Links and Notes for September 23rd, 2022

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Programming
• Video Games

Economy & Finance

Bitcoin Is Not a Store-of-Value. by 0xStacker (SubStack)

“If the network is valued at $568B, but costs $7.125B/year or more to secure, that’s a pretty big leak for something that is supposed to preserve value.”

“So it looks like our denominator is actually closer to 0.37 * $568B = $210B 7.125 / 210 = 3.4% Interesting. So not only does this energy leak in the BTC system have a negative impact on price, it’s actually the cost of diluting the circulating supply.”

“That’s essentially the energy cost of running the Bitcoin network. Who pays for that cost? Not the miners. They are profitable. They pass it onto the Bitcoin holders. Bitcoin holders pay for it in the decreased value of Bitcoin caused by this energy expense.”

“For anyone wondering, based on these estimations our BTC equilibrium price (break even point for miners) would be roughly $22k.”

“Even if these numbers were somehow realistic, can you imagine securing a $62 quintillion market cap on only $7.15B/year of hashrate?”

No-one will be mining even before the next halving, so it’s moot.

“It’s currently costing $78 in energy overhead to secure a single Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin was originally designed to be peer-to-peer cash, then when everyone realized it doesn’t scale, the store-of-value narrative emerged. But we just proved the store-of-value narrative breaks down because of the $7.125B/year leak and the fact that mining is unsustainable long-term unless it is subsidized by transaction fees, which will not exist because transacting on Bitcoin is slow and expensive. It’s a vicious cycle.”

“The same Bitcoin maximalists who scream “not your keys, not your crypto” are the same maximalists that are happy to tout the lightning network as Bitcoin’s scaling solution. Make it make sense.”

“It would only take a little over $3.5625B (51% attack) in annualized energy costs to gain consensus of a $7.3 trillion network. Doesn’t seem so secure after all. Especially after most of the hashrate has centralized over time to cold geographical areas with the lowest energy costs.”

“Bitcoin’s energy requirements cap its maximum potential demand, or addressable market, at a much lower level than non-PoW protocols. You can choose to personally agree or disagree with the stance that many environmentally conscious investors have taken against Bitcoin, but you cannot deny the fact that they exist and have taken a stance.”

“[…] the most common (and nonsensical) arguments from the proof-of-work crowd. They believe that proof-of-stake makes the rich get richer, when in fact this is actually the case for proof-of-work”

Both systems do, POS more obviously by design.

“Bitcoin is not a bad store-of-value because it cannot procure >$7B in new demand to overcome $7B per year in costs. It’s that this leak exists in a market where competitors do not suffer from the same problem that make Bitcoin egregiously vulnerable to competition. That is what makes Bitcoin a bad store-of-value. It is the emergence of tokens with stronger utility, that ALSO have stronger store-of-value mechanics combined with Bitcoin’s inability to upgrade that will ultimately be the downfall of Bitcoin.”

The Financial Industry is a Lot Bigger than a Giant Vampire Squid by Pete Dolack (CounterPunch)

“There is no rational economic reason for a financial industry — and “bloated” would be woefully inadequate to describe it — even a fraction of this size. Most of the action on stock exchanges is simply speculation. Greed is certainly a part of the picture, but by no means the entire picture. Because there are insufficient opportunities for investment, more money is diverted into speculation. As ever bigger piles of money are diverted into speculation, the size of the financial industry and the percentage of corporate profits claimed by the financial industry steadily grows.”

“Too much money comes to chase too few assets, rapidly bidding up prices until there is no possible revenue stream that can sustain the price of assets bought at inflated levels.”

“By February 2022, the amount of money created by the central banks of five of the world’s biggest economies for the purpose of artificially propping up financial markets since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic totaled US$9.94 trillion (€8.76 trillion). That is on top of the US$9.36 trillion (€8.3 trillion at the early 2020 exchange rate) that was spent on propping up financial markets in the years following the 2008 global economic collapse.”

Public Policy & Politics

What Do Americans Care About? Not a Cold War With Russia and China by Katrina Vanden Heuvel (CounterPunch)

“Congress is about to add tens of billions of dollars to the military budget. Unrepentant hawks scorn this as inadequate , urging a 50 percent increase, or an additional $400 billion or more a year. Aid to Ukraine totals more than $40 billion this year , and counting. A new buildup is underway in the Pacific .”

“Beebe argues that over the past three decades, “yawning gaps” have emerged not only between “America’s ambitions in the world and its capacity for achieving those goals,” but also between a “Washington foreign policy elite too focused on promoting U.S. primacy” and “ordinary Americans yearning for greater stability and prosperity at home.””

US Lawmakers Say Student Loan Forgiveness Will Hurt Military Recruiting by Caitlin Johnstone (SubStack)

“As you know, some of the most successful recruiting incentives for the military are the GI Bill and student loan forgiveness programs. The idea that the military will pay for schooling during or after completion of a service obligation is a driving factor in many individuals’ decision to join one of the services.”

“By forgiving such a wide swath of loans for borrowers, you are removing any leverage the Department of Defense maintained as one of the fastest and easiest ways to pay for higher education. We recognize the loan forgiveness programs have issues of their own, but this remains a top recruiting incentive.”

“One of the reasons the U.S. government doesn’t offer the same kinds of social support systems that people have in all other wealthy nations is because otherwise there’d be no economic pressure on young Americans to sign up for service in the U.S. war machine.”

“It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the U.S. empire would collapse without the economic pressures which coerce teens to sign up to kill and be killed over things like oil reserves and Raytheon profit margins.”

“In the wealthiest nation in the world, economic justice is actively suppressed in part to ensure that young Americans will feel financially squeezed into killing foreigners who are far more impoverished than they are. They are keeping people poor so that they will commit mass murder.”

“But such is the nature of the capitalist empire. You’re either a useful gear-turner of the machine or you are liquidated and turned into fuel for its engine.”

“If you’re not a good gear-turner you can be sent to become a prison slave or incarcerated in a private for-profit prison. There’s a use for everyone in the empire.”

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad? by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

“[…] the Central Valley is terrible. It’s not just the temperatures, which can reach 110°F (43°C) in the summer. Or the air pollution, which by all accounts is at crisis level. Or the smell, which I assume is fertilizer or cattle-related. It’s the cities and people and the whole situation. A short drive through is enough to notice poverty, decay, and homeless camps worse even than the rest of California. But I didn’t realize how bad it was until reading this piece on the San Joaquin River . It claims that if the Central Valley were its own state, it would be the poorest in America, even worse than Mississippi.”

“According to Carolina Demography : There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country.”

“California has a high minimum wage and lots of progressive regulations, which are maybe not a great match for a desperately poor area whose entire economy is based on devastating the environment in various ways. This is actually a pretty recent change; California was a red state in presidential elections until 1992.”

America’s Open Wound by Edward Snowden (SubStack)

“Do you believe that the CIA today — a CIA free from all consequence and accountability — is uninvolved in similar activities? Can you find no presence of their fingerprints in the events of the world, as described in the headlines, that provide cause for concern? Yet it is those who question the wisdom of placing a paramilitary organization beyond the reach of our courts that are dismissed as “naive.””

What Happened to America’s Civil Libertarians? by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“As noted in the article, the DOJ is clearly no longer terribly interested in the courtroom, which is why the percentage of cases ending in trial keeps dropping (below 2% now). Once-skilled prosecutors find the unpredictability of judges and juries irritating, so they’ve spent decades pouring energy into new techniques for bullying people into pleas.”

“[…] the Justice Department and its related law enforcement partners have become a de facto primary national media operation. They now not only involve themselves in deciding what stories may or may not be circulated — it still boggles the mind that would-be liberals don’t see the peril in letting the FBI tell Facebook or Twitter when to throttle down distribution of any news stories, much less true ones — but fill papers like the New York Times and Washington Post with sensational headlines by having bottomless pools of “people familiar with the matter” whisper pitches to gullible journalists. They do the same with CNN and MSNBC (and still, quite often, Fox News).”

“When Ed Snowden exposed an extralegal surveillance program, and intelligence chiefs lied to Congress about it, the Justice Department’s response was to give the chiefs a walk and indict the whistleblower. Civil libertarians were freaked out by all this as late as 2015. Many tried to mobilize. Then Trump got elected, and they all went quiet.”

“We were told after 9/11 that our political problems in the Middle East were really tactical issues, and that if we just let the right people take the gloves off for a few years, our terror problem would go away. Instead we multiplied our enemies a hundredfold, and won for our trouble the honor of having Swiss-cheesed a Constitution some of us were proud of once.”

“As former CIA chief Michael Hayden said , “We kill people based on metadata.” Of course, this same Hayden recently called “today’s Republicans” the most dangerous people on earth, which makes one wonder how he and his CIA pals would like to see “metadata” used at home. We already know local police employ algorithmic profiling, often described in media via the euphemism, “ Predictive policing .” What are the chances the Justice Department is not already doing the same, on a much more sophisticated level?”

“This dystopia is coming, Trump or no Trump, but it’s coming faster because people who otherwise might be saying something keep being suckered by Current Thing melodramas and the allure of rich partisan donors, and can’t see even ten minutes into the future. Twenty years ago, they were all able to take the longer view. It can’t just be the money. What happened to all of these people?”

Atrocity Porn by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The absence of evidence supporting Ukrainian accounts of Russia’s responsibility for these events: This is also getting monotonous, So are vigorous assertions that there must be and will be full and impartial investigations into these matters, except that there is never any effort to conduct such investigations. The investigations of Ukrainians are treated as full and impartial.”

“But we think we know the Russians have once again behaved cruelly and viciously. And this is what we are supposed to think we know as we go about our days.”

“An Associated Press video shot in Izyum during the Ukrainian authorities’ guided tour last week reports there is a single mass grave containing the bodies of 17 Ukrainian soldiers, not civilians and not hundreds or a thousand. “It was surrounded by hundreds of individual graves,” The AP notes in a superimposed caption.”

Strike, Strike, Strike by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“This looming battle is crucial. If we begin to chip away at corporate power through strikes, most of which will probably be wildcat strikes that defy union leadership and anti-union laws, we can begin to regain agency over our lives.”

“Widespread strikes, a necessity if we are to prevail, will be declared illegal, no matter which party is in the White House. Those who lead strikes will be targeted for arrest, and corporations will attempt to replace workers with scabs. It will be a very, very ugly fight. But it is our only hope.”

“In 1928, the top 10 percent held 23.9 percent of the nation’s wealth, a percentage that steadily declined until 1973. By the early 1970s the oligarch’s assault of workers expanded. Wages stagnated. Income inequality grew to monstrous proportions. Tax rates for corporations and the rich were slashed. Today, the top 10 percent of the richest people in the United States own almost 70 percent of the country’s total wealth. The top 1 percent control 31 percent of the wealth. The bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population hold 2 percent of all U.S. wealth.”

“About 70,000 people in Prague took to the streets on September 4 to protest rising energy prices and call for a withdrawal from the EU and NATO. Industries in Germany, one of the world’s top three exporters, are crippled, paying as much for electricity and natural gas in a single month, post-Russian-invasion, as they did for all last year. Protesters from across the political spectrum in Germany have called for regular Monday demonstrations against the rising cost of living.”

“At what point does a beleaguered population living near or below the poverty line rise in protest? This, if history is any guide, is unknown. But that the tinder is there is now undeniable, even to the ruling class.”

“Our oligarchs are as vicious and tight-fisted as those of the past. They will fight with everything at their disposal to crush the aspirations of workers.”

“All resistance must recognize that the corporate coup d’état is complete. It is a waste of energy to attempt to reform or appeal to systems of power. We must organize and strike. The oligarchs have no intention of willingly sharing power or wealth. They will revert to the ruthless and murderous tactics of their capitalist forebears. We must revert to the militancy of our own.”

I’ve watched for years as Chris Hedges slowly came around to at least a partial militancy, if not support of violence. It took him a while but he finally got here.

Zelensky and NATO plan to transform post-war Ukraine into ‘a big Israel’ by Alexander Rubenstein (The Gray Zone)

““We will not be surprised that we will have representatives of the Armed Forces or the National Guard in all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas — there will be people with weapons,” Ukraine’s president said, predicting a bleak existence for his citizens. “I am sure that our security issue will be number one in the next ten years.””

“His game plan portrays Israel’s advancements in security to as an almost mythical achievement owing purely to the feisty, innovative spirit of its citizens, overlooking the single greatest material factor in its success: unprecedented levels of foreign military assistance, particularly from the United States. Indeed, without US taxpayers virtually subsidizing its military through yearly aid packages amounting to untold billions of dollars, it is difficult to see how a country the size of New Jersey would have attained the status of the world’s leading surveillance technology hub.”

This is exactly what Ukraine hopes for: to be a well-funded client state of the U.S. In Russia’s orbit, they achieved nothing but to be the absolute-poorest country in continental Europe. As a hyper-militarized client of the U.S., then hope to suckle on Uncle Sam’s cornucopia forever, just as Israel does. They do not consider the possibility that the lights are going out on the American Empire.

The Justice Department Was Dangerous Before Trump. It’s Out of Control Now by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“All of the above innovations were characteristic of an agency that was improving all the time at bullying defendants into pleas but getting worse and worse at proving cases at trial. This was and is borne out in the numerical decline of trials. After World War II, 20 percent of criminal cases went to court. Today the number is under 2%.”

“Facciola was persuasive, but overturned by a judge, Richard Roberts, who said the government’s take-everything, construct-probable-cause-later method was okay so long as there was “sufficient chance of finding some needles in the computer haystack.” This was the kind of judicial advice the feds liked: seize now, worry later.”

“Asked if such tactics could be interpreted as a message, that any attorney who wants to stay in business should think twice about representing someone the government is serious about pursuing, Flowers said the intimidation factor goes further than that. “On the one hand, it’s a strategy move. They get to kick Josh off the case,” he said. “But the next step, or a corollary to that thought, is: for many criminal defense attorneys, it causes them to question whether they want to be in this profession.””

“Flowers, himself a former prosecutor of corrupt police officers, added: “Who’s going to raise their hand against the most powerful government in the history of humankind, if doing so means that you might be searched, have armed agents raid your offices, and then be wrongly accused?””

“The state already conducts its own disclosure assessments, its own privilege assessments, and even sets its own bar for approving “lethal action.” These may not be judicial processes, but they are “processes,” which this new version of the DOJ believes genuinely satisfies constitutional obligations.”

Washington’s nuclear brinkmanship threatens catastrophe by Andre Damon & Joseph Kishore (WSWS)

“The universal proclamation from the American and European powers is that no retreat is possible. Putin’s “references to nuclear weapons do not shake our determination, resolve and unity to stand by Ukraine,” said EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell. German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht added that Putin’s “reaction to Ukraine’s successes only encourages us to continue supporting Ukraine.” Putin’s “rhetoric on nuclear weapons,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said, “leaves us cold.””

“On Wednesday, the Washington Post encouraged the White House to continue to escalate the war over Ukraine, which both Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made clear they would do in speeches before the United Nations this week.

““Putin is getting desperate,” wrote the Post editorial board. “Ukraine and the West must keep the pressure on.” Citing Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons, the Post concluded, “The only thing worse than failing to prepare for Mr. Putin to carry out his threats would be to be cowed by them.””

“prepare for […] them”? How do you propose to do that? Everyone loses in a nuclear exchange, you fucking morons.

Why Thomas Paine's Common Sense Is Important: Chris Hedges & Cornel West (2014) (YouTube)

The title names only Chris Hedges and Cornel West, but Richard Wolff also has a lot to say. This is a fascinating discussion among the three intellectual titans, with good moderation and interesting questions.

At 01:13:30, Cornell West says,

“There’s either a way out or there’s not. Now, climate change is, for me, a very serious issue, but I don’t think it’s going to be the catalytic issue. I think it’s either going to be revolutionary transformation that allows us to get some control over the banks and corporations so we can treat nature as a “thou,” rather than an “it,” but, when I hear a lot of discourse on climate change, I hear people thinking ‘Oh my God, my life is going to be like a wasteland.’ Well, you know, for poor people, it’s a wasteland every day. Every day. Every year. Year after year. How do we make the connection between the climate-change agents, on the one hand, but also those who are wrestling with these new forms of slavery in the neo-liberal capitalist regimes of the world?”

At 01:16:00, Richard Wolff says,

“We depend, as human beings, on the enterprises in our society, that produce the goods and services without which life cannot continue—our food, our clothes, our shelter, our transportation, and everything else—we permit the institutions that we depend on, the productive institutions, to be organized in a fundamentally undemocratic way, that leave all the decisions—those that affect the environment, those that affect the distribution of wealth, those that affect everyday life—in the hands of a tiny number of people that sit atop the pyramid of these institutions, what we call “corporations”. If we don’t want the set of outcomes [that] we call the ‘consequences of capitalism’, then we have to fundamentally alter the organization of production. If we want the production of goods and services—the core economic base of our lives—to serve all of us? Then we have to be in charge of them. And it can’t be a subset of us that arrogates that position to itself.”

At 1:20:00, Chris Hedges says,

“Suddenly you have the sons and daughters, white, who endure police oppression, who can’t get a job, or at least a job where they can sustain themselves, who are enduring what poor people, marginalized people of color, have been enduring for decades. And, at that moment, the state is in serious, serious trouble. Because an alliance between an alienated, white, essentially middle-class, or formerly middle-class—our middle class is disappearing, of course—those people of color, especially low-wage, working-poor, is one, that I think—once it’s galvanized—can begin to create—and that’s why the fight for the minimum wage is absolutely crucial. Debt peonage is a form of political control, it’s put on there on purpose, ask any African-American, it’s how sharecroppers were kept in slavery long after slavery was officially abolished. And what we have done to college students in this country is absolutely criminal. I mean, my son is in France. I said, ‘if you told French college students that they’d have to pay $50,000 per year to go to college, they’d shut the damned country down,‘ which is precisely what you should be doing here.

“I will just close by saying: something’s coming. It’s always the ruling elites that determine the configurations of rebellion. They are unable to respond rationally to the mortgage-foreclosure crisis, to the job crisis, to climate change. They know no internal limits. They will exploit to exhaustion or collapse and there will be blowback.”

For the many, not the few

I so much appreciate the sentiment of the slogan, but that is exactly the problem with the left: this looks so bad. It looks like a bad British game show. Was it? I honestly can’t tell if Jeremy Corbin and this lady were paired up on a Sunday evening game show or whether this is a campaign event for the New Labour Party. Look at the kerning on those signs! Look at the line-spacing! It’s atrocious. Is the word “NOT” bigger than the others? How many font sizes did they get in there? Just awful. 🤦

Journalism & Media

The Washington Post Dabbles in Orwell by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“There was no reference to Clapper being inveigled in a perjury controversy for denying that fact, under oath. Asked on March 12, 2013 by Senator Ron Wyden, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” A year later, we were still in a world where Politifact could rate an intelligence chief’s words “false.” That seems a lifetime ago, with Snowden in permanent exile and Clapper a paid TV analyst.”

“As my friend Glenn Greenwald pointed out at 1:51 p.m. yesterday, this was quite a turnaround for the Post, which back in 2014 congratulated itself for sharing in a Pulitzer Prize (which Glenn also received) for publishing Snowden’s disclosures […]”

“At the time, it was already shocking that the government collected the personal data of Americans without cause. How they did it was even worse: direct extraction, without permission or notice, from companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.”

Missing in this whole sordid affair is the fact that all other global citizens were also recorded constantly, but the U.S. government. Nothing protected them, not their own governments. There is no reason to believe it ever stopped.

“Enough time has passed since Snowden’s story first broke that papers like the Post can begin re-wiring the brains of a new generation that either doesn’t remember or doesn’t know about the secret surveillance program, which the government claims was “shuttered.” (Such claims should be held at arm’s length, in the same way the Post writes that Snowden “considers himself a whistleblower”).”

Science & Nature

We Need To Talk About The Carbon Footprints Of The Rich by Genevieve Guenther (Noēma)

“Only governmental institutions have the capacity to meet the systemic challenges of decarbonization. Even if every individual person on the planet reduced their discretionary carbon footprint to zero, the electrical, industrial and agricultural systems of our economies would continue to emit greenhouse gases and make global heating worse.”

“For precisely that reason, some of the clearest voices in the climate movement have devalued the concept of the climate footprint almost entirely, recommending instead that everyone should embrace and even celebrate the “climate hypocrisy” of their consumption in order to invite more people into the climate movement without any price of admission — without any need for impossible moral purity or even sacrifice. They would argue, for instance, that flying multiple times per year to give talks on the climate crisis is offset by the political effects of those talks themselves — their putative power to inspire other people to join the climate movement, pass climate policy or even reduce their own carbon footprints.”

I get that we shouldn’t talk only of personal carbon footprints, but this pendulum swing 180º in the other direction is absolute bullshit. We shouldn’t hammer people who can’t help it for their carbon footprints, but it is absolutely not helping for wealthy elites to go around burning a huge personal carbon budget while telling everyone else that they’re all the problem. Poor people can’t tell the difference between a wealthy speaker and the true ultra-rich. I completely excuse them for not seeing the nuance.

“Individuals are situated in their class; their identities are inflected by their privilege. “Driving” signifies something very different for the American worker at a big-box store who is forced to commute in her car to the mall […]”

“in these past 30 years, the emissions of the poorest 50% of people have grown hardly at all: They represented a little under 7% of global emissions in 1990, and they remain a little over 7% of global emissions today. By contrast, the richest 10% of people are responsible for 52% of cumulative global emissions — and the 1% for a full 15%.”

I honestly wonder if this is personal consumption or the CO2 caused by resources that they ostensibly own or have under their control. It’s not exactly honest to absolve everyone’s CO2 budgets just because they’re consuming the products rather than producing them. If the top 100 companies produce 70% of the CO2, do we expect that the solution is to just get them to stop entirely? Civilization as we know it would cease. Even the poor in advanced countries benefit enormously vis á vis their impoverished peers in truly poor countries. To whom should these CO2 expenditures accrue? It seems kind of easy to just put it all on the producers when the consumers would literally die were everything to cease.

“Declining rainfall due to climate change between 1960 and 2000 alone caused a GDP gap between 15-40% in affected countries, compared to the rest of the world. The climate movement must call for the end of the fossil fuel system that produces and justifies the wealth of the rich while making the Global South uninhabitable.”

What does the “end of the fossil-fuel system” mean? Just 100% gone? That’s ludicrous. We’d be back in the middle ages. How do you produce a solar panel without fossil fuels? Rainbows and unicorns? How do you drive digging equipment that gets the resources required to build solar panels? How do you smelt ore? With sunshine and batteries? There is no near-term replacement for any of this right now. Fossil fuels are remarkably portable batteries compared to other solutions. For now.

“The idea that even one metric ton of that budget should be used for yachts, private jets, new wardrobes every three months (fashion brands usually produce four “collections” a year) or even unnecessary commercial flights relies on the dehumanization of the people — generally people of color — who live in the places where the planet is unravelling first.”

“Oxfam has defined the world’s 1% as the 60 million people earning over $109,000 a year. They defined the 10% as the 770 million people earning over $38,000. Yet even those who are affluent in a global sense might not have the extra cash to replace their gas furnace with a heat pump, put solar panels on their roof or replace their car with an EV. Nor might they have the choice to buy clean power from their utilities.”

Not to mention that all of these acts of consumption use energy and require products created by fossil fuels.

“As Bloomberg News recently reported, the personal emissions of the top 0.001% — those with at least $129.2 million in wealth — are so large that these people’s individual consumption decisions “can have the same impact as nationwide policy interventions.” And the super-rich are not reducing their individual carbon footprints voluntarily. On the contrary. In 2021, sales of superyachts, by far the most polluting luxury asset, surged by 77%.”

By all means, let’s eat the rich, especially if it will actually help materially, rather than just psychologically.

“[…] it requires a revolution in values, too. We’ll know that we’re on our way when Instagram posts about jet-setting vacations inspire disgust rather than excitement and aspiration.

“To seed that revolution, you can talk about the personal carbon footprints of the super-rich and the people who emulate them. You can call for climate justice. And you can communicate your commitment to these principles by reducing your own discretionary consumption as much as you can.”

“We have to make it normal not just to use zero-carbon forms of energy, but also to pursue our ambitions and enjoy our pleasures without making global heating worse. The material possibility for that life will be produced only by policy, but its cultural and imaginative possibility will be created only by behavior.”

Art & Literature

Bright Wall/Dark Room September 2022: Stupid Man Suit: On Donnie Darko by Lindsey Romain (Roger Ebert)

“Donnie is the perfect vessel for our generational malaise—we whose youths were either circumvented by or blanketed wholly in terrorism and gun idolation and climate crisis. The inevitability of suffering is no longer ignorable, but a daily confrontation, our phones portals to horror and hilarity, demarcated only by finger swipes and clothing ads. Donnie, like us, goes through the motions of life while a great, ominous clock ticks in the background.”

“The politics of the ‘80s are recurrent, too—the film is set just before the first Bush administration, came out during the second, and falls in line with our current landscape: a time of book banning and disinformation and division from self and neighbor.”

“And isn’t that Donnie Darko , too? Removed from the impossible tangle of time travel, it is really just a mood . Aesthetics more than plot. Tears for Fears and Sparkle Motion and bunny suits and trampolines and Cherita in her earmuffs. Fragments that float to the top like chum on seawater. Annihilating the agreeable as an act of creation.”

“I feel no real desire to crack the impossible code. I prefer that ignorant submission to intangibility. It’s how I wake up every day and do my silly little tasks, knowing all the while that the world is burning beyond repair and nothing really matters.”

Programming

Introducing LiteFS by Ben Johnson (Fly.io)

“LiteFS works by interposing a very thin virtual filesystem between your app and your on-disk database file. It’s not a file system like ext4, but rather a pass-through. Think of it as a file system proxy. What that proxy does is track SQLite databases to spot transactions and then LiteFS copies out those transactions to be shipped to replicas.”

“To improve availability, it uses leases to determine the primary node in your cluster. By default, it uses Hashicorp’s Consul . With Consul, any node marked as a candidate can become the primary node by obtaining a time-based lease and is the sole node that can write to the database during that time. This fits well in SQLite’s single-writer paradigm. When you deploy your application and need to shut down the primary, that node can release its lease and the “primary” status will instantly move to another node.”

“We think LiteFS has a good shot at offering the best of both n-tier database designs like Postgres and in-core databases like SQLite. In a LiteFS deployment, the parts of your database that really want to be networked are networked, but heavy lifting of the data itself isn’t.”

Video Games

WoW: Lich King player hits level 80 just 9 hours after “Classic” server launch by Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)

“Naowh combined this exploit with another that makes use of four dead level-one characters in his group. Since these low-level players can’t receive experience from the high-level mob, all the group experience from the fight goes to Naowh. Together, these exploits let Naowh gain experience points at an astounding rate of 1.8 million XP per hour, letting him make the usually grueling run from level 71 to 80 in just under nine hours.”