but who will support a particular stance on abortion, guns, or other hot-button issues.”

Third Party? America Doesn’t Even Have a Second Party. by Thomas Knapp (CounterPunch)

“For all the talk of “polarization” in American politics, the uniparty monopoly occupies the broad and massive center, dividing the largest and most powerful constituencies between its two factions and doling out largess to those constituencies.”

Science & Nature

He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal. by Jordana Cepelewicz (Quanta)

“He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower … are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.””

What a completely different personality. He obviously benefits from the privilege of extreme intelligence, being able to provide societal value, and having a womb that recognizes those facts and protects him from the much harsher world the rest of us live in. I hope he doesn’t think that would work for everyone if they just tried. Society needs to change to grant this level of accommodation to everyone, given enough resources (which we seem to have). Reading Meditations is a very technocratic, techno-libertarian thing to do these days. Everybody who’s anybody is reading the stoics.

“Huh said they should take some more time to find a cleaner, more appealing approach. He thought there was a nicer explanation out there, and that it was best not to rush things. “Federico and I were like, oh, OK, so we’ll just chuck that, then, shall we?” Denham said. It took two years to craft the better argument. “It’s good we’re all tenured,” Ardila said. Ultimately, though, Ardila and Denham agreed that the extra work was worth it. Their end result “was totally different, and deeper, and [got to] the heart of things,” Ardila said.”

Sure, but because you didn’t publish the initial result, no other researchers had the chance to refine the arguments either, for two years. You kept it to yourselves, didn’t collaborate and it took two years when someone else might have done it more quickly. This is not necessarily a process to be proud of.

How do painkillers kill pain? It’s about meeting the pain where it’s at by Rebecca Seal and Benedict Alter (Ars Technica)

“Common over-the-counter anti-inflammatory painkillers work by decreasing inflammation in the injured area. These are particularly useful for musculoskeletal injuries or other pain problems caused by inflammation such as arthritis. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin), naproxen (Aleve), and aspirin do this by blocking an enzyme called COX that plays a key role in a biochemical cascade that produces inflammatory chemicals. Blocking the cascade decreases the amount of inflammatory chemicals, and thereby reduces the pain signals sent to the brain.”

“Opioids decrease pain by activating the body’s endorphin system. Endorphins are a type of opioid your body naturally produces that decreases incoming signals of injury and produces feelings of euphoria – the so-called “runner’s high.” Opioids simulate the effects of endorphins by acting on similar targets in the body.”

Art & Literature

Sadder Things by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“This is a widespread plague in our present culture, this obsession with catering to the “hardcore fans.” The best art you’ve ever enjoyed was made with a studied indifference to its audience. One of the things I hate most about modern TV and movies is recognizing the moments where the creators said “oh, people are definitely gonna gif this part!” It’s bad form for shows to constantly put out their lips to be kissed.”

That’s good, but his next rant is way off.

“Why does everyone dress like such a fucking asshole on this show? Yes, 80s fashions often appear ugly to modern eyes. But they’re clearly trying to make the characters look extra awful, for no discernible thematic reason. Not everyone was walking around looking like absolute ass for the entire decade of the 1980s, I promise you. Mike dresses like his only clothes came from a bag he stole from one of those Salvation Army bins. Will’s hair, I swear to God, it’s like the show’s creators said “give this child the most dogshit haircut you’ve ever seen.””

People actually did dress exactly like that, in a nearly hyper-lack-of-awareness of how bad it would up looking, in hindsight. The costumes are not deliberately ugly. They are just not deliberately good-looking. This is not 90210. There were enough shows that glorified only the best fashions. This show looks like most of dressed at the time. Wildly badly. There is no excuse for it, but that’s the way it was. It is not inaccurate. Someone who wasn’t alive or aware at the time putting a modern lens on it is inaccurate.

I wanted to say the same thing about Will’s hair, but I had the exact same haircut until the tenth grade, when my overcontrolling first girlfriend made me go to her hairstylist sister and change it to something from Flock of Seagulls. Despite that horrible mental image, it was an improvement, hands down.

de Boer is way off here.

Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers by Kat Rosenfield (Reason)

“The sensitivity reader’s possible areas of expertise are as varied as human existence itself. One representative consultancy boasts a list of experts in the usual racial, ethnic, and religious categories, but also in such areas as “agoraphobia,” “Midwestern,” “physical disability, arms & legs,” and (perhaps most puzzlingly) “gamer geek.” Another one lists individual readers with intersectional qualifications: Depending on the content of your novel, you might hire a white lesbian with generalized anxiety disorder or a bisexual, genderfluid, light-skinned brown Mexican with a self-diagnosis of autism. Every medical condition, every trauma, every form of oppression: Sensitivity readers will cover it all.”

“Unsurprisingly, the rise of sensitivity readers has proved controversial. Those who support it insist that they’re no different from subject matter experts, not unlike the physician who proofreads a medical thriller to make sure the science is right. Critics, on the other hand, balk at the idea that being a member of a given demographic automatically conveys special knowledge about how everyone else in that group thinks or feels. (In Gullaba’s case, his sensitivity reader had been born in the Caribbean and raised in the U.K. The idea that she could speak to the “authenticity” of a young, black ex-convict’s experience at an American university was comical.)”

“To understand why publishing would go all-in on a practice that not only interferes with an author’s creative autonomy but traffics in crude stereotyping to boot, you need to know one crucial fact about sensitivity readers: They’re cheap. The average cost of a sensitivity read is a few hundred dollars per manuscript, and it’s a freelance job. This made it a godsend to publishers who wanted to merely look like they were giving people of color a seat at the table but didn’t want to go to the trouble of buying all those additional chairs.”

““These writers think they’re doing the world a service. Like, ‘Look at me, I’m showing up for the social-justice movement.‘ But the problem is that they’re showing up and they’re taking a seat,” she said. The implications were clear: If you were a white author writing black characters, you were taking up space that could have gone to a more deserving marginalized writer. If you needed a sensitivity reader, then was this really your story to tell?”

Amazing. I’m speechless.

“My job was not to offer my take on the book, as a woman. It was to scrutinize the text from the perspective of a woman who was not me, someone far more sensitive and prone to taking offense than myself—a person whose perspective, thought, and feelings I could only imagine. But per the rules of sensitivity reading, I was allowed to do this, while the author, due to lacking the proper chromosomal and/or genital configuration, was not.”

“At the time, I felt the fundamental tension, even absurdity, inherent to what I was doing: suggesting edits that would take all the teeth out of the story, all for the sake of placating the type of person who would invariably just find something else to be offended by.”

“More broadly, the rise of sensitivity reading seems to reflect an obsession with policing language in service of a hypothetical person who is not only maximally sensitive but also not very smart.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason by Evgeny Morozov (New Left Review)

“As a result, many Marxists—we can skip the internal disputes at this stage—held that, under feudalism, the means of surplus extraction are extra-economic, being largely political in nature; goods are expropriated under the threat of violence. Under capitalism, in contrast, the means of surplus extraction are entirely economic: nominally free agents are obliged to sell their labour power in order to survive in a cash economy, in which they no longer possess the means of subsistence—yet the highly exploitative nature of this ‘voluntary’ labour contract remains largely invisible. Thus, as we move from feudalism to capitalism, politically enabled expropriation gives way to economically enabled exploitation.”

“It was a system in which untamed private powers ruled supreme. As a result, it’s customary within this rather diverse intellectual tradition to contrast feudalism not to capitalism but to the law-respecting and law-enforcing bourgeois state. To be a feudal subject is to live a precarious life in fear of arbitrary private power; to tremble at rules that one had no role in creating and to have no possibility of appealing one’s guilty verdict.”

I am not sure how that doesn’t describe the U.S. for at least 90% of the population, for all practical purposes. A world run by corporations matches this description for most people. “most” being over half, by definition. Just because you don’t know any of these people means that you’re very privileged and not that they don’t exist. They are the precariat and they are legion.

“Today’s capitalists simply establish control over intellectual property rights, while trying to limit what the unruly multitude can do with its newfound communicative freedoms. These are not the innovation-obsessed capitalists of the Fordist era; these are lazy rentiers, entirely parasitic on the creativity of the masses. Working from these premises, it’s easy to think that some kind of techno-feudalism is already upon us: if the members of the multitude are truly the ones doing all the work and are even using their own means of production, in the sense of computers and open-source software, then to speak of capitalism seems like a cruel joke.”

“It is impossible to grasp the ascendancy of the American tech industry if one brackets out the Cold War and the War on Terror—with their military spending and surveillance technologies, as well as the global network of American military bases—as extraneous, non-capitalist factors, of little importance to understanding what ‘capital’ wants and what it does. Could one make the same mistake today, when the ‘rise of China’ and climate catastrophe are coming to occupy the system-orienting role once played by the Cold War?”

Programming

The new wave of React state management by REM (Front-end Mastery)

“Popular libraries like Recoil and Jotai exemplify this bottom-up approach with their concepts of “atomic” state. An atom is a minimal, but complete unit of state. They are small pieces of state that can connect together to form new derived states. That ends up forming a graph. This model allows you to build up state incrementally bottom up. And optimizes re-renders by only invalidating atoms in the graph that have been updated. This in contrast to having one large monolithic ball of state that you subscribe to and try to avoid unnecessary re-renders.”

“Automatic optimizations is where the library optimizes this process of only re-rendering what is necessary, automatically, for you as a consumer. The advantage here of course is the ease of use, and the ability for consumers to focus on developing features without needing to worry about manual optimizations. A disadvantage of this is that as a consumer the optimization process is a black box, and without escape hatches to manually optimize some parts may feel a bit too magic.”

“There’s no right answer as to what is the best global state management library. A lot will depend on the needs of your specific application and who is building it.”

Profiling and Fixing Common Performance Bottlenecks by JetBrainsTV/Steve Desmond (YouTube)

“We’re turning our IO-bound problem into a CPU-bound problem.”

Operations on a Human Timescale