Links and Notes for December 2nd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Notstand in Kinderkliniken – mit hustenden Kindern lässt sich kein Geld verdienen by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“1995 gab es in deutschen Krankenhäusern 416 Fachabteilungen für Kinderheilkunde. 2020 waren es nur noch 334. Während 1995 25.939 Betten für Kinder gemeldet wurden, waren es 2020 nur noch 17.959 – ein Drittel weniger. Gleichzeitig nahmen die Fallzahlen nicht etwa ab, sondern zu. Und selbst diese tristen Zahlen bilden die deprimierende Realität nur im Ansatz ab.”

“Wie kam das Ministerium von Jens Spahn auf diese Fehleinschätzung? Ganz einfach. Man betrachtete nicht etwa die Auslastung zu Spitzenzeiten, sondern den durchschnittlichen Nutzungsgrad der Betten – und hier betrachtete man nicht etwa die wirklich zur Verfügung stehenden Betten, sondern die gemeldeten Betten, die jedoch eine sehr theoretische Größe sind.”

“Für Kliniken ist es demnach wirtschaftlich nicht sinnvoll, die nötigen Kapazitäten vorzuhalten, um zur Erkältungszeit die zu erwartbaren Atemwegserkrankungen der Kinder zu behandeln. Der Notstand ist also, wenn auch nicht gewollt, so zumindest kühl einkalkuliert. Es ist nicht das Virus, sondern der Neoliberalismus, der tötet. Und so bitter es klingen mag – eine systemimmanente Lösung für dieses Problem gibt es nicht. Renditeorientierte Krankenhäuser und Notfallkapazitäten für erkältete Kinder passen nun einmal nicht zusammen.”

“Ohne eine Verbesserung der Personalsituation kann die Zahl der betreibbaren Betten nicht gesteigert werden. Ohne eine bessere Bezahlung und vor allem eine Abschaffung der Verdichtung der Pflegearbeit, die ihrerseits zu physischen und psychischen Schäden beim Personal führt, wird man jedoch die Personalsituation nicht verbessern können.”

“So empfahl er vor wenigen Tagen doch allen Ernstes, das unsere Kinder doch einfach Masken tragen sollten. Klar, wenn wir unsere Kinder dauerhaft isolieren und durch Hygienemaßnahmen vor Viren und Bakterien „schützen“, kann das renditeorientierte Gesundheitssystem seinen Aktionären auch künftig fette Dividenden ausschütten. Das werden die Kleinen sicher verstehen, wenn man es ihnen einfühlsam erklärt.”

Ist ja nicht vollkommen verkehrt. Dadurch werden die kleinen Monster gar nicht erst mal krank. Andererseits, wird die Sozialisierung durch dauerhafte Maskentragen durchaus schlechter.

Economy & Finance

Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred by China Miéville (Jacobin)

“To take the liberal approach and see Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi and his aftermaths, violent and intricate “conspiracism,” the rise of the alt right, the growing volubility of racism and fascism, as deviations, is exoneration of the system of which they are expressions.”

“Capitalism cannot exist without relentless punishment of those who transgress its often petty and heartless prohibitions, and indeed of those the punishment of whom it deems functional to its survival, irrespective of their notional “transgression.” It increasingly deploys not just bureaucratic repression but an invested, overt, supererogatory sadism.

“There are countless ghastly examples of the rehabilitation and celebration of cruelty, in the carceral sphere, in politics and culture. Spectacles like this aren’t new, but they have not always been so “unabashed,” as Philip Mirowski puts it, “made to seem so unexceptional” — and they are not only distraction but part of “teaching techniques optimised to reinforce the neoliberal self.””

“In 1957, Dorothy Counts desegregated a school in North Carolina. Writing of the photograph of her walking past the vicious jeering mob of demonstrators, James Baldwin wrote that “[i]t made me furious. It filled me with both hatred and pity.” The latter for Counts; the former for what he saw in the faces of her attackers.”

I’m not sure that’s what Baldwin meant. I think he was being more nuanced. He hated the racists, but pitied them for being trapped by their own hatred. Otherwise, he would be no better than they.

“The Manifesto hopes to be a “swan song” of the system, but it is, too, a “hymn to the glory of capitalist modernity.” “Never, I repeat, and in particular by no modern defender of the bourgeois civilization has anything like this been penned, never has a brief been composed on behalf of the business class from so profound and so wide a comprehension of what its achievement is and of what it means to humanity.” If this, from the conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter, is an exaggeration, it isn’t by much. The Manifesto, for all its fire, its anger and indignation, admires capitalism and bourgeois society and the bourgeoisie. It admires the bourgeois class too much.”

“For the working class, the situation is different. The eradication of the bourgeoisie as a class is the eradication of bourgeois rule, of capitalism, of exploitation, of the boot on the neck of humanity. This is why the working class doesn’t need sadism, nor even revenge—and why it not only can, but must, hate. It must hate its class enemy, and capitalism itself.”

“It would take an unreasonable amount of saintliness for no one on the Left to feel any hate for, say, hedge fund founder, pharmaceuticals CEO, and convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli, for example, not only because of his ostentatious profiteering from human misery, but given his repeated, performative, stringent efforts precisely to be hated. And, of course, there’s the race-baiting, disability-mocking, sexual-assault-celebrating Trump.”

Not really. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

“The point, though, is that to fully and uncritically surrender to such agon against individuals is to invite one’s own ethical degeneration; to implicitly give a pass to those others in the ruling class more inclined to decorously veil the misery from which they profit; and to lose focus on the system of which such turpitudinous figures are symptoms. Which is to risk exonerating it.”

Or: don’t hate the player, hate the game. Mieville is ever so much more voluble than even I. I guess no-one gives you genius grant for writing “don’t hate the player. hate the game.” Instead, you get one for expressing the exact same sentiment with 10 times as many words, including “agon” and “turpitudinous”.

“This is a political iteration of the תַּכְלִ֣ית שִׂנְאָ֣הַ, the taklit sinah, the “utmost” or “perfect hatred” of the Psalms for those who rise up against the Lord — that is to say, to translate into political eschatology, the enemies of justice. Psalm 139:22: “I hate them with a perfect hatred.””

The Fed’s Rate Hikes Are Hurting Workers — and Exposing the Scam of American Capitalism by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“Much of that is from small business owners finding it harder to service their loans, but it’s also a product of dampened demand: one firm profiled by the outlet, a manufacturer of rooftop solar systems, has seen sales fall due to the higher cost of loans for residential customers to finance such construction.”

“The average credit card interest rate has hit 19.04 percent, the highest since Bankrate started keeping track of rates thirty-seven years ago, and just above the previous record figure of 19 percent from 1991.”

“In other words: because more low- and middle-income Americans were able to save up a bit of money during the pandemic, the Fed has to keep interest rates high until those savings are ground to a pulp, too, in case families dip into them to buy goods and services.”

“For years, tech start-ups, even wildly unprofitable ones, have been kept afloat by a seemingly limitless fire hose of cheap money that’s now coming to an end under higher interest rates and stubborn inflation, leading to what one industry figure has called “the steepest and widest drawdown for a generation” in tech.”

“Venture funding in the third quarter of this year fell by 53 percent from 2021 and by 33 percent from the previous quarter, and more than seventy-three thousand tech workers have lost their jobs over this year as of mid-November.”

“More broadly, the new situation is exposing how many business models that flourished before the tightening amount to borderline scams.”

“[…] the PE model is known mostly for stripping companies, including ones with important social value, of all they’re worth while loading them up with debt, making a profitable escape before the unlucky victim goes under.”

“[…] recent Bank of America survey of fund-managers found that a whopping 92 percent think that we’re careening toward stagflation, aka high unemployment and high inflation. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

Public Policy & Politics

Mali’s Break With France Is a Symptom of Cracks in the Transatlantic Alliance by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“‘There is no uranium in France’, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the democratic socialist party La France Insoumise, told me last year; ‘we import it mainly from Niger and Kazakhstan’. One in three lightbulbs in France is lit by uranium from Niger, which is why French troops garrison the country’s uranium-rich town of Arlit.”

Instead of staying on friendly relations with this necessary supplier in a trade relationship, France uses military power to maintain supply and a low price. Piracy and colonialism. Nothing free-trade about it. The way of the world has not changed, just the stories we tell about ourselves to justify or hide our crimes.

“While French troops are being evicted from the region, US and British troops seem to be taking their place. In 2017, five West African countries created the Accra Initiative to fight the expansion of the Islamist threat from the Sahel region; two years later, in 2019, the initiative’s anchor, Ghana, opened a US military base in its international airport called the West Africa Logistics Network.”

“[…] as a consequence of greater German and US collaboration over military provision for the Ukrainian army during the past eight months, Germany has shifted its own military purchases from European to US arms manufacturers. For instance, in March, Germany announced that it would phase out the European-produced Tornado fighter jets in favour of US-produced F-35 fighters.”

Of course they did. It’s so infuriating to watch the U.S. military hardware manufacturers succeed, despite their obvious criminality. Hell, Switzerland is also buying those F-35 fighters. Utterly unprincipled. Russia is condemned out of existence while Germany and Switzerland buy military hardware from the U.S., the world’s—maybe history’s—greatest purveyor of global chaos.

“The Wagner Group soldiers in Mali have provided France with an excuse to ignore the wider anti-French sentiment in West Africa and the Sahel as well as to sidestep the fact that their military presence on the continent is being supplanted by Britain and the United States. The Russian presence on the African continent is minuscule (although growing since the October 2019 Russia-Africa summit at Sochi), but it provides Paris with a useful rationale for France’s diminished status on the continent and indeed in the world.”

Ukrainische Menschenrechtlerin Larissa Schessler: „Alle haben Angst“ by Ulrich Heyden (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die Opposition in der Ukraine ist heute physisch und politisch vernichtet. Alle Organisationen und Oppositionellen und alle Medien, die oppositionelle Meinungen verbreiteten, wurden zum Schweigen gebracht. Noch vor dem Februar 2022 wurden alle Informationskanäle geschlossen, über welche die Opposition ihre Informationen verbreitet hat. Fünf Fernsehkanäle und einige Medienhäuser wurden aufgrund von Beschlüssen der Werchownaja Rada und des ukrainischen Sicherheitsrates geschlossen. Auch Internetportale und andere Medien wurden geschlossen. Das widersprach der Verfassung und den Gesetzen. In der Ukraine gibt es heute kein freies Wort. Es gibt keine Freiheit für politische Organisationen. Es wurde eine totale Diktatur errichtet.”

“Heute sind die Kommunistische Partei der Ukraine, die Sozialistische Partei der Ukraine, die Progressive Sozialistische Partei der Ukraine, die Union der Linken Kräfte und zahlreiche weitere Organisationen in der Ukraine verboten. Die Führer dieser Organisationen werden verfolgt. Sie werden aus der Ukraine vertrieben.”

“Wir haben gesehen, dass viele politisch aktive Menschen spurlos verschwanden oder in Gefängnissen sitzen. Zum Beispiel Jelena Bereschnaja[]. Das ist eine sehr bekannte Menschenrechtlerin, die für die Rechte der politischen Gefangenen in der Ukraine eingetreten ist. Sie ist aufgetreten im Komitee für Menschenrechte der UNO, in der OSZE, im Europäischen Parlament. Jelena Bereschnaja ist über 60 Jahre alt. Sie sitzt seit März 2022 im Gefängnis und niemand weiß in welchen gesundheitlichen Zustand sie sich befindet.”

“[…] im südukrainischen Gebiet Nikolajew, welches Anfang November von russischen Truppen geräumt wurde, zwei Einwohnerinnen verhaftet wurden. Man wirft ihnen prorussische Tätigkeit vor. Sie haben humanitäre Hilfe verteilt und bei der Beantragung russischer Renten geholfen. Sie werden als Verbrecherinnen angeklagt. Ihnen drohen Gefängnisstrafen von zehn Jahren.”

“In der Ukraine kann jeder Mensch auf der Straße angehalten werden. Man kann ihn auffordern, dass er sein Telefon zeigt und die Telegram-Kanäle, die er abonniert hat. Und wer einen bekannten russischen Kanal wie colonelcassad oder Juri Podoljaka abonniert hat, kann verhaftet und verhört werden.”

“Die Ukraine als souveräner Staat hat bereits aufgehört zu existieren. Das Territorium befindet sich unter vollständiger Kontrolle der Amerikaner und wird genutzt als Mittel im Kampf gegen Russland.”

Democrats Were Dithering on Railworkers’ Rights. The Left Just Forced Their Hand. by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“For the past week or so, Congress has been consumed by the prospect of a looming and potentially monumentally disruptive strike by railworkers, who have spent three years negotiating with rail carriers for a better contract, centered on their lack of rights to take paid time off work if they fall ill.”

“Pelosi lamely added some condemnation of railroad companies’ “obscene profits” for good measure, even as she made clear she was intervening firmly on the side of helping the carriers maintain those profits.”

Zhou Enlai’s Posthumous Triumph by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“[…] despite one’s objections to such nations, and I am sure figures such as Zhou and Nehru had theirs in their day, the principle of noninterference must prevail for the sake of a working, ultimately humane world order. There are exceptions to this having to do with extreme cases, of course, but this does not mean the kind of flagrant abuse the U.S. makes with its unlawful, disorderly, typically violent “humanitarian interventions.””

“Readers of this column may recall the admiration I have severally expressed for Zhou’s Five Principles. All five had to do with how nations should conduct themselves in an emerging era of unprecedented multiplicity: They were mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, nonaggression, noninterference in the internal affairs of others, equality and mutual benefit in relations, and peaceful coexistence.”

Der Holodomor war eine katastrophale Hungersnot – aber kein Genozid by Franco Cavalli (NachDenkSeiten)

“Um ihren Widerstand zu schwächen, zögerte Stalin nicht, auch das zeigt eine der grausamsten Seiten des Stalinismus, sogar die Waffe des Hungers gegen sie einzusetzen. Und die demografischen Daten sind eindeutig: Die meisten Todesopfer kamen auf dem Lande ums Leben, weit weniger in den Städten und unabhängig von der ethnischen Herkunft oder der gesprochenen Sprache. Wenn man also schon von einer vorsätzlichen Ausrottung von Menschen sprechen will, so geschah dies sozusagen auf Basis des sozialen Status, nicht auf religiöser, ethnischer oder nationaler Basis, sodass der Begriff Völkermord in diesem Fall nicht zutrifft.”

“Nach dem Ende des Realsozialismus setzten insbesondere die Weltbank und der IWF mit Jelzin (der das demokratische Experiment durch die Bombardierung der Duma beendet hatte) als Marionette einen drastischen Übergang zur Marktwirtschaft und zum Kapitalismus durch, der zwischen 1991 und 2014 in den Ländern des Realsozialismus eine Übersterblichkeitskrise mit schätzungsweise 18 Millionen Toten verursachte, davon 12 Millionen in Russland.”

“Zur Bewässerung der Landwirtschaft auf der Krim wurde in den 1960er Jahren – also zu Zeiten der Sowjetunion – ein Kanal gebaut, der Wasser vom Dnepr auf die Krim bringt. Er deckte um die 85 Prozent des Süsswasserbedarfs der Halbinsel Krim. Nachdem sich die Bevölkerung der Krim 2014 von der Ukraine lossagte und sich die Krim mit Russland wiedervereinigte, blockierte die Ukraine die Wasserzufuhr durch diesen Kanal, um die Krim trockenzulegen und damit dem Hunger auszusetzen. Das kommt einem Genozid deutlich näher als eine allgemeine Hungersnot über mehrere Sowjetrepubliken hinweg.”

Inside the Neoliberal Kingdom by Daniil Nozdriakov (Russian Dissent)

“Modern Russia is a country of neoliberalism triumphant. Moreover, what has prevailed here is an especially hypertrophied and perverse form of that philosophy. No wonder that, in our country, the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is constantly atop the bestseller list.”

It’s almost like Russia and the U.S. should be best friends.

“The US Department of Commerce has even struck Russia from its list of countries with a market economy. And yes, state capitalism has developed into a very specific system in its own way, as the chief of the imperial provocateurs Zubatov said. But the guiding neoliberal principle holds, which is that everything may be monetized, and the state does not owe you a thing.”

“The coming of the special operation revealed this essence of the social sphere for all to see, as it was the regional authorities who were charged with the obligation to supply and equip not only volunteers, but also those citizens mobilized into the national army; and those regional authorities tried, in turn, to partially shift these responsibilities onto the people themselves. As the Oryol governor Andrei Klychkov said, if you don’t like our equipment, buy some yourself. And this from a member of the Communist Party, by the way.”

Breathtakingly similar to the U.S. Monetize everything. State owes you nothing. Services must be profitable.

“In reality, only two institutions exist that can be said to constitute a kind of collectivity: the family and the special services. In a difficult situation, you can only rely on relatives, and it is now desirable to do business only with them. That is why civil servants prefer to register property to relatives.”

That’s about where people are in America, too, unless you’re in the elite.

“[…] the secret services won out as the most organized and strongest structure capable of regulating life in the entrusted state. Their victory has sublimated the war of all versus all in the form of “Putin consensus:” society does not interfere with the state and does not get into politics, and the state does not prevent people from earning money in any or all available ways. From this, fraud has grown to an incredible scale − even among the volunteers who collect humanitarian aid for “our boys for the summer” there are many who simply put the money right into their pockets.”

“Now the state has crossed the line and almost reached the point of coercion. Almost – because mainly those who did not outright flee from mobilization do go to the front, and because the authorities did not undertake any special repressions against the draft dodgers. Of course, by participating in a special operation, one can get money into the family budget. But the mobilized have agreed to die only in comfort: in warm boots and brand new helmets, and it was the lack of these that spurred them to protest and to write appeals to their governors. They were not against war or mobilization per se, merely objecting to personal inconvenience, which of course is more important than any other consideration.”

“According to various sources, between 700,000 to 2 million people left Russia in the September-October days. Had such a huge mass of people engaged in spontaneous protest rather than fleeing, it would have been a serious blow to the authorities. But people prefer individual salvation, and one cannot blame them for their choice. After all, the opposition is atomized and fragmented even worse than is society as a whole.”

“What can the left do in these conditions? To create and restore grassroots collectivity, including trade unions, as the only alternative to total disunity and atomization. The answer sounds simple, but in practice it is not so easy to implement.”

Man, those last few sentences in each WSWS article are on point: “workers of the world, unite”, indeed. Most of the people of Russia have a tremendous amount in common with most of the people of the U.S. They are kept at each other’s throats by their respective elites, who brainwash them with a poisonous ideology through the all-encompassing media that they control.

Biden Sides With Trump in Killing Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“It was the same with the idea of bringing the U.S. back into the JCPOA. The lying dog-faced pony soldier who moved into the White House in January 2021 knew he could commit to reviving the accord with no chance his administration would ever do so. As soon as Biden assumed office and named his national security detail it was perfectly evident that Israel would be running their Iran policy.”

“Note the language of a leader whose nation was party neither to the original agreement nor to the new negotiations: To his mind, what would constitute a good deal could not be limited to banning a nuclear weapons program; Israel would insist Iran must not have a nuclear program of any kind, even one limited to peaceful purposes—energy production, advanced medical procedures, and the like.”

“The problem with Fordow, Sanger writes, is that it is “hard to bomb.” I am reminded of a remark Netanyahu made in response to Iran’s development of missile defense systems a few years ago. These will make it hard for us to attack, Bibi complained. How dare those Iranians.”

“Far down in Sanger’s piece, where this stuff always appears, we read, “The United States recently issued an assessment that it had no evidence of a bomb-making project underway.” I love Sanger’s comeback after writing that obligatory sentence: But maybe the intelligence is wrong, he suggests.”

“Nowhere in Sanger’s report—as nowhere in all mainstream reporting, indeed—do we read that Iran condemns nuclear weapons as a matter of religious principle and national defense doctrine. Just a small matter of no particular account.”

Journalism & Media

Rep. Khanna on Twitter, Free Speech, and the Hunter Biden Story by Jonathan H. Adler (Reason)

“Unlike many who comment on such controversies, Rep. Khanna recognizes that whether a company like Twitter is legally obligated to respect free speech principles is a separate question from whether it is desirable or beneficial for it to do so. That Twitter is not required to provide a robust forum for divergent views and perspectives does not mean it should not do so. Put another way, pointing out that Twitter is not bound by the First Amendment is no answer to criticism of Twitter for selectively suppressing speech or information that is disagreeable or disfavored.”

Science & Nature

Impure by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“I am studying qualities that do not exist at the ‘fundamental’ level! I am operating at the foundations of epistemology for the system I am studying! The only difference between you and me is that your systems are so simple, you can afford to put 400 dudes on figuring out how half a particle works!”

Art & Literature

Philosophy & Sociology

Gone Bad, Come to Life by Justin E.H. Smith (Hinternet)

“The version of me that believed a good life is constituted from such “fun” diversions as this died a long time ago. Far from having a “bucket list”, I now understand that the proper conduct of the second half of life is to approach something like what the Tibetan Buddhists call tukdam, to do less and less, but only to sit and meditate, and to breathe once every century or so, so that by the time you actually die there will be scarcely any change to register.”

“We can at least understand the “selective” benefit of fermentation when we place it alongside other culinary traditions such as curing and pickling. All of these are techniques for making your food a bit bad, or pushing it right up to the boundary of inedibility, in order to keep the flies and microorganisms away so that you may have it for yourself throughout the season of scarcity or over the course of a long voyage.”

“Is any product of bourgeois consumer ideology more noxious than the “bucket list”? At just the moment a person should be adjusting their orientation, in conformity with their true nature, to focus exclusively on the horizon of mortality, they are rudely solicited one last time, before it’s really too late, for a final blow-out tour of the amusement parks and spectacles that still held out some plausible hope of providing satisfaction back in ignorant youth, when life could still be imagined to be made up of such things. “Travel is a meat thing”, William Gibson wrote, to which we might add that the quest for new experiences in general is really only fitting for those whose meat is still fresh.”

“What I will say, with as much certainty as I have about anything, is that death is not an event of life, it is not something you pass through and then keep going, and it certainly is not going to matter to you, when you’re dead, if you ever rode a camel or not. It might matter whether you loved another person with all your heart, whether you attained any lucidity about your mortal condition or only lived like a puffed-up fool (you will certainly not be riding your camel through the eye of any needle); it will not matter whether you fed a watermelon to a hippopotamus.”

Do what makes you happy. None of it matters, true. But we must still kill time, no?

“[…] we are expected to ascribe the same value to the collection of new experiences at every age, rather than seeing experience as something whose role in life evolves.”

I don’t need to put myself in other places. I agree with Gibson: “travel is a meat thing.” I don’t need to put my meat in other places—and other places won’t benefit from me being there. I mean…they might? But they certainly won’t miss my not having gone there. They’ll never know what they’re missing.

“In how many different accents, in how many open-air markets around the world, do you need to hear someone say: “Yes please, you like, I make special deal.” At some point, you get the idea. You figure it out. You even start to worry that it’s all staged, not just the sales pitch, not just the market, but everything, for no matter how many different paths you take, no matter how many side-quests you go on, it all keeps coming out the same.”

“For me it has been not just a realization that I already am who I am and will never be anything radically different, that I’ve used up most of the becoming allotted to me. At its worst it has been the realization that I already am nothing, a ghost stalking the world.”

Maybe? Who cares? As long as you’d still rather be you than anyone else.

“This is the same thought Dean Martin expressed dimly when he said he feels sorry for people who don’t drink.“When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.””

“I no longer live, as Czesław Miłosz put it, “under orders from the erotic imagination” (he managed to stay in that mode well into his nineties, at least if he is telling the truth in his poetry — chapeau to him, but I personally have no idea how that is possible). To put this another way, I no longer see the world as frothing with possibility, as “open”. That’s what it is, I think, to survive past midlife: your life is not done, yet it is, as we say, “a done deal”.”

“Can it still, under such circumstances, hold out the hope of being “good”? Hell yes, life is good. It’s a gift, it’s a miracle, &c. And it is surely a blessing to live long enough to learn to stop searching in vain for sources of transcendence in the common substances of this world, however rarefied they are made, however spirit-like, by the long art of men.”

Counsel by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“I still remember how your skull-orbs fucked my brain to jelly the day we met. By Christ’s balls, I sharted a heart-brick.”

“I’m corpsitating, Mom, porked sideways by the cock-punch of fate. But don’t doom-void! Skull-fang upon the world! Your presence has always just absolutely booiled by frickin’ ass!”

Company, team, self. by Will Larson (Irrational Exhuberance)

“People are complex, and they get energy in complex ways. Some managers get energy from writing some software. That’s great, particularly if you avoid writing software with strict dependencies. Some managers get energy from coaching others. That’s great. Some get energy from doing exploratory work. Others get energy from optimizing existing systems. That’s great, too. Some get energy from speaking at conferences. Great. Some get energy from cleaning up internal wiki’s. You get the idea: that’s great. All these things are great, not because managers should or shouldn’t program/speak at conferences/clean up wiki’s/etc, but because folks will accomplish more if you let them do some energizing work, even if that work itself isn’t very important.”

If that’s all they work on, interminably avoiding the more complex work, maybe not so great. But, yes, this does help. I will often do some short-term things that are not high-priority because (A) they need to get done soon anyway (just not right away, or faster than other things), (B) I don’t feel like working on the other things yet, or I’m not feeling energetic about them, or (C) I just really want to shrink my task list a bit for sense of accomplishment, or (D) all of the above.

“Leadership is getting to the correct place quickly, it’s not necessarily about walking in the straightest line. Gleefully skipping down a haphazard path is often faster than purposeful trudging.”

“What folks may not understand, is that for a certain type of person, strictly adhering to the correct path is very energizing. That kind of person […] doesn’t need to do sub-optimal energizing work, because doing the correct work is inherently energizing.”

I’m kind of lucky that the work I need to do short-term tends to be the work I’m most interested in doing. Chicken/egg, sure, but it works for me.

Programming

Color Formats in CSS by Josh W. Comeau

P3 extends the standard sRGB color space, giving us access to brighter and more vibrant colors. I really like this image, from a wonderful WebKit blog post:

sRGB vs. P3

[Three] squares showing how the P3 color space extends sRGB. Red is extended by a moderate amount, blue is extended by a little bit, and green is extended by a ton.

“LCH isn’t linked to a particular color space, and so we don’t know where the upper saturation limit is. It’s not static: as display technology continues to improve, we can expect monitors to reach wider and wider gamuts. LCH will automatically be able to reference these expanded colors by cranking up the chroma. Talk about future-proofing!”

“We’re using the standard hue and saturation for our red color, but we’re lowering the lightness by 20%. The color goes from hsl(0deg 100% 50%) to hsl(0deg 100% 30%).

“Now, this might seem a heck of a lot more complicated than the Sass way. It’s definitely more typing. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is all happening in vanilla CSS.

“Unlike with Sass variables/functions, which compile away into hardcoded values, CSS variables are dynamic. We can tweak any of these values using JavaScript, and all the other ones will automatically update.”

Video Games

Dwarf Fortress, the Deepest, Most Insane Computer Simulation Game Ever, Just Got a Shiny New Makeover by C.J. Ciaramella (Reason)

“It’s not an exaggeration to say Dwarf Fortress is one of the great pieces of outsider art created in the 21st century. (Don’t take my word for it; the game is on display at the Museum of Modern Art.) It’s a work of singular genius, the kind that we don’t see much of these days, and also the story of an indie gem finding its audience thanks to the internet. The success of the new Steam version shows people are eager to show their appreciation for the Adams brothers’ years of labor. The story isn’t finished yet, though. The Adams brothers are still working on Dwarf Fortress and adding new features, delving ever deeper into the simulation, just like their dwarves. Long may they reign.”

Victoria 3 Players Think Communism Is Too OP by Sisi Jiang (Kotaku)

“But in a Victoria 3 communist economy, worker cooperatives ensure that all capitalist wealth is turned over to the workers. As a result, their high purchasing power allows them to spend more money in the economy, which increases economic demand. This leads to higher living standards, which attracts more immigration, another big boost. “It’s just so easy,” the player concludes.”

Yeah. Duh.

“One root cause seems to be the game’s assumption that as buildings increase in profitability, the workers inside will get raises, too.”

That would be nice, but seems incredibly unrealistic. On the other hand, the cooperative where I live has lowered the rent a couple of times in the last several years (because they charge what it costs to run the building, plus a small percentage profit). This, despite most other places in town having exploded in their rents.

“But maybe it’s time to accept that there are certain inherent advantages to not giving all your economy’s money to people who will stick it in an offshore account instead of spending it. In the meantime, leftist nerds can feel vindication when they play Victoria 3.”