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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

COVID-19

US COVID death toll surges in third winter of the pandemic (WSWS)

“The Economist recently posted a glossy, high production video titled “the true costs of ageing,” that opens with the lines, “When people retire, they start costing more money and the cost will soon be unsustainable. The current approaches for the care of the elderly are a drain on society’s resources.”

“The editors go on to discuss that with a reduced work force the cost of paying out pensions and health care will be catastrophic because the elderly “spend less, pay less in taxes, and cost more,” driving down GDP and leading to economic stagnation. They add, “If you look at it from an economic perspective, we are spending too much money doing the wrong thing … and the mistakes cost more than just money.”

“According to RBC Wealth management, “the projected lifetime cost of care for a healthy 65-year-old is $404,253—and that doesn’t factor in long-term care costs, which could be as high as $100,000 a year.” The removal of 800,000 such people (the number of over-65s killed by COVID in the US) would save the American government $320 billion, plus another $80 billion a year, plus additional “savings” from additional deaths. Such calculations are undoubtedly being made in government and Wall Street offices.”

These are the ones one consider themselves to be the leading lights of society, the moral beacons. They spend more on a meal for themselves five nights a week than most of these elderly see in a month, but it’s the elderly that are the problem. The readers of the Economist are the ones inhaling a wildly disproportionate part of society’s product, and throw shade at the useless elderly. This is a scandal and deeply amoral.

US COVID death toll would be 4X higher without vaccines, modeling study finds by Beth Mole (Ars Technica)

“In all, the modeling estimated that COVID-19 vaccination prevented 3.25 million deaths, with a 95-percent confidence interval of 3.1 million to 3.4 million. Averted hospitalizations were estimated at 18.6 million, with a confidence interval of 17.8 million to 19.35 million. For infections, the model estimated a dodge of 119.85 million, with a confidence interval of 112.7 million to 127.1 million.”

Long COVID: An update and gauging risk by Katelin Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“A recent study pooled more then 54 long Covid studies (which included a total of 1.2 million people) and found that 6% of individuals who had symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection experienced long Covid in 2020 and 2021. This is consistent with a massive study in Sweden (2020-2021) that found the proportion receiving a long Covid diagnosis was 1% among individuals not hospitalized for their COVID-19 infection, 6% among those hospitalized, and 32% among those treated in the ICU.”

“Today, the U.K. estimates that 3% of the general population has long Covid. […] Economically, long Covid is a big deal to this country. The total economic cost is $3.7 trillion in the U.S., without accounting for future cases.”

“A very strong study in the Lancet found the odds of long Covid after an Omicron infection were significantly lower compared to after a Delta infection.”

“One rattling study in the Lancet found that people infected with SARS-CoV-2 had more than 3 times the risk of dying over the following year compared with those who remained uninfected. For COVID-19 cases aged 60 years or older, increased mortality persisted until the end of the first year after infection, and was related to increased risk for heart and/or respiratory causes of death.”

Super-rough estimates:

“The risk of getting an Omicron infection (asymptomatic and symptomatic) per year is ~1 in 2 (before Omicron it was ~1 in 4). If we take into account 3% of infections lead to long Covid and, of those, ~18% will have disease so severe that they are unable to work. So, the annual risk of severe long Covid (unable to work) is 1 in 370.”

“I spoke with Dr. Ruth Link-Gelles a few days ago, as she is the Program Lead of COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness at the CDC and Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service. While she worked directly on these studies and probably could repeat the results like the back of her hand, I asked more about the context around these numbers.”

Two things jumped out at me here:

1. “Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service”? Is the Public Health Service a branch of the military? The doctor in question has medals all over her chest. I’d never thought about it, but I guess I’ll have to be less judgmental when I see Chinese officials of ostensibly civilian-sounding organizations with military ranks.
2. “probably could repeat the results like the back of her hand”: That is not how that idiom works. This is why we think that AIs write so well already: because we ourselves don’t really know how to read or write. We’re all accustomed to just blowing by peculiarities like that expression (it should be “probably knows the results like she knows the back of her hand” or something along those lines), so when an AI writes the same, we think nothing of it. In fact, it makes the AI more human than I am. 😯 food for thought.

Economy & Finance

Behind the News, 12/8/22 by Doug Henwood (Apple Podcasts)

I listened to this podcast today. The lady (Natalia Mehlman Petrzela) being interviewed in the first half kept pronouncing the word “strength” with a silent “g” and I can’t remember having been more angry about anything in my entire life.

In the second half, Doug Henwood seemed a bit off of his game in the interview with Paolo Gerbaudo about the Italian economy. He noted that Italy was unlike most other countries, with its deep divide between the rich in the north and the poor in the south. What? The U.S. is even more deeply divided: the coasts and inland. If you want, the north and the south. I don’t understand how he can’t hear himself saying something so mundane.

Then they both talked about the mafia in the south without even thinking to discuss how large businesses function essentially the same as the mafia. The mafia is a small fish in the world of international financial crime; I’m kind of surprised that Henwood didn’t make this point.

In the same vein, they both chastised Giorgia Meloni for subsidizing small businesses that are otherwise not economically viable—Italy’s businesses are, on average, half the size of those in France or Germany—but they didn’t bother to note how many goddamned subsidies large companies already get. It was disappointing to hear them fall into the trap of criticizing the new laws without noting that its not a change from the status quo.

Neither of them thought to mention that Luxotica owns every pair of eyeglasses in the world.

Episode 254: Moneyball II by TrueAnon (Patreon)

This is a great episode that starts discusses FTX and SBF and all of the sordid details. It was an outright con where the stole money. Don’t be distracted by how they dressed it up. That’s what con men do. Excellent reporting and insightful analysis by Liz and Brace.

China hits back at US chip sanctions with WTO dispute (Ars Technica)

“China’s commerce ministry said on Monday its WTO complaint was a legal and necessary measure to defend its “legitimate rights and interests,” after the US Department of Commerce introduced sanctions in early October to make it harder for China to buy or develop advanced semiconductors.”

“China’s complaint also comes days after a landmark ruling in which a WTO panel backed Beijing against Washington. In a report published on December 9, the WTO said the US was not justified in arguing the Trump administration’s 2018 tariffs—on steel and aluminum from China and other countries—were necessary to protect its national security.”

Inflation is Falling Much Faster Than Most People Know by Mark Weisbrot (CounterPunch)

“Do Americans understand what is happening with inflation in this country? This is an important question, because the public’s perception can influence national policy and political choices. Before the midterm elections one month ago, 87 percent of likely voters told pollsters that inflation was extremely or very important in deciding their vote.”

Weisbrot and his colleague Dean Baker are kind of annoying me lately with their seemingly deliberate attack on the narrative of inflation. They say that it’s coming down. They are 100% correct on that. The rate of increase of prices has slowed to a near standstill. Hooray! Economists can go back to sleep. Their completely irrelevant measure has stopped doing the thing that they think it shouldn’t be doing.

The natural conclusion is not that people can now stop complaining, though. The prices haven’t gone back down, have they? They just increased and now they’re sitting there, at the higher level, in a country chock-full of people who not only never get a cost-of-living increase, the concept is so foreign to them that you have to explain it five times before they can even begin to understand that it might be possible for their society to do something about the fact that their buying power has diminished due to reasons completely outside of their control.

Shit costs too much relative to what people are making. That’s the point. Maybe some prices have adjusted to places where they should be, but that’s another story. Let’s just talk about something other than inflation. How is nobody talking about cost-of-education inflation? Is education optional? Like food and gas? What about rent increases? Is that not inflation?

I just don’t understand how two fantastic economists can spend all of their time browbeating an absolutely moribund media for their obsession with inflation while ignoring the bigger picture that something is desperately wrong in the economy for most people and people sense that. Weisbrot and Baker disparage the media—rightly!—for being all partisan and disparaging Democrats for an inflation that largely no longer exists, because of the danger of giving too much power to Republicans. But the core problem persists, regardless of whether inflation is still high. The impression I keep getting from their articles is “stop bitching, it’s not a real problem”—without mentioning what the real problem is. I know that’s not what Dean and Mark mean, but that’s what I’m reading.

They keep writing about how, statistically, so many millions of people are better off than they were—even when that mostly means that they’re only 40m underwater rather than 80m. They’re still drowning, but less? Awesome. We can go home, everybody, our work is done here. People are still suffering and unfulfilled and panicked and desperate, but 20% less, so all’s well.

Public Policy & Politics

Equality of Opportunity

How Capitalism Worms Its Way Into Every Aspect of Our Lives by Daniel Denvir (Jacobin)

“[…] with the emergence of capitalism, and especially these various Victorian ideologies and middle-class ideals of female domesticity, we developed the idea that that women weren’t really even working at all. They were just adorning or diffusing fine moral sentiments throughout society. This is all a huge mystification.”

“[…] for the most part, and this is another distinctive feature of capitalism, unless it’s brought inside the economy and treated as a way to make a profit, it’s not counted as having any value. And most of social reproduction is still outside the formal economy. It’s seen as not having a value. Since the whole raison d’être of capitalism is precisely to accumulate profits and thereby to expand capital, that’s the system’s sole measure of value.”

If we’re going to keep capitalism, we have to stop externalizing costs. Capital does not pay enough for the work that goes into keeping the labor force healthy and topped up. This sounds insane, though. Making the goal be “create good workers, and enough of them”, with the hoped-for side-effect being “happy, healthy, and fulfilled people”.

“I want to be clear that I am the last person to say that this New Deal or state-managed regime was a golden age of any kind. It was premised on a lot of built-in domination. It was premised on women’s subordination through the idea of the family wage, the idea that a working man should be paid a salary sufficient to support his nonemployed wife and children so that a family should need only one salary, one worker. That at one level seems like a luxury to us today, but at another level it was premised on a kind of male-dominated household model in which women were dependent on men. It was also premised on the ability of the wealthy states of the capitalist core to siphon value from what was then called the Third World, what we today call the Global South.”

“Capitalism developed in a dualist way, historically. On the one hand, you have the iconic working men who go to the factory and get a wage roughly equal to the costs of their social reproduction. On the other hand, you have actually a much larger population of people whose assets are simply being seized in one way or another by capital, by imperial and colonial states, or even by their own states in our time.”

“Jason Moore, the eco-Marxist critic, writes that “behind Manchester stands Mississippi.” That’s a beautiful phrase. It’s so succinct. What it means is that you don’t have the ability to profitably exploit factory labor in the great textile mills of Manchester without the raw material of cotton produced by slaves in Mississippi. That cheapens the crucial input, the raw material for the textile production. It also helps to have slave-produced sugar and tobacco and rum and other commodities that allow you to pay lower wages because you have cheap consumer goods, so to speak.”

“And overall, roughly speaking, that distinction between exploitation and expropriation has corresponded to what W. E. B. Du Bois famously called the “color line.” It has been overwhelmingly people of color who found themselves on the expropriation side of the boundary and people who were called whites or Europeans or metropolitans who found themselves on the exploitation side.”

“Barbara Fields, who writes about how racism is a result of the contradictions between what you would describe as the political and economic spheres of liberal capitalism. You have liberal democracy proclaiming liberty and some sort of equality for all, but you have this economy that’s obviously brutally unequal,”

The economy is considered to be mostly outside of direct political control. This is incorrect—elites make the economy work for them—and wrong—because how people acquire the means to secure happy, healthy, and fulfilled lives is inherently political. For example, what is labor? Where does labor come from? People. So why isn’t it considered a valuable i.e. paid job to be a mother or father, raising children? It kind of is, through tax schemes, etc. but not really in the minds of citizens. Once robots can do everything, people will have less value? What the hell are we talking about here? Are people even aware of the implications of where society wants to go?

“[…] these fantasies of liberation from nature and from labor have always meant one thing: off-loading our burdens onto other bodies and other natures. Again, a Manchester is only possible because there’s a Mississippi somewhere else. That means other people whose conditions of life are being devastated.”

“When we’re talking about the dynamic whereby capital is always trying to confiscate as much as it can in the way of free labor, free nature, and free political benefits without paying their costs, that’s an objective system dynamic. Without some kind of intervention, left to its own devices, it will necessarily end up undermining, destabilizing, and exhausting the very background conditions that the system needs. That’s an objective story about a crisis tendency, parallel to what Marx meant by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.”

“Do they actually think it’s a crisis or not? What it means to think it’s a crisis is to think: This is not accidental. These bad things are going on, but there’s something about the system itself that is generating them, and this system could be changed. We stand at a crossroads and might be willing to undertake the responsibility to organize collectively to change them.”

True, but how to implement it?

“At any moment historically, there is more than one such story around a crisis. You mentioned a legitimation crisis. What that means is that the sort of established narrative through which people interpreted what was going on in a normal noncrisis period has lost its credibility.”

“By progressive neoliberalism, what I mean is that there’s a veneer of progressive and seemingly egalitarian, emancipatory aspirations that got tied up with the same political economy that created NAFTA and the WTO, repealed Glass-Steagall, and basically invited industry to decamp and finance to metastasize. Bill Clinton is the key architect of all this with the so-called New Democrats.”

This is a very fancy way of saying that progressive neoliberalism is running a scam. Every scam has a “veneer”. This is not magically different from a scam.

“Prior to the Sanders-Trump moment, we had a situation in which we had two choices: a reactionary neoliberalism or a progressive neoliberalism. You could choose between ethnonationalism and multiculturalism, but either way you were stuck with financialization and deindustrialization.”

“Capitalism steals from us not just our labor and energy but our ability to decide collectively the most important questions about how we want to live. How hard do we want to work? How many hours? How much leisure do we want to have? What do we want to leave for future generations? How do we want to relate to nonhuman nature? What should we do with the social surplus that we collectively produce? These are fundamental questions, and they are decided now essentially by a small handful of people who appropriate the surplus we produce and basically use market mechanisms to invest for the sake of maximal expansion.”

“We might even prefer to produce less wealth and to live more simply, companionably, socially, and easily in a more relaxed way. We could have a much freer and more democratic life. But that’s not compatible with capitalism.”

Since Boris Yeltsin, Russians Have Been Living in an Imitation Democracy by Tony Wood (Jacobin)

“While Yeltsin’s administration received the fulsome backing of Western governments and pundits as a paragon of democracy, it went about the task of perpetuating its hold on power by rigging elections and empowering a new capitalist class.”

“Putin inherited and consolidated in the 2000s what Yeltsin had built in the 1990s — a relationship symbolized by the handover from Yeltsin to Putin on New Year’s Eve of 1999. (Underscoring the bonds of complicity between the two, Putin’s first act was to exempt his predecessor from prosecution.)”

“In Russia, the question of comparison was freighted with status anxieties. Parallels with Western countries, however unflattering in the present, at least implied that this was the relevant peer group. To find similarities between Russia and Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan, conversely, would place Russia in the wrong company.”

“An imitation democracy still in the process of growth would have been able to find another leader, would have imagined other options for its prolongation beyond simply insisting on more of the same. While the constitutional amendment of 2020 might be taken as a sign of flourishing authoritarianism, by perpetuating the system’s reliance on Putin it also signals the increasingly illusory character of its democratic façade, codifying the system’s slow-burning crisis rather than resolving it.”

That analysis applies to the U.S. as well, where citizens face the prospect of Trump vs. Biden. If Biden can’t run, then maybe Hillary will step in. How is anything different? Maybe Trump implodes and is replaced with DeSantis, who is basically also Trump in policy and personality.

“[…] the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 took well-informed observers by surprise, their shock compounded by the seemingly impulsive or even irrational nature of this course of action.”

Shocked but not surprised, not really. It was a long time coming. It was only shocking because Putin had resisted the provocations for so long that people had gotten accustomed to being able to poke Russia as much as they wanted and nothing serious would happen.

People were surprised that Russia would do a 300, simply figuring it would take as many down with it as possible.

Well, Russia (thought it) saw a SWAT team on its front doorstep, so it flipped its wig and figured it would take everyone else down with them. It remains to be seen who’s wrong about the new world order. Either the world will continue with a drastically diminished Russia and a dead-cat-bounce of an ascendancy for the U.S. and NATO or the world will become multi-polar, with Asia (China, Russia, India) in the driver’s seat of the economy.

“This kind of repetition was the second of the two scenarios he laid out in the book’s brief final chapter, the first being a successful transition to genuine democracy in Russia. It is perhaps difficult, in the present moment, to share Furman’s certainty that this first scenario will take place — not least because the contours and substantive content of democracy will themselves surely be the object of intense struggles.”

Not just in Russia. People everywhere keep writing the word “democracy” as if they’re all talking about the same thing. As if the thing they’re talking about actually exists or has come close to being achieved. If Russia were to be a democracy like the U.S., does that count as a success? They’re quite close already. The U.S. has figured out how to change leaders and parties while changing nothing else. The result for the 99% in both countries is very similar: they have neither political nor economic power.

The Trans-Atlantic Rift Grows Wider by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“As the Financial Times explained late last month, European corporations are beginning to move operations to the U.S. to take advantage of the administration’s incentives and—not to be missed—because natural gas is cheaper than what price-gouging American suppliers are getting in Europe.”

“I have read no report indicating the shameful profiteering of U.S. suppliers of liquefied natural gas even registered with the man from Scranton. Why would it, how could it, in the land where free markets are the objects of a perverse idolatry? What’s the matter with making a buck when U.S.–directed sanctions hand you captive buyers?”

He’s being sarcastic, but this really is the mindset for the hyper-capitalist: they don’t see the problem with gouging your friends when they’re down, even though they’re actually down because they’re obeying your orders to help them, which is even more insidious.

“A year ago this month Putin sent draft treaties to Washington and NATO headquarters in Brussels in this same cause. Those were declared “nonstarters”—end of story. On the Ukraine question specifically, Putin spent eight years trying to get the Kiev regime to abide by the Minsk I and Minsk II accords, which, as noted previously in this space, would have provided for a federalized Ukraine that accommodated the different interests and perspectives of its population.”

“Manny Macron is not stupid. He surely knew he would break his pick talking to his not-very-bright, not-very-subtle American counterpart about the topics he crossed the ocean to raise. As a dear friend put it the other day, everyone walks away from the Biden White House empty-handed with the obvious exception of the Israelis, who always go home with exactly what they came to get.”

Barfuß in Delhi – Baerbocks regelbasierte Ordnung floppt in Indien by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Der Westen – also die EU plus die G7-Staaten USA, Kanada, Australien, Japan und Großbritannien – haben sich als Initiatoren der Russland-Sanktionen auf einen „Ölpreisdeckel“ geeinigt, der gestern, am 5. Dezember, in Kraft getreten ist. Dieses Instrument besagt, dass Drittstaaten für russisches Erdöl maximal 60 US-Dollar pro Barrel bezahlen sollen; ein Preis, der unter dem Weltmarktpreis liegt. Tun sie dies nicht, gelten sie für den Westen als „Sanktionsbrecher“. So sieht sie also aus, die „regelbasierte Ordnung“.”

“[…] und auch langfristig auf vertraglicher Ebene zu fixieren. Baerbocks Amtskollege Jaishankar erteilte seiner deutschen Kollegin auch gleich ein paar Nachhilfelektionen in Sachen Realität – die EU habe, so Jaishankar, seit Beginn der russischen Invasion mehr fossile Brennstoffe aus Russland importiert als die nächstgrößten zehn Länder zusammen. Allein beim Erdöl liege die Importsumme der EU sechsmal über der indischen.”

Mit erst 1/3 so viele Einwohner als Indien.

US Railroad Workers ‘Under the Thumb’ by Jack Rasmus (CounterPunch)

“The Railway Labor Act in 1926 set the pattern that was taken up for the rest of the US labor force with Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the further US government anti-strike measures that have followed. The 1926 law has been used as the basis for the US government to ‘lower the boom’, as they say, on railroad workers’ and their unions no fewer than 18 times in the past. So no one should be surprised it has just done so for the 19 th time in the current railroad industry dispute.”

“The transport unions like railroad, longshore shipping at ports, and trucking which were still potentially powerful. But the Railway Labor Act (railroad unions) and Taft-Hartley (longshore and trucking) are there to prevent workers and their unions from exercising the potential power they have.”

There are no real labor rights in the U.S., even if you’re in a union.

“[…] railroad management saw a nice rise in profits as their labor costs were reduced due to the 30% decline in the work force (and of course not having to give workers still on the job any raises for three years as well).”

“In short, the key issues in the recent railroad negotiations were not just back pay after three years of no raises. It was not just the need for 15 paid sick leave days where previously there were none. It was about the right to take days off when sick, or injured, or even for vacations and personal leave days!”

It was about having a decent life, about not letting the job determine everything.

“The total ‘wage package’—including back pay and annual bonuses—amounted to only 24% over five years. The backpay barely covered the inflation for the previous three years. And for 2023 and 2024 the new wage increases would be only 4% and 4.5%, respectively—likely much less than the forecasted inflation rates for those years to come.”

This is how the U.S. treats essential workers, covering a 30% resource gap. It’s also interesting to see how long these workers have to wait for their pay: 3 years worth of back-pay! What if you need the money sooner than that?

“Nancy Pelosi, Democrat Speaker of the House, publicly responded saying legislation would be drafted by the House to prevent a railroad strike and started the process.”

I don’t understand why anyone listens to what the government says. I know it’s because they will strip them of their pensions (their savings!) if they step out of line. But it’s Qatar that has abhorrent labor practices, ammirite? Boycott the 2026 world cup for the workers!

“We are in a period when the US ruling elites are willing to attack any challenge to their hegemony and power domestically, as well as internationally. As those elites prepare to take on global challengers of Russia and China, they will not hesitate as well to ensure firm control of class relations at home in the USA as well.”

Gallic Rebuke: France and the US Rules-based Order by Binoy Kampmark (CounterPunch)

““Really people forget that, if China and Russia are obliged to oppose [with] their veto, it is because frankly the Security Council is most of the time, 95% of the time, has a Western-oriented majority.””

“In a recent closed-door meeting with his top diplomats, Macron remarked that “the international order is being upended in a whole new way. It is a transformation of the international order. I must admit that Western hegemony may be coming to an end”.”

Macron is echoing Putin and, quite frankly, simply acknowledging reality. Perhaps in forty years (if I’m still around and not enfeebled), I will have learned to regret having agitated for the end my own country’s hegemony, to regret the loss of my comfortable cocoon at the heart of the empire, nestled among the elites. But it is all won amorally, off the backs of and built on the suffering and restriction of innumerable others. My freedom and comfort is bought with the immiseration of numerous unseen others.

Will a multipolar world distribute value more equitably? Will it be more just? Or will it just have other winners and losers? And here’s the next conclusion: if the latter is the case (usually taken as a given), then why deliberately move to the losing side? For the bloody principle, of course. Quoting Chris Hedges: I don’t fight fascists because I think I’ll win. I fight them because they’re fascists.

The title of Hedges’s latest book is War is the Greatest Evil. War must be stopped at nearly all costs. We must really coldly examine what we are trading in exchange for continued war. What would we have to trade?

If someone walked into a room and threatened to start shooting people, would you ask them how you they could be dissuaded from doing so? Or would you jump right into John McClane mode and start sneaking around in air ducts, trying to fight this person? What if they said they wanted $5.- or they would start shooting? Would you be willing to capitulate? To concede to this demand? Or would you stand on the principle that you don’t negotiate with terrorists? What if it were $5,000 or $5M? What if you could easily pay the price, would you still risk those deaths for a principle?

Ukraine is the roomful of people being shot while you enjoy the luxury of not negotiating with terrorists.

Railroad Workers’ Lives Revolve Entirely Around Their Jobs by Andrew Perez (Jacobin)

“A longtime conductor for BNSF Railway, Kufalk is virtually always on call. He must be ready to get to work within ninety minutes from when the company says they need him — which can happen any time, day or night. The family lives forty-five minutes away from the terminal in La Crosse, Wisconsin, that serves as his home base. He spends a lot of time away in hotels in Chicago and Galesburg, Illinois.”

“Next year, Kufalk will retire with an extra bonus. He and Mona are planning to sell their house and move somewhere on the water. For the moment, he’s nearly always on call, but he’s not missing any more important days with his family. Kufalk said he “refused to go to work this Thanksgiving,” and used his last remaining vacation day for the year. “I’m not going to be working Christmas either,” he said. “I’ll take a hit on the points. I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.””

Know Thine Enemy by Chris Hedges (Mint Press News)

“The two ruling political parties differ only in rhetoric. They are bonded in their determination to reduce wages; dismantle social programs, which the Bill Clinton administration did with welfare; and thwart unions and prohibit strikes, the only tool workers have to pressure employers.”

“Class struggle defines human history. We are dominated by a seemingly omnipotent corporate elite. Hostile to our most basic rights, this elite is disemboweling the nation; destroying basic institutions that foster the common good, including public schools, the postal service and health care; and is incapable of reforming itself. The only weapon left to thwart this ongoing pillage is the strike.”

“What are we to make of a Congress that rewrites the tax code on behalf of lobbyists so 55 of the largest corporations that collectively made over $40 billion in pre-tax income in 2020 – paid no federal income tax and received $3.5 billion in tax rebates.”

“Let us hope that defying Congress, freight railroad workers carry out a strike. A strike will at least expose the fangs of the ruling class, the courts, law enforcement and the National Guard, much as they did during labor unrest in the 20th century, and broadcast a very public message about whose interests they serve. Besides, a strike might work. Nothing else will.”

They will sacrifice much. It would be a true sign of solidarity, as older members risked pensions to fight for the working conditions of younger members.

Record US military budget prepares for “future conflict with China” by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“For the first time in US history, the United States is directly arming Taiwan, providing $10 billion in arms over 10 years. The direct arming of Taiwan strikes yet another major blow at the one-China policy.

“Taiwan is by far the most referenced geographic area in the bill, with 438 mentions, more than Russia, with 237, and Ukraine, with 159.

“The bill ends the requirement that the Pentagon provide competitive contracts for military procurement, opening the door to massive price-gouging by military contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which are already posting record profits fueled by the bloody, US-provoked war in Ukraine.

““Whether you want to call it wartime contracting or emergency contracting, we can’t play around anymore,” a senior congressional aide told Defense News earlier this year.

“This “wartime contracting” means that arms dealers will be free to charge taxpayers effectively whatever they want, with no serious oversight or regulation.”

““We want to be able to build our stocks not just where we started the war, but higher. We’re posturing for a pretty ― over a period of three years ― a dramatic increase in conventional artillery ammunition production,” Doug Bush, the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, technology and logistics, said last week.”

Just madness. So many things falling apart and they keep buying weapons. I’m watching TraumaZone right now, a 7-part documentary about Russia from 1985–1999. The U.S. is going down the same path, but doing to itself what it did to Russia 30 years ago.

NATO Chief Says Full-Blown War With Russia Is a ‘Real Possibility’ by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post)

“NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned Friday that he fears a full-blown war between Russia and NATO is a “real possibility” in a rare acknowledgment of the dangers of backing Ukraine.

““I fear that the war in Ukraine will get out of control, and spread into a major war between NATO and Russia,” he said, according to The Telegraph. “If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong.””

How annoying will it be to have to live in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse because of these two dorks?

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Episode 256: Programmed to Kill by TrueAnon (Patreon)

This is a great episode that starts with San Fransisco’s proposal to use robots with deadly force for policing, moves on to tell us that this has already happened, to a discussion of the spectrum of what robots are, to how they’re being used in the military. Excellent reporting and insightful analysis by Liz and Brace.

Journalism & Media

The Story of the “Twitter Files” Is About Press Freedom, Not Twitter Personalities by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“Instead, it now appears that if a story is politically sensitive enough, Twitter executives feel entitled to take unprecedented steps to kill its reach based solely on their own personal feelings, a tactic that didn’t totally work here owing to the Post ’s high-profile status, but could easily succeed in a different set of circumstances with a less prominent media outlet.”

Naw, this is the Žižek-style “we knew, but now really know and cannot pretend not to know” that was au currant during Edward Snowden’s revelations, many, many moons and news cycles ago.

““[I]n the heat of a presidential campaign, restricting dissemination of newspaper articles (even if NY Post is far right) seems like it will invite more backlash than it will do good,” he wrote.”

That parenthetical, though, says a lot about the mindset from even the best one. We have to stop caring about the slant of the publisher if their information has been verified. Repeat after me: it matters more whether it’s true than who published it, not the other way around.

“The return to 2016 is fitting, since WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Clinton emails that year (which were separate from the State Department email scandal the Democrats reference above) is largely what spurred this push for tech censorship, with Twitter in particular coming under pressure from Congress to do more specifically about hacked material that could sway an election.”

Her mails were not hacked. They were leaked. Yes, it’s important, especially for legal reasons.

The ‘Twitter Papers’ Reveal the Totalitarians Among Us by Ron Paul (Antiwar.com)

“It is important to understand that both US political parties were involved in pushing Twitter to censor information they didn’t like. There is plenty of corruption to go around. However, as the Twitter Papers demonstrated, vastly more Tweets were censored at the demand of Democratic Party politicians simply because Twitter employees on the censorship team were overwhelmingly Democratic Party supporters.”

Yes Twitter can censor what it wants. But politicians used their leverage at Twitter to achieve a goal we’d explicitly forbidden them: suppressing and censoring speech. It was derivative, but the effect was the same. Certain speech was no longer allowed. I wonder if there are “NYT papers” or “WaPo papers” out there, just waiting to be leaked?

“Elon Musk himself openly stated before the release that, prior to his taking control of the company and engaging in mass firing, Twitter had been manipulating elections. So all those years we heard lies from the Washington elites that Russia was interfering in our elections when after all it was Twitter.”

The Twitter Files and Writing for the Maw by Freddie DeBoer (SubStack)

“I don’t see how any minimally honest person could conclude that an Eric Trump laptop scandal would play out exactly the same as a Hunter Biden laptop scandal. And isn’t the difference between them profoundly relevant to the prosecution of democracy?

“I don’t think there’s a lot there, with the Hunter Biden laptop. (I’m fully convinced that Hunter Biden is a scumbag, however.) I do think that there’s a lot there with how the media perceives and covers scandal. That’s inherently relevant. And if you think that Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss are the wrong people to cover that story, perhaps you should ask yourself about the social-professional conditions in media that have created a caste of outsiders who are the only reporters that many people trust. Perhaps you should think about cratering public trust in establishment media. Perhaps you should think about the Maw.”

“I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility. The Maw shreds nuance and destroys complexity and, more than anything, forces everyone to constantly arrange their self-presentation in a way that ensures they don’t fall on the wrong side of the culture war faultline. I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about the Twitter files and how they are being reported. The Maw insists that there’s nothing there at all.”

Twitter Files: The FBI Frequently Flagged Joke Tweets, Asked for Moderation by Robby Soave (Reason)

“As with previous Twitter Files disclosures, it’s not that this information was totally unsuspected; it was already abundantly clear that government officials were in regular communication with social media companies and flagging content for moderation. But it’s useful to see the scale of that interaction as well as some specific examples. The extent to which Big Tech and Big Government are working in tandem to crack down on dissent, contrarianism, and even humor is frankly disturbing.

“Social media companies have every right to moderate jokes if they really want to—and users can complain about the jokes or the moderation, of course—but the FBI’s role in all this raises the specter of a free speech violation, even if the government wasn’t literally forcing Twitter to take action. It is inappropriate for the FBI to report joke tweets to content moderators and take a what-are-you-doing-about-this tone. Social media companies might feel like they have little choice but to cooperate with law enforcement, given that political figures in both parties are constantly threatening to punish the platforms for making decisions that displease Republicans and Democrats.”

From the Twitter Files: Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“We learn more and more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags social media content in a neverending, cyclical process. The state isn’t a bit actor in a mostly-private “content moderation” movement. It’s the central player, clearly the boss of the whole operation, and clearly also the driving force in its expansion, a truth we can show in pictures.”

“We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity — your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement — and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, “bounced,” deleted or “visibility filtered” by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons.

“The FBI is not doing this as part of any effort to build criminal cases. They’ve taken on this new authority unilaterally, as part of an apparently massive new effort to control and influence public opinion.”

“A lot of this was known before, but we’re seeing how it works at most every link of the chain now. It’s exciting, and I have every hope we’ll know twice as much by next week.”

Science & Nature

As the Arctic warms, beavers are moving in by Sharon Levy (Ars Technica)

““Beavers really alter ecosystems,” says Thomas Jung, senior wildlife biologist for Canada’s Yukon government. In fact, their ability to transform landscapes may be second only to that of humans: Before they were nearly extirpated by fur trappers, millions of beavers shaped the flow of North American waters. In temperate regions, beaver dams affect everything from the height of the water table to the kinds of shrubs and trees that grow.”

“Aerial photography from the 1950s showed no beaver ponds at all in Arctic Alaska. But in a recent study, Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, scanned satellite images of nearly every stream, river and lake in the Alaskan tundra and found 11,377 beaver ponds […]”

““During greenhouse intervals in the Earth’s deep past, we have forested ecosystems all the way up to 85, 86 degrees north and south latitude,” McElwain says. There were no places on Earth where the climate was too cold for trees to grow during these times. And where there are trees, the animals that depend on them—such as beavers—can thrive.”

“Scientists have come to view their landscape engineering as beneficial, and even critical in some vulnerable ecosystems. In many places south of the tundra, conservationists have moved to protect and reintroduce beavers to restore stream and wetland habitats.”

Synthetic fibers discovered in Antarctic air, seawater, sediment and sea ice as the ‘pristine’ continent becomes a sink for plastic pollution by Oliver Steeds (Eurekalert!)

“Ahead of the Global Plastic Treaty discussions, they call on policy makers to:”

• Reduce plastic pollution and production globally, by creating a robust global plastics treaty that builds on national and regional initiatives;
• Align plastic reduction actions with natural and societal targets to achieve multiple positive outcomes for society;
• Empower local communities to co-develop and use programmes that support full life-cycle solutions to plastic waste management.

“They add that concerned individuals can also play their part by adopting simple lifestyle habits to reduce synthetic microfibre pollution. These include:”

• Fill your washing machine: more space to move around in the wash results in microfibres falling off.
• Wash at 30C: gentle cycles and lower temperatures decreases microfibre shedding.
• Ditch the dryer: tumble dryers generate about 40 times more microfibers than washing machines.
• Microfibre capture for washing machines, e.g. GuppyFriend (https://guppyfriend.com) or Coraball (https://www.coraball.com).
• Choose natural fibres, e.g. organic natural fibres like cotton, linen, hemp.
• Avoid microfibre cleaning cloths − use natural alternatives.
• Wash textiles less!

Orion spacecraft splashes down, completing Artemis I mission by Bryan Dyne (WSWS)

“The Starship HLS does, however, exemplify the profit-driven character of the Artemis program. Landing on the Moon is not primarily seen as an endeavor of human exploration, but a means to shovel billions of dollars into the pockets of the already super-rich. A genuinely renewed space program is only possible when the constraints of capitalism on spaceflight are eradicated.”

“In reality, there is no reason to go to the Moon before heading to Mars. To go from Earth’s surface to being captured by Mars’ gravity requires a delta-V of 13.67 kilometers per second, less than what is needed to land on the Moon and only a little more than what is needed to orbit the Moon.

“The orbital mechanics are clear: the claims that going to the Moon is a “gateway” to Mars are absurd. There are commercial, political and military interests that drive such conceptions, but not scientific ones.”

“[…] the 3 MJ released in this experiment is a big step up from the amount of energy deposited in the target by the National Ignition Facility’s lasers. But it’s an enormous step down from the 300 MJ or so of grid power that was needed to get the lasers to fire in the first place.

“[…]

“Tammy Ma leads the DOE’s Inertial Fusion Energy Institutional Initiative, which is designed to explore its possible use for electricity generation. She estimated that simply switching to current laser technology would immediately knock 20 percent off the energy use. She also mentioned that these lasers could fire far more regularly than the existing hardware at the National Ignition Facility.”

But that’s only down to 240MJ (300MJ − 20%), which is still 8x as much energy in as came out. There’s also the problem of repeatability. The thing ignited one capsule for a microburst of power. There was no second capsule, to say nothing of multiple capsules per minute.

This is just making a lot of noise to fool the press into thinking the U.S. has solved fusion somehow. It hasn’t. It’s not even on a productive track with laser-induced fusion. Tokamak-based designs are much closer to realization. (Still 20 years away, though! 😜)

Art & Literature

A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959): One of the science fiction works of the era depicting the consequences of nuclear war by Cordell Gascoigne, Sandy English (WSWS)

“The literature of the time did raise questions about freedom of expression, political repression, conformity and authoritarianism (especially in the light of Nazism and the Holocaust), but it was unable or unwilling to examine the most profound causes of war in the 20th century—the existence of the profit system with its division of the world into competing nation-states—and the reactionary political and social forces that threatened to hurl the planet into a Third World War.”

Chokepoint Capitalism review – art for sale by Kitty Drake (The Guardian)

“Culture is the bait adverts are sold around, but artists see almost nothing of the billions Google, Facebook and Apple and make off their backs. We have entered a new era of “chokepoint capitalism”, in which businesses snake their way between audiences and creatives to harvest money that should rightfully belong to the artist.”

“Google and Facebook make billions selling advertisers the most intimate facts about your life – whether you’re depressed, or suffering erectile dysfunction, or thinking about cheating on your partner – but it is all a con. There is no hard evidence to show that harvesting a customer’s private information makes them any easier to sell to. There is something depressing about this (data-mining might not actually work, but Google will continue to sell your secrets for as long as advertisers keep buying them).”

“What makes artists uniquely vulnerable to this kind of exploitation is that they are liable to work for nothing. Corporations free ride off of the “human urge to create”.”

Happens with teachers and nurses, too. Open-source software developers, as well. Pretty much anyone who enjoys what they do—or think that it matters—will work for less.

“One really heartening thing about this book is its insistence that no matter what your place is in the cultural ecosystem, you are entitled to get paid decently for what you do.”

Philosophy & Sociology

Cancel culture is turning healthy tensions into irreconcilable conflicts by Fintan O'Toole (Prospect Magazine)

““All great truths,” wrote Bernard Shaw, “begin as blasphemies.” But not all blasphemies, we must add, are great truths—some of them are vile lies. Public discourse has to hover between these facts. Sanitise common speech and democracy has no immune system. Let the privileged and the malign say what they want without challenge and democracy will succumb to their toxicity.”

No, i don’t think so. Let everyone say what they want. Let them be corrected. Let the people decide. That’s democracy. You may not get the result you want, but you’ll have what we deserve. Democracy might vote itself out of existence. Education is paramount, but elites are only interested in brainwashing.

“The culture warriors want to make cancellation a blood sport in which the enemy is obliterated. It is not a game that anyone who values democracy ought to play. Reasoned criticism and the practice of accountability are much harder than placing your enemies beyond the pale. But civil society is impossible without them.”

“An old order of decent discourse is dying. A new, much more open one is struggling to be born. We must hasten its arrival while holding open as much space as possible for the antiquated virtue of tolerance.”

Technology

Why I’m Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency by Scott Siskind (Astral Codex Ten)

“[…] interesting projects, plus a long tail of thousands of scams. If you’re a knowledgeable person using crypto for some legitimate reason, you’ll use some well-regarded crypto platform and probably not get scammed.”

I think that this is patently untrue. There are so many ostensibly knowledgeable people who used well-regarded platforms and lost all of their money. This isn’t to say that there’s no use for a database that doesn’t all data to be deleted that’s combined with a zero-trust consensus algorithm, but just that all of the uses that we’ve seen so far have either been outright scams or so unstable that they might as well have been.

Obligatory ChatGPT Post by Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)

Here is the first paragraph of the text written by ChatGPT.

“As with any new technology, the development and deployment of ChatGPT is likely to have a significant impact on the field of cybersecurity. In many ways, ChatGPT and other AI technologies hold great promise for improving the ability of organizations and individuals to defend against cyber threats. At the same time, however, the use of these technologies also raises important questions and concerns about the potential risks and challenges they may pose.”

Schneier deems it “not bad”. I deem it useless garbage. It’s grammatically correct, for the most part. The syntax is fine; it’s the semantics—the important part—that is wasting everyone’s time.

It’s fantastic that an AI wrote this, but it’s just rehashing stuff it read elsewhere. It’s writing a tsunami of text that kind of sounds like it might know what it’s talking about if you don’t look too closely, but there’s nothing original, and it often doesn’t make any sense if you stop skimming. They’ve re-invented college students. Fantastic.

I wonder if most people can even notice that ChatGPT actually sucks at writing. Most people have terrible reading comprehension and wouldn’t know good writing if it smacked them in the mouth. They’re used to reading absolute twaddle online. Probably what ChatGPT produces is just like all the crap I never read on CNN or Engadget or any of the other absolute cesspits of terrible writing online.

This will not end well. Instead of elevating anything, ChatGPT and its ilk will generate so much text that it will subsume us all in a blanket of words that make no sense but that we don’t understand and can’t stop skimming. Ohne mich.

Programming

You might not need a CRDT by Paul Butler (Drifting in Space)

“For example, suppose our document state represents a directed acyclic graph as a list, where elements can reference other items by index. Even if each replica ensures that changes made to it don’t introduce a cycle, two innocent changes made concurrently on two replicas could combine to break the invariant. If we naively try to replicate this tree by replicating the underlying list CRDT, we lose control of this invariant. Two concurrent modifications may result in a cycle when they are combined, even if neither introduces a cycle in isolation.”

“When we instead have a global order of changes, data structures with invariants are easier to reason about. The authoritative server can apply the change locally to detect if invariants are violated. If they are, instead of broadcasting the change, it can notify the sender that there is a conflict.”

This is different than when merging source code. No-one guarantees the semantics of the result. You can run the CI, but there might still be undetected problems. I suppose it’s just that correctness is easier to prove in a game server or a simple data structure like a chat conversation than in source code.

“A general theme of successful multiplayer approaches we’ve seen is not overcomplicating things. We’ve heard a number of companies confess that their multiplayer approach feels naive — especially compared to the academic literature on the topic — and yet it works just fine in practice.”

Excellent advice: don’t bother fixing problems you don’t have.

GitHub Copilot preliminary experience report by Mark Seemann (ploeh blog)

“In general I don’t think that typing is a productivity bottleneck, and I’m sceptical of productivity tools, and particularly code generators. The more code a code base contains, the more code there is to read. Accelerating code production doesn’t strike me as a goal in itself.”

“While I couldn’t remember the details of Hedgehog’s API, once I saw the suggestion, I recognised Gen.frequency, so I understood it as an appropriate code suggestion. The productivity gain, if there is one, may come from saving you the effort of looking up unfamiliar APIs, rather than saving you some keystrokes. In this example, I already knew of the Gen.frequency function − I just couldn’t recall the exact name and type. This enabled me to evaluate Copilot’s suggestion and deem it correct. If I hadn’t known that API already, how could I have known whether to trust Copilot?”

“I’ve encountered my fair share of these people. When editing code, they make small adjustments and do cursory manual testing until ‘it looks like it works’. If they have to start a new feature or are otherwise faced with a metaphorical blank page, they’ll copy some code from somewhere else and use that as a starting point. You’d think that Copilot could enhance the productivity of such people, but I’m not sure. It might actually slow them down. These people don’t fully understand the code they themselves ‘write’, so why should we expect them to understand the code that Copilot suggests?”

Software horror show: SAP Concur by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse)

“The actual authors of SAP Concur’s phone app did none of these things. I understand. Budgets are small, deadlines are tight, product managers can be pigheaded. Sometimes the programmer doesn’t have the resources to do the best solution.

“But this list isn’t even alphabetized.

“There are two places named Los Alamos; they are not adjacent. There are two places in Spain; they are also not adjacent. This is inexcusable. There is no resource constraint that is so stringent that it would prevent the programmers from replacing displaySelectionList(matches) with displaySelectionList(matches.sorted()).

“They just didn’t.

“And then whoever reviewed the code, if there was a code review, didn’t say “hey, why didn’t you use displaySortedSelectionList here?”

“And then the product manager didn’t point at the screen and say “wouldn’t it be better to alphabetize these?”

“And the UX person, if there was one, didn’t raise any red flag, or if they did nothing was done.”

WebKit Features in Safari 16.2 by Jen Simmons (Webkit Blog)

CSS Alignment allows web developers to describe how space should be allocated around or between items in both Flexbox and Grid formatting contexts. It includes multiple properties like justify-content, align-items, and place-self. There are many values that these properties support, including three for baseline alignment: baseline, first baseline, and last baseline. Safari has supported the first two since implementing support for CSS Alignment.

Safari 16.2 adds support for last baseline, making it possible to align Flexbox and Grid items along the baseline of the last line of text they contain. This means the following rules are now supported:

align-items: last baseline;
align-content: last baseline;
align-self: last baseline;
justify-items: last baseline;
justify-self: last baseline;
place-items: last baseline normal;
place-self: last baseline normal;