Links and Notes for September 9th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Video Games

COVID-19

Economy & Finance

Business Whiners (Reddit)

Business Whiners

YouTube

There is, as usual for a Richard Wolff interview, very much to learn in this video. I was particularly intrigued by the formulation he delivered as the very end, at 1:08:00,

“For decades, we, as a nation, can send them little green pieces of paper that costs us absolutely nothing to produce. They send us wine, they send us iron ore, they send us all of the things produced for life that we buy—and we buy a lot. And all we have to give is little green pieces of paper. Because they hold those. They use them. They accept that. And that gives us the benefit of what they produce without having to give them anything of what we produce. And when that stops, when another country—or a group of countries, which is most likely what’s going to happen next—a group of countries like China, India […], if they develop alternatives, then those subsidies will go to them and not to the United States. And then we can see a decline in the United States that will suddenly be so sharp and so palpable that the kinds of conversation that we’re having now will be the ones that are happening in the corner pub because everybody [will know it by then].”

I guess that’s technically true? Unless maybe the world puts up with the U.S. so that it continues to produce Marvel movies?

Democrats Remind Everyone That All The Money You Just Lost In The Stock Market Wasn’t Really Worth Much Anyway Thanks to Inflation (Babylon Bee)

“Speaker Pelosi spoke to constituents at a press conference, reminding them that 1.6 trillion dollars isn’t what it used to be thanks to near record levels of inflation. “It’s 1.6 trillion, what is that, like three barrels of oil?” said Pelosi. “$1.6 trillion is barely enough to remodel one of my kitchens. Calm down, everyone.””

The Faces of Inflation by Nora De La Cour (Jacobin)

“Patricia Moseley says McDonald’s has the money to pay its workers a living wage: “The ones in there sweating and mopping, dealing with the customers? You should be able to pay them. Because without them, you would have no money.” McDonald’s has elevated its prices so much that Christopher Saperstein and his family can no longer afford the occasional takeout meal. If companies can raise their prices to boost profits, Saperstein wonders, “why can’t we raise our prices?””

All In at the Crypto Casino by Ryan Zickgraf (Jacobin)

“Billions of dollars worth of LUNA were withdrawn in a matter of hours, causing the currency to enter a death spiral. Instead of folding and cashing out, Michael threw in every penny of his earnings, plus a $38,000 bank loan, in order to “buy the dip.” His twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend, who lives in Bangkok, also invested her entire life savings into the failing crypto coin.”

Michael wasn’t happy being a multi-millionaire for having done literally nothing. Instead, he wanted to be stupid rich for doing literally nothing. How do people justify this to themselves? We should absolutely be instilling the feeling in people that they should be giving something back to society instead of just trying to figure out how to be a rich parasite.

“Men, especially those under the age of fifty, anted up, with 43 percent of those between eighteen and twenty-nine buying or trading crypto.”

43% of what? All U.S. males between 18 and 29? That’s very hard to believe. I don’t know what to do with this number. If it really is what it sounds like they’re saying, then it’s an incredible number.

“Crypto’s rapid growth, he thought, was the best path to the ultimate nest egg, the promise of a better future just a couple of smartphone swipes away. Soon, Michael would get married to his fiancée and spend some of his earnings on a big wedding in Bora Bora.”

Yeah, I’m really starting to dislike Michael. Why did he think he deserved any of this? Because he … does? Because if he doesn’t take it, someone else will? I’m increasingly of the opinion that I’m wired quite differently than many people, and that I am incapable of understanding what drives a large swath of humanity.

“Paula, a first-generation Polish immigrant who manages a coffee chain store in Chicago, saw her $3,000 of online investments as part of a populist uprising like Occupy Wall Street. “I feel like I’ve been fighting with the people for the people. It’s just been [investments], yet seeing everyone come together like this has been so beautiful.””

Would you have felt the same if you only made 5%? Or nothing? Or lost it all? Of course not. It’s only exciting because you’re making a ton of money—for doing literally nothing—but convincing yourself that you’re being paid for being one of the good ones, one of the ones who are fighting oppression by doing literally nothing at all but getting rich by standing still.

Yes, You Should Worry About Inflation by Doug Henwood (Jacobin)

“There are several problems with this “narrowly confined” claim. One is that food and energy are essential items, accounting for about 20% of the average household’s spending, and rather hard to cut back on. Another is that so-called core inflation, which excludes food and energy because their prices can be volatile and may obscure underlying trends, was 6.1% for the year ending in April, a rate unseen since 1982. And yet another is that price indexes put out by the Federal Reserve banks of Cleveland and New York, which strip out extreme price changes of just the sort that the “narrowly confined” partisans are pointing to, are rising as well. Inflation is real.”

“Houses, one of life’s essentials, are being priced out of reach because of a speculative mania — though it should be noted that those who already own housing and are seeing its value rise are a powerful constituency for keeping the game going. Since the beginning of the pandemic, house prices are up 34%, a pace three times the one logged during the heart of the great housing bubble in 2002–6.”

“Zillow’s rent index displays monthly changes on their site, which reflects what people looking for housing face now. It’s up 20% since the pandemic began, most of it over the last year. Although the Zillow index has cooled slightly, work by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank shows that it’s likely to feed into the CPI measures of rent for the next couple years — and real-world costs, as leases expire and tenants are confronted with sharp rent increases.”

“[…] the rest of the speculative menagerie is a massive waste of capital and human attention — and could put the broad financial system at risk of crisis. As John Maynard Keynes put it in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, the best thing ever written on speculative markets:”

“The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is “to beat the gun,” as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow.”

“There was little mention of inflation lowering the real value of debt, which is the reason creditors normally hate it and many progressives welcome it. But most people seem not to be aware of it — with good reason. The real value of debt is a quantity that’s stretched out over years, with much less immediate impact than paying the monthly bills.”

It also lowers the value and buying power of savings.

“In May 2021, 26% said they were finding it somewhat or very difficult to do so. In June 2022, that was up to 39%. Most income classes, from the poorest to those making $100,000, saw increases of around 15 percentage points. Only those with income above $150,000 saw single-digit increases.”

“Despite some inspiring bits of union organizing at Amazon and Starbucks, the share of the private sector labor force belonging to unions is down by nearly three-quarters since 1979, and strikes are down by over 90%. Some sectors, notably restaurants, are seeing strong wage increases as employers desperately seek to lure reluctant workers back on the job,”

Because their wages were so low to begin with.

“The greatest beneficiaries of the trillions of dollars of free Federal Reserve money over the last decade have been the private equity moguls, venture capitalists, and crypto promoters who’ve gotten monstrously richer as the electronic printing presses have been coining fresh money. The real value of the stock market was up 368% between the depths of the financial crisis in 2009 and its December 2021 peak.”

“Since ordinary price inflation looked to be under control, no one cared about asset inflation, the risks of bailouts, or, since 2008, near-0% interest rates. When returns on low-risk assets are close to nothing, and the cost of borrowing to speculate is close to nothing, then people who are politely called “investors” go wild. And if the worst that can happen to one of those investors is missing a bonus, why not?”

“Because the political idiocy in Washington made serious fiscal policy impossible (the COVID-19 relief bills aside, though they were temporary), QE became a substitute. Instead of an infrastructure or jobs program ultimately paid for by taxes, we’ve had a flood of central bank money. The bridges may still be falling down, and we’re facing a summer of electricity brownouts, but QE did a lot to tack 3,200 points onto the S&P 500 since the Lehman Brothers failure in 2008.”

“If American capitalism is so feeble that it can’t stand 3% interest rates, we need to have a serious talk about its condition. Raising interest rates and clawing back some of the free money the Fed provided to the markets over the last decade would calm speculative fevers. If that provokes some financial crises — and it may — then socialize the institutions involved and manage the failure so it doesn’t spread, but don’t subsidize a return to the status quo ante.”

“When explicitly asked about a trade-off between unemployment and inflation — a complicated question, but bracket that concern for now — an overwhelming majority preferred a regime of low inflation and high unemployment to one with high inflation and low unemployment. People said they’d rank keeping inflation down as a greater priority than preventing drug abuse or deterioration in the quality of the schools.”

“Modern Monetary Theory–style money printing looks to be thoroughly discredited. Despite the belief that big budget deficits are good for the working class, the United States consistently has the biggest deficit among the richest nations. All that red ink hardly produces an egalitarian paradise: we have the highest poverty rate and the most unequal distribution of income among all the rich countries.”

“[…] the labor market gets too tight, wages will rise, profits will be squeezed, and capitalists will demand the government induce a recession to revert to the order they find most pleasing.”

“To do that without inflation would require a serious overhaul of the productive structure, as well as public control over investments that are now planned by CEOs.”

Patagonia’s Founder Found the Only Way to Be a Good Billionaire by Jessica Corbett (Scheer Post)

““I don’t respect the stock market at all,” he explained. “Once you’re public, you’ve lost control over the company, and you have to maximize profits for the shareholder, and then you become one of these irresponsible companies.”

“As he put it in the letter: “Instead of ‘going public,’ you could say we’re ‘going purpose.’ Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.””

“It was important to Chouinard’s children “that they were not seen as the financial beneficiaries,” he told the Times. “They really embody this notion that every billionaire is a policy failure.””

Public Policy & Politics

Sleep of the Just by Mr. Fish (Scheer Post)

Sleep of the Just by Mr. Fish

Putin Sees Future With Asia and Claims Western Economic Decline in New Speech by Diego Ramos (Scheer Post)

“Putin even references the recent decision that sees Gazprom, Russia’s state-run energy corporation, “switch[ing] to 50/50 transactions in rubles and yuan with respect to gas payments,” as opposed to US dollars.”

““Europe is about to throw its achievements in building up its manufacturing capability, the quality of life of its people and socioeconomic stability into the sanctions furnace, depleting its potential, as directed by Washington for the sake of the infamous Euro-Atlantic unity. In fact, this amounts to sacrifices in the name of preserving the dominance of the United States in global affairs,” Putin said.”

Russia should not get away with its invasion. But neither should the U.S. have. Europe ignores invasions until Russia does one. Purely ideological. The obvious conclusion is that they are opposed not to invasions, but to Russia.

“I am referring to the Western sanctions frenzy and the open and aggressive attempts to force the Western mode of behaviour on other countries, to extinguish their sovereignty and to bend them to its will. In fact, there is nothing unusual in that: this policy has been pursued by the “collective West” for decades.”

“[…] the Western countries are seeking to preserve yesterday’s world order that benefits them and force everyone to live according to the infamous “rules”, which they concocted themselves. They are also the ones who regularly violate these rules, changing them to suit their agenda depending on how things are going at any given moment.”

“It will come as no surprise if eventually the niches currently occupied by European businesses, both on the continent and on the global market in general, will be taken over by their American patrons who know no boundaries or hesitation when it comes to pursuing their interests and achieving their goals.”

“[…] according to the UN, 135 million people in the world were facing acute food insecurity, their number has soared by 2.5 times to 345 million by now – this is just horrible. Moreover, the poorest states have completely lost access to the most essential foods as developed countries are buying up the entire supply, causing a sharp increase in prices.”

“[…] all the grain exported from Ukraine, almost in its entirety, went to the European Union, not to the developing and poorest countries. Only two ships delivered grain under the UN World Food Programme – the very programme that is supposed to help countries that need help the most – only two ships out of 87 – I emphasise – transported 60,000 tonnes out of 2 million tonnes of food. That’s just 3 percent, and it went to the developing countries.”

Interesting. The only article I could find that even talked about this was Putin says nearly all Ukraine’s grain has gone to the EU. Is he right? by Matthew Holroyd (Euronews), which has different numbers, with 36% going to Europe. That still seems like a lot.

“I would like to stress once again that this situation has been caused by the reckless steps taken by the United States, the UK and the European Union, which are obsessed with illusory political ideas. As for the wellbeing of their own citizens, let alone people outside the so-called golden billion, they have been pushing it to the backburner. This will inevitably lead Western countries into a deadlock, an economic and social crisis, and will have unpredictable consequences for the whole world.”

Hard to disagree with any of that.

“It is noteworthy that despite the attempts of external pressure, the total cargo of Russian seaports has only slightly decreased over the seven months of this year; it has remained at the same level as a year earlier, which is about 482 million tonnes of cargo. Last year there were 483 million, so the figure is practically the same.”

“[…] our focus is on building the eastward infrastructure and developing the North-South international corridor and ports of the Azov-Black Sea basin which we will keep working on. They will open up more opportunities for Russian companies to enter the markets of Iran, India, the Middle East and Africa and, of course, for reciprocal deliveries from these countries.”

“That is why we have established a single Far Eastern airline. It offers almost 390 destinations, some of them subsidised by the state. In the next three years, this airline’s traffic should increase, and the number of destinations will exceed 530. And as we could see after those flights were opened, these destinations are in great demand.”

“Something else I would like to stress – we need to increase the volume of housing construction in the Far East, while also widely applying the most advanced ‘green’ and energy-efficient construction technologies.”

Huge focus on the Far East. He’s at least paying lip service to energy efficiency. I’m absolutely unable to judge how much any of this might happen. If it were Biden, I’d be gut-laughing too hard to type this, so I have to allow for the large possibility that Putin is also just blowing smoke up his people’s asses.

Biden Brings the War on Terror Home by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Biden’s handlers had the otherwise inspiring setting of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall bathed in so much blood-red light, he looked like an opening act for Queensrÿche or Rammstein. Trying to create a setting for judgment and warning, they overshot the staging and made the white-haired ex-Senator look like a vampire sat up from a crypt.”

“Bush lawyers later claimed authority to use “enhanced interrogation” on “ members of the enemy .” One could be put on a Watch List, with consequences ranging from restricted travel to cessation of government benefits to being denied a bank account, if judged to have “known o[r] potential links to terrorism.” The Obama administration followed by sanctifying “targeted killing” even for an American deemed a “continued and imminent threat to U.S. persons or interests.””

“Seventy-four million people voted for Trump in 2020. It’s beyond delusional to think they are all violent extremists. A smart politician would recognize the overwhelming majority are just people who pay taxes, work crap jobs, raise kids, obey the law, and give at most a tiny share of attention to politics. The University of Virginia did a study arguing that as many as 8 million previously voted for Obama, so there’s that. I’d bet more than half would pick a screening of Thor: Love and Thunder over a Trump speech. The only sure way to radicalize the lot is to call them one big terror cell, or have the president go on TV to describe them as an existential threat to national security.”

The People Versus The Unelected by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Hoenig violated an unspoken taboo, reminding readers that the Fed’s work isn’t just a technocratic process, but “also an allocative policy,” i.e. one that helped pick society’s economic winners and losers — the stuff of politics.”

“Hoenig worried the Fed was addicting Wall Street to cheap cash, upsetting the delicate balance of financial power he’d spent a life trying to maintain. “I can’t guarantee the carpenter down the street a margin,” he said. “I really don’t think we should be guaranteeing Wall Street… by guaranteeing them a zero or near zero interest rate environment.””

“Once bubbles begin to inflate, and the prices of farmland or oil wells or internet stocks or residential housing or really anything at all begin to ascend, the slightest downturn in the available credit would send the edifice crumbling.”

“And the winners of an asset bubble have, by definition, the most money and the most clout to keep it going. If you don’t separate them, it’s self-perpetuating. The overwhelming majority of losers don’t matter when the medio report only on the winners.”

“Specifically, the Fed had replaced congress and the White House as the main driver of economic policy, being able to act more quickly and in greater volume in a crisis than the old fiscal authorities. Conservative movements like the Tea Party that focused on “government spending” and Treasury-led bailouts like the TARP program were really looking in the wrong place, as the Fed was executing much huger relief programs essentially in secret.”

“The bailouts were designed to prioritize recapitalizing the same financial sector that had just overinflated history’s hugest bubble, on the theory that this would unfreeze a panicked lending environment and create jobs. However, only half of that plan panned out. Though”

“The bailouts were designed to prioritize recapitalizing the same financial sector that had just overinflated history’s hugest bubble, on the theory that this would unfreeze a panicked lending environment and create jobs. However, only half of that plan panned out.”

The important half, of course, and as usual.

“Fisher said that he had recently spoken with the chief financial officer of Texas Instruments, who explained how the company was managing money in the age of ZIRP. The company had just borrowed $1.5 billion in cheap debt, but it didn’t plan to use the cash to build a factory, invest in research, or hire workers. Instead, the company used the money to buy back shares of its own stock. This made sense because the stocks paid a dividend of 2.5 percent, while the debt only cost between 0.45 percent and 1.6 percent to borrow. It was a finely played maneuver of financial engineering that increased the company’s debt, drove up its stock price, and gave a handsome reward to shareholders. Fisher drove home the point by relating his conversation with the CFO. “He said—and I have his permission to quote—‘I’m not going to use it to create a single job.’”

Because they hand out federal money with no strings attached. No nationalization, no ownership, no restrictions, nothing.

“It should have been obvious that a devastating problem was built into a policy whose chief by-product was asset inflation, namely that it only worked for people with assets: In early 2012, the richest 1 percent of Americans owned about 25 percent of all assets. The bottom half of all Americans owned only 6.5 percent of all assets. When the Fed stoked asset prices, it was helping a vanishingly small group of people at the top.”

“Hoenig was being introduced to the vibe now standard everywhere from op-ed pages to campuses to the White House briefing room, where unanimity is expected and dissent considered dangerous and a betrayal.”

“[…] pumping a staggering $4.6 trillion into the economy in response to the Covid disaster. America’s billionaires roughly doubled their net worth across the two years of extreme asset inflation that ensued, cashing in on yet another period of wild yield-chasing in which insiders reaped huge rewards from speculative investments in everything from corporate takeovers to crypto to pre-IPO fundraising for electric air taxis or health and wellness companies fronted by Sammy Hagar .”

Interview: Christopher Leonard, Author of “The Lords of Easy Money” by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“In The Lords of Easy Money he found a story anyone can understand, that of a man cast out by a corrupt church for the crime of trying to bring the religion to the people, while the unelected Bernankes, Powells, and Yellens of the world sought to keep their work shrouded in Latin.”

“[…] this guy to me represented this political tradition in American life that is dead now, the Eisenhower conservative. The old school conservative who believes in a market, but a market ruled by rules that restrains the worst impulses of capitalism.”

“[…] what he was really talking about was something that traditionally we would’ve thought of as a concern of the left, a populist, anti-elitist message about preventing over-concentration of influence and money. Yet as you say, he was politically a conservative at the time. Was he one of the first people that we thought of that way?”

“[…] it’s this idea that the Fed and what they do, they set policy and it creates winners and losers and it has distributional effects. And as you know, from the story, they are doing quantitative easing, and a 0% interest rate massively benefits the richest of the rich. It is hyper-trickle-down economics, it’s the idea that we will stoke the stock market and the corporate bond markets, asset prices in other words, with the hope that it creates a so-called wealth effect that makes people feel more confident to go out and spend more money.”

“And you could just see that so much with the extraordinary bailouts that they did in 2020, just breathtaking, impossible to describe without sounding hyperbolic. I mean, printing, what was it, 300 years’ worth of money in a few months in the spring of 2020? Juicing the stock market, the Dow gains 40% in a couple months during the summer 2020. And even during this time, you still had people disputing that the Fed was boosting stock prices, but those voices were becoming increasingly detached from reality.”

“[…] there was a good case to be made that, “Oh, this is transitory. This is COVID,” but there was also this reality that was like, “We better pray to God this is transitory,” because we have a $9 trillion balance sheet and 0% interest rates, and if we have to hike rates quickly, it’s going to be carnage. So let’s kind of keep things on an even keel, and hope that this inflation goes away. And unfortunately, for all of us, inflation didn’t go away.”

Unmaking History by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Journalism, and I mean in its mainstream variety, is what the powers that control media publish precisely to keep true accounts of events out of the history books, not in them.”

“These paragraphs are also a kind of enduring document all by themselves. They are like one of those historical paintings on museum walls that tell a large story in a single, intimate scene: In one group portrait, The Post gives us an extraordinarily compressed image of the people who have conducted American foreign policy since the Spanish–American War of 1898—a virtuous people, a righteous, moral people wondering what to do as inexplicable evil elsewhere comes upon them.”

“But it was Eisenberg who at last established, chapter and verse, that it was the Truman administration, not Stalin’s Kremlin, that bore responsibility for the division of Europe and the East–West binary that blighted humanity for four and some decades. As measured by public opinion, we must note, it remains axiomatic even now that it was the Soviets who inflicted Cold War I upon humanity.”

“Everyone knows the old adage: Truth is war’s first casualty. I propose a refinement when the U.S. is in on things, given it has started pretty much every war it has fought since 1945, and I am not sure I need my “pretty much.” Causality is war’s first casualty. America is ever the done-to, never the doer.”

“[…] another rehearsal of the democracy-vs.-autocracy bit wherein the Russian president is cast as a grieving nostalgist obsessed to the point of irrationality with retrieving Russian greatness.”

“The U.S. role in raising tensions in and around Ukraine since it cultivated the coup in Kyiv in 2014 is nowhere mentioned. NATO’s eastward expansion—a matter Moscow has sought repeatedly to negotiate since the fall of the Soviet Union—is dismissed as another of Putin’s unreasonable obsessions. When he raises the question again in late 2021, The Post report dismisses it as “a familiar diatribe.””

“Remember the causality problem and how most of us lost track of this matter during Cold War I. This is how it gets started, with insidious bunkum such as this. And remember, too: The Post ’s six-piece takeout is merely the first such project in the first-draft-of-history line. We are in for a lot more of this, inevitably.”

“By the start of 2021, it was reported, if not widely, that the Armed Forces of Ukraine had dramatically escalated its attacks on the eastern provinces and that it enjoyed American support as it did so. If you are provoking, provoking, provoking your adversary, it does not require a lot of intelligence (in both senses of the term) to predict that your adversary will respond.”

“I read two purposes into The Post ’s inflated account of the Russian military’s war plans. One is what we call threat inflation, placing Russia in the most dangerous light possible—a threat not only to Ukraine but to the West altogether. This is the fear card, in short—perfectly familiar to anyone who endured Cold War I. Two is to make up an imaginary Russian strategy that, when it does not materialize, can be cast as a failure.”

“I have read many accounts of this withdrawal to the effect that the Russian forces’ purpose from the first was merely to tie up Ukraine’s best ground units while the Russians got their campaign in the east going. But to my knowledge these reports have never been confirmed. We do not know everything, but we know there has never been any persuasive evidence that Ukrainian troops beat back the Russians from the northern suburbs.”

“In December 2021, Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister, presented the drafts of two treaties addressing the European security question. One went to Washington and the other to NATO headquarters in Brussels. The treaty format reflected Moscow’s desire to begin talks with the West toward a renovated security architecture—this on the thought that existing arrangements had led to the dangerous disorder evident to everyone save those who insist that “the rules-based international order” is fine as it is.”

“The underlying premise of these documents was that no nation or group of nations can secure itself at the expense of any other nation’s security. This is a cardinal rule in statecraft, as a middling graduate student in international relations would easily understand.”

“In a more recent context, Putin had spent the previous eight years urging a settlement between Kyiv and the two Donbas republics in accordance with the Minsk I and Minsk II Protocols. These were signed in September 2014 and February 2015 and provided for, roughly speaking, a federal political structure that would give the eastern provinces sufficient autonomy to hold the nation together. France and Germany backed the Minsk accords—on paper but not in practice. Kyiv, with the West’s tacit approval, made no effort to implement them.”

“I vividly recall the coverage of these treaties and Washington’s response. It was a wall-to-wall carpet of derision. Moscow’s demands were preposterous, extravagant, unreasonable, irrational.”

“It was handy, as it relieved reporters of the responsibility to reason through the Russian documents on their own.”

“Among the most dangerous features of the American credenda is this ever-and-always claim to innocence. It is our license to aggress across the world, indifferent to the rights and aspirations of others. This enduring claim to innocence, we urgently need to accept, is the most un-innocent thing about us. In publishing the series of pieces I briefly review, The Washington Post proposes that we continue insisting on our innocence, inscribing it once again in history, destructive as it is to ourselves as well as the rest of humanity. In this The Post is as un-innocent, as responsible, as all the people it depicts for its readers as innocent. Our nation will not do well in this new century unless we can think and act honestly and so find our way out of this delusional state. The Post has chosen to stand against this project.”

We Urgently Need to Give Ukraine Peace Talks a Chance by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies (Scheer Post)

“Such early success for a peace initiative was no surprise to conflict resolution specialists. The best chance for a negotiated peace settlement is generally during the first months of a war. Each month that a war rages on offers reduced chances for peace, as each side highlights the atrocities of the other, hostility becomes entrenched and positions harden.”

“Ukrainian and Turkish sources have revealed that the U.K. and U.S. governments played decisive roles in torpedoing those early prospects for peace. During U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s “surprise visit” to Kyiv on April 9th, he reportedly told Prime Minister Zelenskyy that the U.K. was “in it for the long run,” that it would not be party to any agreement between Russia and Ukraine, and that the “collective West” saw a chance to “press” Russia and was determined to make the most of it.”

Let’s Stop Pretending America Is A Functioning Democracy by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation.”

“The slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency, the courts or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only the fiction of democracy remains.”

“The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war.”

“These diseases of despair are rooted in the disconnect between a society’s expectations of a better future and the reality of a system that does not provide a meaningful place for its citizens. Loss of a sustainable income and social stagnation causes more than financial distress.”

“A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of education and adequate health care, and a loss of hope result in crippling forms of humiliation. This humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger and feelings of worthlessness.”

“The old consensus that buttressed New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal Black youth, “welfare queens” and other alleged social parasites.”

“Biden, raising clenched fists, backlit by Stygian red lights and flanked by two U.S. Marines in dress uniforms, announced from his Dantesque stage set that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.””

“Biden’s frontal assault widens the divide. It solidifies a system where voters do not vote for what they want, since neither side delivers anything of substance, but against what they despise.”

“The intelligence agencies that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to strip them of their original meaning to ensure corporate control and excuse corporate crimes, are omnipotent.”

“The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.”

“Our corporate overlords and militarists prefer the decorum of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But they worked closely with Donald Trump and are willing to do so again. What they will not allow are reformers such as Bernie Sanders, who might challenge, however tepidly, their obscene accumulation of wealth and power. This inability to reform, to restore democratic participation and address social inequality, means the inevitable death of the republic. Biden and the Democrats rail against the cultish Republican Party and their threat to democracy, but they too are the problem.”

America This Week, September 5-September 11 by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“Biden Allots Podesta $370b Long-serving Clinton confidant John Podesta, who remains under scrutiny for his role in the controversial Russiagate scandal, was put in charge of a staggering $370 billion in federal clean energy funds under a new law. Podesta overnight essentially becomes the world’s largest Venture Capital fund manager — the gargantuan SoftBank Vision Fund, by comparison, is a $100 billion operation — and because he is a much-reviled figure among Republicans, expect extreme scrutiny of the tax breaks and other credits distributed from this new office.”

“All through 2021, even as inflation was starting to rear its head, the Fed kept buying up to $60 billion in MBS a month, until its portfolio got to approximately $2.8 trillion. The Fed kept its foot on the gas way too long, providing too much stimulus, and now there’s an awful mess to clean up.”

You Can’t Fight MAGA Fascism Without Smashing Biden’s Republic by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“It’s at this moment when you catch your breath and realize that you’ve been terrorized into another pledge drive for America’s other imperialist party. “With just three easy payments of 99.99 you too can save American democracy and advertise that fact to all the other bougie Karens in line at Starbucks with this stylish “I Fought the MAGA Republicans!” tote bag.“ Goddamnit! You fuckers got me again.”

“Fascism isn’t so much of a philosophy as it is an excuse for rich people to use poor people to kill other poor people. The few things that most of these excuses have in common are demonizing minorities in order to justify the militarization of civilian society and consolidating unchecked corporate power within the federal government.”

Why Russia Will Still Win, Despite Ukraine’s Gains by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“These are the forces that have been committed to the current fighting. Russia finds itself in a full-fledged proxy war with NATO, facing a NATO-style military force that is being logistically sustained by NATO, trained by NATO, provided with NATO intelligence, and working in harmony with NATO military planners.

“What this means is that the current Ukrainian counteroffensive should not be viewed as an extension of the phase two battle, but rather the initiation of a new third phase which is not a Ukrainian-Russian conflict, but a NATO-Russian conflict.”

“There will be a fourth phase, and a fifth phase … as many phases as necessary before Ukraine either exhausts its will to fight and die, NATO exhausts its ability to continue supplying the Ukrainian military, or Russia exhausts its willingness to fight an inconclusive conflict in Ukraine. Back in May I called the decision by the U.S. to provide billions of dollars of military assistance to Ukraine “a game changer.””

“A failure of intelligence of this magnitude suggests deficiencies in both Russia’s ability to collect intelligence data, as well as an inability to produce timely and accurate assessments for the Russian leadership. This will require a top-to-bottom review to be adequately addressed. In short, heads will roll — and soon. This war isn’t stopping anytime soon, and Ukraine continues to prepare for future offensive actions.”

“The successful Ukrainian counteroffensive needs to be put into a proper perspective. The casualties Ukraine suffered, and is still suffering, to achieve this victory are unsustainable. Ukraine has exhausted its strategic reserves, and they will have to be reconstituted if Ukraine were to have any aspirations of continuing an advance along these lines. This will take months.

“Russia, meanwhile, has lost nothing more than some indefensible space. Russian casualties were minimal, and equipment losses readily replaced.”

“The bottom line – the Kharkov offensive was as good as it will get for Ukraine, while Russia hasn’t come close to hitting rock bottom. Changes need to be made by Russia to fix the problems identified through the Kharkov defeat. Winning a battle is one thing; winning a war another.

“For Ukraine, the huge losses suffered by their own forces, combined with the limited damage inflicted on Russia means the Kharkov offensive is, at best, a Pyrrhic victory, one that does not change the fundamental reality that Russia is winning, and will win, the conflict in Ukraine.”

Biden Administration Guts Due Process Protections for Students Accused of Sexual Misconduct by Emma Camp (Reason)

“The new rules, which apply to investigations under Title IX, part of a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, rescind rules crafted and implemented by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos during the Trump administration. They mark the return of the “single investigator model,” which empowers a single college administrator to investigate, judge, and sanction alleged misconduct.”

“These judges, like many other critics, viewed Obama’s Title IX rules, which Biden is now copying, as fundamentally unfair. “Whether someone is a ‘victim’ is a conclusion to be reached at the end of a fair process, not an assumption to be made at the beginning,” wrote Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in the 2016 case Doe v. Brandeis University. “If a college student is to be marked for life as a sexual predator, it is reasonable to require that he be provided a fair opportunity to defend himself and an impartial arbiter to make that decision.””

Short Take: Victim, Killer Or Both? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)

“Had Lewis stabbed Brooks while he was engaged in raping her, that would be one thing. But while Brooks was asleep is an entirely different legal matter. At the moment when deadly force was used, Lewis was not being harmed. Yes, she was before. Yes, she likely would be after. But not at the time when she killed Brooks. That’s where the law draws a line.

“The point is that the law doesn’t encourage people to take the law into their own hands. Defending oneself is one thing, but that occurs in the moment of extremis, when force is being used. One can’t preemptively act or retaliate later. If there is harm being perpetrated against someone, the law says go to the police and they will address the crime. The law does not permit someone, once victimized, to subsequently decide that now would be a good time to kill someone who did you wrong.”

“What happened to Lewis was horrific and inexcusable. There is no question about this. But the question is whether Lewis’ decision to kill Brooks was the way to address her nightmare. It’s becoming increasingly acceptable, or at least understandable, but should punishment for horrific crimes be imposed by the state or by Lewis while Brooks slept?”

Extended episode: Katrina vanden Heuvel on Gorbachev’s legacy and the Ukraine proxy war by Useful Idiots (YouTube)

The show showed a clip of a PushBack interview of Stephen Cohen (SoundCloud) by Aaron Maté from September 2019 (the podcast aired it at the end of 2020, when Cohen died). At 1:07:40,

“You have a situation now, which seems not to be widely understood, that the new president of Ukraine, Zelensky, ran as a peace candidate. This is a bit of a stretch, and maybe it doesn’t mean a whole lot to your generation, but he ran a kind of George McGovern campaign. The difference was, that McGovern got wiped out and Zelensky won by, I think, 71, 72%. He won an enormous mandate for peace. That means that he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.

“And there are various formats, right? There’s the so-called Minsk format, which involved the German and the French, there’s bilateral directly with Putin. But, his willingness—and this is what’s important and not well-reported here—[…] to deal directly with Putin, which his predecessor Poroschenko was not, or couldn’t for whatever reason, actually required considerable boldness on Zelensky because there are opponents of this, in Ukraine, and they are armed.

“Some people say they’re fascist, but they’re certainly ultranationalists, and they have said that they’ll remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin. So, now, along comes Trump, right? So Trump makes a wrong-headed phone call [Ed: the one for which he was impeached, BTW.], to Zelensky, about Biden and information. It was the wrong thing to do. There are two ways of looking at that.

“But, the more important thing is and that’s why I’d like to see the full transcript of the—we’ve only been given a partial so far as I know—I want to know if Trump encouraged Zelensky to continue the negotiation with Putin. And here’s why: Zelensky cannot go forward—as I’ve explained, I mean, his life is being threatened literally by quasi-fascist movements in Ukraine—and he can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back. Maybe that won’t be enough but, unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end of the war. So the stakes are enormously high.”

The “war” to which Cohen refers was, at the time, the war that Ukraine was waging on the Donbass (Donetsk and Luhansk). To recall from above, the interview was from September 2019. His analysis is still correct—Ukraine can’t make a move without the approval of the U.S. It has recently been revealed that Britain and the U.S. torpedoed peace negotiations in April, to keep the war going for themselves. It is almost certainly now too late for Zelensky to even attempt to do what his mandate originally was. He is on a different track now—he is playing the role of a hero/president, resolute against an implacable and unknowable enemy.

Railroaders furious after unions reveal that no tentative agreement exists, despite sabotage of strike by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

“Another railroad worker agreed, writing, “I am more pissed off with the union than the carrier right now. It’s one thing for the company, you expect that, but to be stabbed in the back by the f*ckers you pay $140 a month to, well f*ck that.”

““The union sold us out so this wouldn’t make the Democrats look bad before the midterms. There’s no other way to view considering Pierce’s statements before this deal,” another worker commented. “Three to four weeks to even write the damn thing up, then time to vote, then most likely an additional 30 days cooling off period after that puts it firmly after the midterm elections for a future strike.””

“The way forward was outlined at the meeting of the Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee (RWRFC) held on Wednesday evening, before the agreement was announced. The more than 500 workers in attendance adopted a resolution, with 98 percent in favor, declaring:

“1. We will not accept any act by Congress that violates our democratic right to strike and imposes upon us a contract that we do not accept and has not been ratified by the rank and file.

“2. We demand a contract that addresses our needs, including a major pay increase to make up for years of declining wages; cost-of-living adjustments to meet soaring inflation; an end to brutal attendance policies; guaranteed time off and sick days; and an end to the push for one-man crews.

“3. We inform the unions that any attempt to force through contracts that we do not accept and that have not been voted on, or to keep us working without a contract, will be in violation of clear instructions given by the rank and file.”

Journalism & Media

Silencing the Lambs. How Propaganda Works by John Pilger (Mint Press News)

“In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries. The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognized; and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.”

“Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.”

“‘US foreign policy,’ he said, is ‘best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”

“In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this:”

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

“Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nato’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.”

“Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.”

“News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.”

“The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.”

“The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which ‘we’ are moral and benign and ‘they’ are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.”

“Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.”

Science & Nature

The biggest myths of the teenage brain by David Robson (BBC)

“Their risk-taking, rebelliousness, impulsivity and general irritability can be so easily blamed on things like ignorance and immaturity, or their “raging” hormones and increased sex drive.”

Most important is that they need do nothing to constrain their antisocial behavior, right? But what is wrong with this explanation? In the end, their behavior is, in general, not societally acceptable. It may not be their fault, but they are still a problem. When they break glass bottles all over the children’s soccer field near my apartment, do we just quietly clean it up every weekend and wait for them to get better? Like, all on their own? When their brains are finished growing?

““It is not socially acceptable to mock and demonise other sectors of society… But it is, strangely, acceptable to mock and demonise teenagers.””

Bullshit. Fat people. Ugly people. People with bad teeth. Very thin people. Dumb people. The poor. All mostly acceptable to mock. Society doesn’t generally care about that. People who would otherwise defend every creed and color cheerily use the term “white trash” without hesitation.

“On average, they have greater activity in their dopamine signalling – a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and curiosity – compared to both adults and younger children, with bigger spikes when they experience something that is novel or exciting.”

This may explain those euphoric moments I remember having when I cracked a math proof or finally understood something I considered profound, when I was younger. The last strong one was first time over the Grimsel Pass. It may explain those lame book quotes on Reddit.

Art & Literature

Visual Effects for the Indian blockbuster “RRR” (Blender)

“A long-time 3ds Max user, Makuta adopted Blender as primary 3D creation tool during the production of the VFX for RRR. As one major introduction scene had been delivered and signed off by the client, thanks to the Cycles for Max port of the Cycles renderer for 3ds Max, we decided the time was right for the transition around November 2019. Since then we delivered 700 shots for the RRR feature with our work being the prominence in the international trailer.”

Seriously, go to the article to watch the three embedded videos (between 90 and 120 second each). They show just how much of the incredibly intricate, dusty, crowds of thousands was just … rendered. Incredible.

Here’s one of them:

RRR − Ram Charan Police Station Fight | VFX Breakdown | Makuta Visual Effects by Makuta Visual Effects (YouTube)

I’d heard of this movie before. It looks absolutely amazing. If you want to get really excited about it, watch the review below.

RRR − The Biggest Blockbuster You've Never Heard Of by Patrick (H) Willems (YouTube)

Is Culture Dead? w/ Catherine Liu & Eileen Jones + Setbacks in Chile w/ René Rojas by Jacobin Show (YouTube)

There’s a lot of great content here, but I liked the second half very much. Both Eillen Jones and Catherine Liu have a lot of interesting things to say, and Jen Pan runs the session really well.

At 1:20:08, Catherine Liu says,

“I do think that there has been an acceleration of professional-managerial-class liberalism taking over the culture industry and making it an arm of its propaganda—an indoctrination arm—and that means … from Zero Dark Forty to Godzilla vs. Kong to Batman, it’s really, really coordinated. And now to The Rings of Power. It’s really coordinated. It’s a group of people who are professionally trained, who went through grad school—MFA programs, or MBAs—who want to streamline the production and consumption of culture. And, it has an agenda: it’s an anti-left—anti-extremist—pro-U.S.-imperialism, pro-identity-politics-propagandizing […]”

I love Catherine’s phrase “Eye Garbage”, referring to content that you watch “to get through the evening so that you can go to bed and get up in the morning to work again”. It’s low-barrier content. Her evaluation of Rings of Power seems fair. Nothing exciting, some lovely performances, predictable cinematography.

At 1:39:30, she says,

“Right now, you have to be a good person, too [in order to be an artist]. It’s a new form of censorship, I think, that’s really powerful. Because you’re constantly trying to cut people out. You’re constantly trying to exclude people to try to curate the best culture. And you’re a bunch of new-economy philistines, and you’ve read like three books [in] your whole life—one of them being Malcolm Gladwell—and then you’ve decided that you’re just going to nudge people with their cultural content. It’s incredible power—exercise of power and control. There was at least an acknowledgment, in olden days, where you could see the figure, at least, as “out of control”—our of your control. That you could still admire, but someone who[m] you could not control. But now, it’s like, I’ve got to control everyone. […] Everyone’s going to be controlled by me. I am the liberal superego. I have money and money will help me curate the content stream that I want, to uplift the dumb idiots who are consumers.”

Our brave new venture-funded brand culture by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day)

“In the 90s, when young people could afford to drive cars and everyone still worked in offices, it was not uncommon to listen to the radio while commuting in the morning or the evening. And when you would turn on the radio you would hear a few different kinds of programming — DJs talking about the big news stories of the day, typically a mix of brand new songs and old favorites, interviews with celebrities, and call-in shows, where random people from the community would spout off crazy nonsense, compete for prizes, ask for advice, or just get in a fight with the DJ. This content arrived linearly, punctuated by ads, but for the most part, it aired in arbitrary blocks. You’d turn on the radio and never really knew what you might hear, but chances are it was fine, but not great, though occasionally good enough to keep you sitting in your car after you parked. Well, that’s basically the role TikTok is currently filling.”

“[…] it’s not hard to imagine that flicking open TikTok starts to feel just as passive as turning the radio on was 20 years ago. You know you’ll be entertained and you may even share a few of the videos with your friends, likely in a messenger app of some kind. But eventually the app will just become a ubiquitous stream of content that you stare at mindlessly, filling in the dull parts of your day with a pleasant and often weird digital background noise.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Meta 2 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

SMBC − Meta − Politics

“But politics isn’t a per-se bad. It’s a process. Making politics more productive and substantial makes society better. Having people nope out of society whenever they get
uncomfortable doesn’t help with any of the hard work politics does, for things like allocating scarce resources, justice, or equity.”

A Request to Readers by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“I suppose someone has to be thinking about housing policy and gerrymandering and so on, but when such topics exhaust our sense of the life of participatory discursive culture, it means that culture is in deep, deep crisis — and, most tragic of all, the discourse, such as it is, is too droningly loud to permit any of us a moment of calm in which we might hear, and regret, the disappearance of Latin bucolic poetry from our shared universe of things to know about and to value.”

“This naïveté, this scholarly fauvism, has sometimes served me well, in a sort of Forrest Gumpian way, but has also often led to awkward misunderstandings in interaction with more correctly disciplinarised peers; and it has been a notable disadvantage in the new economy of grant-seeking that is driving university research in the twenty-first century and is absolutely suffocating the humanities as we used to know them. Compared to the economic forces driving the STEMification and financialisation of humanistic inquiry, complaints about wokeness and related symptoms of our immiseration sound like the complaints of a trench soldier, downwind of a blast of mustard gas, myopically griping about his head lice.”

“I confessed in an early ‘stack that I pretty much love everything:”

Except Marvel movies.

“My Substack has several purposes, but I would say that its primary and deepest purpose has been, since I started it more than two years ago, to create such a space, and to do so very much against the current of nearly everything I encounter in the ambient world of ideas.”

“I’ve been astounded similarly to see Borat —whom I always considered a rather ingenious satirical invention— degenerate among those who are too young to recall his initial cultural impact, with all its subtleties (as when the fellow at the Texas rodeo asked him if he was a Muslim, and he said, speaking for all of Kazakhstan, “I follow the hawk”), into the guy who said only: “My wife!” It makes one wonder: did, say, Jimmy Durante have some intricate and subtle project of social satire, which in my ignorance I have reduced to something even less than a catch-phrase, the mere animal ejaculation of “ Ha-cha-cha-cha! ”?”

It’s just because we’re missing context that others have, no? As when anyone who dips into some cultural thing with which you’re intimately familiar and then fails to grasp the subtleties. It’s like pidgin English taking over the world.

Technology

Teslas Hackers Have Found Another Unauthorized Access Vulnerability by Steve DaSilva (Jalopnik)

“By reverse-engineering the communications between a Tesla Model Y and its credit card key, they were able to properly execute a range-extending relay attack against the crossover. While this specific use case focuses on Tesla, it’s a proof of concept — NFC handshakes can, and eventually will, be reverse-engineered.”

The Fabric of Civilization by Editors (Jacobin)

“But cleanrooms are for the benefit of the chips — which are extremely sensitive to contamination — not the workers. And while workplace injuries are low, those working in the fabs continue to experience the long-term effects of toxic chemical exposure — chemicals banned in the US more than a quarter-of-a-century ago.”

“Both the Trump and Biden administrations have sought to secure the flow of chips into the United States, courting TSMC to open a fabrication plant in Arizona and investing in other sources of domestic manufacturing. But the opening of the much-anticipated Arizona plant has been delayed by near-certain labor shortages: the US simply doesn’t have enough graduates in chip engineering to staff it.”

“For example, in 2019, amid regional tensions, Japan capped export of three chemicals necessary to semiconductor production to South Korea, impacting $7 billion in semiconductor exports each month. But brief, one-off accidents can be just as devastating: in 2020, a mere one-hour power outage at a Taiwanese memory fab impacted 10% of the global DRAM supply.”

Programming

A byte string library for Rust by Andrew Gallant (Burnt Sushi)

“bstr is a byte string library for Rust and its 1.0 version has just been released! It provides string oriented operations on arbitrary sequences of bytes, but is most useful when those bytes are UTF-8. In other words, it provides a string type that is UTF-8 by convention, where as Rust’s built-in string types are guaranteed to be UTF-8.”

“[…] for general purpose Unix-like tooling on plain text files, what is your expected format? It’s probably something like “valid UTF-8 with a reasonably small number of bytes between newline characters.” (And an honorable mention for UTF-16 on Windows.) But when there are so many files in practice that just aren’t valid UTF-8 but are still mostly plain text, it winds up being important for your general purpose tool to handle them by simply skipping over those invalid UTF-8 bytes. But crucially, when it comes time for your tool to print its output, like a grep, it’s important for it to print exactly what was read. Doing this with string types that are guaranteed to be valid UTF-8 is often difficult and sometimes just impossible.”

“If you’re using a byte string library, how much does it cost to build the string in memory? It costs exactly as much as it takes to load the data from the file and into memory. But how much does it cost if your string types are guaranteed to be valid UTF-8? Well, the relative cost from byte strings is UTF-8 validation, which requires a full scan over the string.

“That’s pretty much it. Byte strings optimistically assume your strings are UTF-8 and deal with invalid UTF-8 by defining some reasonable behavior on all of its APIs for when invalid UTF-8 is encountered.”

One thing that the Rust has going for it is that there are several big-name contributors who write a lot and they write well.

Why all your classes should be sealed by default in C# by Nick Chapsas (YouTube)

“In my opinion, you shouldn’t just stick to internal types, you should also seal public types, unless that public type is specifically made to be inherited from. If it is not? Seal it. You gain performance and your code is better because who you don’t want to inherit that type will be able to do so. You can always open up a type in the future if there is a need for it, but you shouldn’t really do it by default. It should be sealed by default.”

Sealed by default is good, I think. I’ve always been a bit hesitant in framework code because so many classes are useful for users of the framework—sometimes it was hard to predict what consumers of the framework would want to use. As soon as you sealed or internalized a base class, you’d then ten crappy implementations of something like that base class appear in ten different code bases as each of your consumers struggled and wasted time to provide missing functionality—some of which they couldn’t even tell might have been available because they class was internal.

Perhaps a sealed, public class would be good. Then the consumer can complain and you can open it up.

Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project by Andreas Kling (I like computers!)

“Both LibWeb and LibJS are novel engines. I have a personal history with the Qt and WebKit projects, so there’s some inspiration from them throughout, but all the code is new. Not to mention, hundreds of people have worked on the codebase since I started it, all adding their own personal influences, so it’s definitely its own thing.

“The browser and libraries are all written in C++. (While our own memory-safe Jakt language is in heavy development, it’s not yet ready for use in Ladybird.)”

Coalescing DTOs by Mark Seemann (Ploeh Blog)

“The problem with an ad-hoc design like this is that the motivation is unclear. As a reader, you feel that you’re missing the full picture. Perhaps you feel compelled to read the implementation code to gain a better understanding. Perhaps you look for other call sites. Perhaps you search the Git history to find a helpful comment. Perhaps you ask a colleague.

“It slows you down. Worst of all, it may leave you apprehensive of refactoring. If you feel that there’s something you don’t fully understand, you may decide to leave the API alone, instead of improving it.

“It’s one of the many ways that code slowly rots.

“What’s missing here is a proper abstraction.”

“Sometimes a good API design can elude you for a long time. When that happens, I move on with the best solution I can think of in the moment. As it often happens, though, ad-hoc abstractions leave me unsatisfied, so I’m always happy to improve such code later, if possible.”

How the SQLite Virtual Machine Works by Ben Johnson (Fly.io)

“The query execution side of SQLite follows this simple parse-optimize-execute plan on every query that comes into the database. We can use this knowledge to improve our application performance. By using bind parameters in SQL statements (aka those ? placeholders), we can prepare a statement once and skip the parse & optimize phases every time we reuse it.”

“SQLite uses a virtual machine approach to its query execution but that’s not the only approach available. Postgres, for example, uses a node-based execution plan which is structured quite differently.”

Video Games

Fascinating discussion about highly eccentric speedruns.

If only Siegfried Kircheis were here by prokopetz

“The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess low% route where a one-frame synchronisation error in Link’s idle animation allows an additional eight items to be skipped compared to the any% route by spending 17 hours standing motionless while staring at a rupee.

“The Paper Mario unrestricted any% route where a seemingly trivial memory management oversight in the Nintendo 64 hardware permits a route that saves 75 minutes over the normal any% route, dropping the overall time from 101 minutes to 26, but requires you to spend the first nine of those 26 minutes playing Ocarina of Time.”

“Or, to TL;DR the TL;DR: you use a glitch in Ocarina of Time to deposit a logic bomb made of fairy dust on the N64 Expansion Pak, then boot up Paper Mario and do stupid tricks with the menus to ricochet the execution pointer off that payload and start executing your save file’s name as code, thereby enabling arbitrary code execution.”

Followed by this glorious comment:

“I used to really wonder how bread was ever invented. The process of making bread always seemed like so many weird steps that are each meaningless to try without the final result already in view: why would people even try to grow wheat, then grind it, then make dough, then put it into the oven unless they already knew what would happen from the start, especially when there were other crops they could grow instead? But now that I have seen this video (and others on the speedrunning community at large) I am not puzzled by this at all. The speedrunning community is living proof that humans will literally just keep trying the most random shit, at tremendous cost of time and energy, just to see what happens, and then record the results with hair-splitting precision, and then build off of each others findings with no conceivable reward in sight. And to me, that’s actually kind of inspiring.”

Also I can’t get over how kind of wonderful it is that Tumblr manages to stubbornly look like Web 1.0 and remain so weird. Never change, Tumblr.

I mean, “If only Siegfried Kircheis were here”.

What the hell even is that?

I can’t even tell if that’s the name of the page or the name of the Tumblr … or if there’s even a difference.