Links and Notes for December 23rd, 2022

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun
• Video Games

COVID-19

An estimated 250 million Chinese people were infected with COVID-19 through December 20 by Aaron Edwards (WSWS)

“According to a leaked report presented by Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Deputy Director Sun Yang at a closed-door health briefing last Wednesday, roughly 250 million people were infected with COVID-19 across China within just the first 20 days of December.

“This massive number of infections amounts to 18 percent of China’s 1.4 billion people and starkly contrasts with official figures of the National Health Commission (NHC), which reported 62,592 symptomatic cases over the same 20-day period. Sun estimated that on a single day, Tuesday, December 20, roughly 37 million people were infected.”

“The abandonment of regular testing and even the reporting of cases by the NHC has resulted in vast undercounts of infections and deaths, prompting a hypocritical response from the imperialist powers and other countries which have overseen mass infection policies throughout the pandemic.”

This is such an ungenerous way of formulating what happened. Jesus, so uncharitable.

“The direct pressure of major corporations such as Nike and Apple, which in November threatened to move their businesses elsewhere if supply chain and labor-related shortages continued, prompted the rapid lifting of Zero-COVID. China is expected to be the world’s cheap labor sweatshop, and the CCP is forcing the working class back into dangerous conditions that will lead to their sickness, disability and death.”

Kill your people or we’ll starve everybody. We need our new, shiny phones.

• Once he went over the waterfall, the lazy bastard stopping even trying to swim.
• Once the car hit the wall head-on, the idiot stopped steering.

Jesus, some people just can’t lean back, shut up, and just pray for people.

Economy & Finance

The Road to De-Dollarisation Will Run Through Saudi Arabia by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“In 1993, China became a net importer of oil, surpassing the United States as the largest importer of crude oil by 2017. Half of that oil comes from the Arabian Peninsula, and more than a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports go to China. Despite being a major importer of oil, China has reduced its carbon emissions.”

And is, by far, the world’s largest exporter, meaning that they use that energy to produce the goods that we consume. Whether they’re using the energy to produce shit that no-one needs is another question.

“Simon proposed that the US purchase large amounts of Saudi oil in dollars and that the Saudis use these dollars to buy US Treasury bonds and weaponry and invest in US banks as a way to recycle vast Saudi oil profits. And so the petrodollar was born, which anchored the new dollar-denominated world trade and investment system. If the Saudis even hinted towards withdrawing this arrangement, which would take at least a decade to implement, it would seriously challenge the monetary privilege afforded to the US.”

The U.S. would most certainly and violently yank on the leash.

“In 2015, 90% of bilateral trade between China and Russia was conducted in dollars, but by 2020 it fell below 50%. When Western countries froze Russian central bank reserves held in their banks, this was tantamount to ‘crossing the Rubicon’, as economist Adam Tooze wrote. ‘It brings conflict in the heart of the international monetary system. If the central bank reserves of a G20 member entrusted to the accounts of another G20 central bank are not sacrosanct, nothing in the financial world is. We are at financial war’.”

Yeah, obviously. Stop letting yourself get distracted by one side’s narrative unless you’re really on board with its actual ideology and goals. Otherwise, you run the the risk of being a useful idiot.

“Countries under unilateral US sanctions – such as Iran and Russia – were cut off from the SWIFT system, which connects 11,000 financial institutions across the globe. After the 2014 US sanctions, Russia created the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), which is mainly designed for domestic users but has attracted central banks from Central Asia, China, India, and Iran. In 2015, China created the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), run by the People’s Bank of China, which is gradually being used by other central banks.”

“Brazil’s new minister of finance from 1 January 2023, Fernando Haddad, has championed the creation of a South American digital currency called the sur (meaning ‘south’ in Spanish) in order to create stability in interregional trade and to establish ‘monetary sovereignty’. The sur would build upon a mechanism already used by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay called the Local Currency Payment System or SML”

“Under the prevailing conditions of the capitalist system, China would have to allow for the full convertibility of the yuan, end capital controls, and liberalise its financial markets in order for its currency to replace the dollar as the global currency. These are unlikely options, which means that there will be no imminent dethroning of dollar hegemony, and talk of a ‘petroyuan’ is premature.”

“Western media has been near silent on the region’s humiliating loss of economic prestige and dominance during Xi’s trip to Riyadh. China can now simultaneously navigate complex relations with Iran, the GCC, Russia, and Arab League states. Furthermore, the West cannot ignore the SCO’s expansion into West Asia and North Africa. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Qatar are either affiliated or in discussions with the SCO, whose role is evolving.”

No wonder they’re shitting their pants. The gravy train is headed for a siding.

The Economic Realities We Face at the End of 2022 by Richard D. Wolff (CounterPunch)

“The presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden illustrate the shift (even as orthodox economics finds it awkward having celebrated laissez-faire for so long). Objections from European, Canadian, and other corners flood into Washington against new U.S. subsidies for automobiles produced inside the United States.”

Who the fuck has actually supported laissez faire unless it meant laissez moi faire quel que je veux mais vous ne pouvez pas faire la même chose. We are forever paying lip service to a thing that never existed (even Richard Wolff). Maybe they’re chiding themselves for having pretended to be laissez faire for a while when it’s no longer necessary to pretend.

“[…] the USSR led global movements against capitalism, but they mostly focused on displacing private employers with state officials as employers. For most in that generation, capitalism meant private employers, whereas socialism meant state employers. Capitalism’s basic workplace structure—employers versus employees—persisted in both its state and private forms. Capitalism’s two forms contested and worked their profound influences everywhere, culminating in World War II.”

“The USSR was strong enough to provide some counterweight to U.S. military power, chiefly by creating space for the emergence of replicas of its socialism (state employers rather than private employers, in conjunction with state-planned distributions rather than free markets).”

I repeat myself, but: no-one has had so-called free markets, uninhibited by state intervention. The U.S. guided its markets with other means, but the outcomes were just as planned. It continues today. The military budget is nothing if not the state deciding which industries are important. The CHIPS act as well. The difference is that the U.S. funnels money from taxpayers to a handful of oligarchs. Oh, wait, there is no difference.

“Socialists were split by World War I. On one side were those (Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs, and Vladimir Lenin) who upheld the primacy of the anti-capitalist class struggle and transition to a post-capitalist economic and social system. On the other side were those who took sides in the global power struggles of capitalist powers and found convenient socialist-sounding rationales for doing so.”

A Conversation With Yanis Varoufakis by Charles Stevenson – Matthew Stevenson (CounterPunch)

“Varoufakis wrote the best-selling book, Adults in the Room, an account of the negotiations to save Greece from its creditors, and he has helped launch a new political party: Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). He now sits in parliament as a member of its Greek branch, and is also an active member of the Progressive International, an organization that supports like-minded causes around the world.”

“So I realise that here you had two models. One was assuming that the employers are stupid and the unions are smart and the other one the opposite. Both of them received the same support from the data. So that was my thesis. And once I did that, I realized that economists were very interested in this work. I had honed in on a basic problem that economics has: it is not an empirical science, because when you have two completely different hypotheses, both supported to the same extent by the data, then empiricism simply breaks down. And it was so easy to convert my thesis to a PhD that I did so. And then I started getting offers for jobs from economics departments, even though I wasn’t an economist.”

“We had already been in the Eurozone since 1998-1999 before it was created. The decision was made that we were going to get in. Interest rates were locked, and the exchange rates were locked, so even though we didn’t have euros coming out of ATMs, we were effectively in the euro from that time. That’s when the huge tsunami of loans comes into Greece because German bankers, in particular, and French bankers start looking at the Greeks. Even though, in their eyes, we were poor, corrupt, and lazy, we owned our own homes, and we didn’t have debt. And that’s a dream come true for a banker. Bankers dream of potential customers who have no debt and have collateral. And we were a whole nation of them, because back then nobody had credit cards. Nobody had mortgages. You couldn’t get them even if you wanted them. And people actually had a moral indignation towards them. My parents, I remember, were completely against the idea of owing a single penny.”

“Banks were actually sending people credit cards that nobody had applied for. So you know that this thing was not sustainable: you don’t need to be an economist to know that. Between 2000 and 2008, we had a real growth rate of 5% at a time when Germany was on 1.5%. No investment, no increases in productivity, a ballooning external deficit, and ballooning private debt. When we entered the Eurozone, we had private debt of 5% and we ended up with 140%.”

“[…] agree with everybody who saw that after the Second World War, there was an opportunity to end all wars. The European Union as a means of ending war in Europe, and therefore diminishing the prospect of Europe inflicting huge pain on the rest of the planet, that was a good one. The criticism I have regards the way we did it: we created it as a cartel for Big Business.”

“The EU employs a contradictory scheme: on the one hand, it is bringing peace and some guarantees of human rights to member states and their citizens. That’s why I support it. But at the same time, it is imposing a cartel-like system which is its own worst enemy, and is incapable of stability.”

It is antidemocratic at its very core because they have zero control of their own economies. Ok, not zero. Little to no.

“Now, the tragedy was that Europe didn’t have a Hamiltonian moment by saying that if you’re going to have a common currency, you need to have common debt; if you’re going to have a common debt, you have to have common taxation; if you’re going to have common taxation, you have to have a common parliament. In other words, you’re federated. Instead, they decided to go for a monetary union.”

“[…] why I am completely against the idea of equality. Equality of what? We used to be all about freedom. And then we allowed the Right to take over freedom and claim it as its own. The whole point about the early feminist movement was women’s liberation, not equality. Then suddenly we all became Social Democrats and we care about something called social justice and John Rawls’s idiocy.”

“[…] that is no argument for replacing GDP with something else. Because we live under capitalism which values only exchange values, not use values: use values have gone. Experiential values – the smell of the pine forest: who cares? Can you monetize it? If you can’t, it’s got no value under capitalism, right? So capitalism is like a shark that needs constantly to keep moving and the equivalent being to produce more GDP.”

“[…] the whole discussion between growth/degrowth leaves me completely cold. Now, we need to reduce the amount of cement that we produce and use – toxins as well, certainly CO2. It would be good to reduce the amount of steel that we’re producing, because we know that steel production is destroying the planet (at least until we find ways of using green hydrogen to do it). But degrowth? The opposite of grow is reduce. It’s not degrow. Reduce the use of the things that are destroying the planet. That means moving away from the media, which is dominated by the companies whose job it is to put in your soul desires that you never had. But that, again, is overthrowing capitalism.”

✊✊✊

“I write every day, even if it’s only half an hour. It’s therapy. I need to do it like other people need to see their psychiatrist or go for a walk. So I always have a book on the boil, so to speak. And yes: I write on airplanes, in toilets – everywhere I can steal five minutes. And even if I don’t have the time, I read what I wrote the last time; I comb it; I add a sentence. That’s the thread running through my life.”

😬😬😬

Public Policy & Politics

Former German Chancellor Merkel admits the Minsk agreement was merely to buy time for Ukraine’s arms build-up by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US has pursued the goal of remaining the “sole world power.” To this end, Washington has waged numerous criminal wars and expanded NATO into Eastern Europe. Now it also wants to integrate Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics into NATO and subjugate Russia in order to plunder its resources and isolate China.”

“The SWP paper also addresses the devastating human and social costs of the war in eastern Ukraine. In 2017, for example, the “proportion of people without access to balanced nutrition” was 86 percent in the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and 55 percent in Kiev-controlled areas. Since 2014, tens of thousands of homes have been damaged and destroyed. According to the OSCE, both sides—but particularly the Ukrainian Armed Forces—targeted civilian property.”

“The regime in Kiev, it said, did not care. “Quite a few politicians in Kiev regard the Donbas as an unnecessary economic burden and its population as backward-looking and politically unreliable. Its willingness to work to alleviate humanitarian hardship in the areas affected by conflict is correspondingly low,” the SWP paper says.”

“Russia’s decision to take military action against Ukraine was the predictable—and intended—reaction to this NATO offensive. That does not make it any less reactionary. The Putin regime represents the interests of the Russian oligarchs who looted the Soviet Union’s socialised property and are at war with the Russian working class.”

South Africans are Fighting for Crumbs by Vijay Prashad & Zoe Alexandra (CounterPunch)

“In the last general election in 2019, Ramaphosa won with 57.5 percent of the vote, still ahead of any of its opponents.”

Obviously. 57.5% (which is more than half)…

“[…] the new government led by former South African President Nelson Mandela agreed to a “negotiated settlement” with the old apartheid elite. This “settlement,” Irvin Jim argued, “left intact the structure of white monopoly capital,” which included their private ownership of the country’s minerals and energy as well as finance. The South African Reserve Bank committed itself, he told us, “to protect the value of white wealth.” In the new South Africa, he said, “Africans can go to the beach. They can take their children to the school of their choice. They can choose where to live. But access to these rights is determined by their economic position in society. If you have no access to economic power, then you have none of these liberties.””

Cool! Fully capitalist, then! Enlightened capitalism: where you can only discriminate along class lines. Can’t afford it? Can’t have it.

“How a country with so much wealth can be so poor is answered by the lack of public control South Africa has over its metals and minerals. “South Africa needs to take public ownership of these minerals and metals, develop the processing of these through industrialization, and provide the benefits to the marginalized, landless, and dispossessed South Africans, most of whom are Black,” said Jim.”

Can the Left Disagree Without Being Disagreeable? by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“The thing about war zones that is often not talked about is the noise: the loud noises of the military equipment and the sound of gunfire and bombs. The sound of a modern bomb is extraordinary, punctuated as it often is in civilian areas by the cries of little children. Imagine the trauma inflicted upon generations and generations of children by the noise itself, not to speak of the neurological fear of the adults around them and the great loss of life that they experience from early in their lives. There is no war that should be supported based on the catastrophic cost paid by humanity for the violence.”

“There is no war that I have experienced that has been as devastating as the war on Iraq, which snatched the lives of millions, devastated the lives of the entire population, and left the country scarred beyond belief. No doubt other reporters who are in Ukraine will come with their own stories. There is no comparison of warzones, one more deadly than the other, although the sheer destruction of Iraq compares to the pain inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bombs.”

And no-one said a word in the west. No sanctions. No endless speculation about the unprovoked nature of the attack.

“I oppose this war as I oppose every war, which is why I have written – since 2014 – for the need for negotiation and for the need for neighbours to find a way to live with each other. It is peculiar that a call for negotiation between Russia and Ukraine is now painted as a ‘talking point’ of Vladimir Putin rather than a gesture towards peace.”

“To be sure, I am impressed by the Chinese government’s many policies, such as the way it handled the pandemic, the way it has eradicated absolute poverty, and the way it has managed the social development of the population. If you compare China with India, you will have no problem seeing the impressive developments in the former.”

“History is a bundle of contradictions; social policy is fraught with difficult choices: to believe that history is a sequence of questions with one pure answer is erroneous and it creates a fratricidal culture in the left. We need to be far more generous with each other, able to hold conversations without resort to insults and abuses.”

Between Myth and History by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“How sweet it will be for our Republic when the day arrives on which we admit we have failed. What splendid vistas will lie before us when we at last accept that our idea of who we are and what we are meant to do in the world has been defeated. In short, we are a nation desperately in need of failure and defeat. We need these things precisely so that we can realize ourselves and our great, underserved potential in new ways and as fully as we can—this for our own sake but also for the world’s.”

“The blows of greatest magnitude were to our hearts and minds. We had lived for centuries on the assumption that history, as Toynbee wonderfully put it, was something that happened to other people. We considered ourselves immune from it —from the depredations and uncertainties of time itself. All of a sudden it landed on us that we weren’t.”

“We have made a lot of messes since 2001—we make one in Europe and Ukraine as we speak, and we can hardly wait to make another with China—but we have never since that day been able to do what we want, where we want, as we want—not with any kind of result to our benefit—or anyone else’s for that matter.”

“William Appleman Williams titled his last book, published five years after Saigon rose, as I prefer to put it, and I hope you don’t mind, Empire as a Way of Life. This is where we are—hooked on a faded, collapsing hegemony that cannot be salvaged and in any case is not worth salvaging.”

“Victors, by contrast, work on the assumption that they have it right, they have proven out, and all they need to do is keep on as they have. Victors have no great need to think about anything.”

“One of Wolfgang’s studies in The Culture of Defeat is the American South. He writes in that chapter, “Victory, like revolution, can devour its children, particularly those who expect more from it than what it actually delivers.””

“The question before us is what we propose to do once we have got this done. What kind of nation do we want to be, with what kind of policies? What will be our purpose? I define the objective as a post-exceptionalist America. Much else, and maybe all else, will flow from this, it seems to me.”

“All of us, were we to have leadership with the guts to embark on a new path, would soon discover that our claim to exceptionalism and all the responsibilities it imposes upon us have been an immense burden.”

“Imagine a world where a multitude of voices and sensibilities are aroused to address tasks, challenges, crises that are common to us all. What new ways would things open up to us—providing we first have the courage to open our minds and escape our obsession with our own voice as the only one the world needs to hear.”

A Lexicon for Disaster by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“Sole purpose/MAD was the cornerstone philosophy behind successive American presidential administrations. In 2002, however, the administration of President George W. Bush did away with the Sole Purpose doctrine, and instead adopted a nuclear posture which held that the U.S. could use nuclear weapons preemptively, even in certain non-nuclear scenarios.

“Barack Obama, upon winning the presidency, promised to do away with the Bush-era policy of preemption but, when his eight-year tenure as the American commander in chief was complete, the policy of nuclear preemption remained in place.

“Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, not only retained the policy of nuclear preemption, but expanded it to create even more possibilities for the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. Joe Biden, the current occupant of the White House, campaigned on a promise to restore Sole Purpose to its original intent.

“However, upon assuming office, Biden’s Sole Purpose policy ran headfirst into The Interagency which, according to someone in the know, was not ready for such a change.”

What a surprise. Circumstances conspire to prevent Joe from doing something he was never really interested in doing anyway. Pull the other one.

“As such, Russian strategic planners must not only plan for a world where the treaty-imposed caps are in effect, but also the possibility of a U.S. “break out” scenario where the B-52H bombers and Trident missiles launch tubes are brought back to operational status. This scenario is literally the textbook definition of unpredictability and is why Russia looks askance at the idea of negotiating a new arms control treaty with the U.S. As long as the U.S. favors treaty language which produces such unpredictability, Russia will more than likely opt out.”

“That the intelligence was never shared with the Russians, further eroded the viability of the U.S. as a treaty partner. When the Russians offered up the actual 9M729 missile for physical inspection to convince the U.S. to remain in the INF treaty, the U.S. balked, preventing not only U.S. officials from participating, but also any of its NATO allies.”

“In the end, the U.S. withdrew from the INF treaty in August 2019. Less than a month later, the U.S. carried out a test launch of the Tomahawk cruise missile from a Mk. 41 launch tube. The Russians had been right all along — the U.S., in abandoning the ABM treaty, had used the deployment of so-called new ABM sites as a cover for the emplacement of INF-capable ground-launched missiles on Russia’s doorstep.”

Talk about burning long-term goodwill for supposed short-term gain. “Anything to win, baby” is just so asinine, it sets my teeth on edge. I don’t know what duplicitous thing the Russians did, but we’ve done nothing but undermine trust with pretty much everyone, trusting in the historical certainty that everyone will be required to treat with us, whether they like it or not. We are about to see whether the U.S. can force Russia’s hand and make it bow, like the rest of Europe already has.

The F-35: Sales to Allied Countries Don’t Mean It’s A Great Airplane by Roger Thompson (CounterPunch)

“The GAO found that the entire F-35 fleet averaged a full mission capable rate of 39% in 2020, which was an improvement from the 32% the year before. The Air Force’s F-35A variant performed the best with a fleet average of 54% that year, a rate of performance that is still far below the 80% mission capable rate needed for an effective aircraft fleet (and even significantly below the program’s low 65% availability standard). The Marine Corps’ fleet of short takeoff and landing F-35Bs and the Navy’s fleet of F-35Cs, which are tailored for use on aircraft carriers, lag far behind. The F-35B fleet’s full mission capable rate got worse between 2019 and 2020, dropping from 23% to 15%. The F-35C fleet showed some improvement during that period, but that is not saying much. That fleet’s rate went from 6.4% to 6.8%.”

“Finally, Grazier concludes that “More than twenty years into the F-35’s development, the aircraft remains in every practical and legal sense nothing more than a very expensive prototype. The simple fact that the contractors and the program office haven’t been able to deliver an aircraft whose effectiveness has been proven through a full operational testing program suggests the original Joint Strike Fighter concept was flawed and beyond any practical technological reality. With little progress and significant regression in 2021, it seems that the F-35 program will remain in its current stagnant state for the foreseeable future.””

Cool. Good for Switzerland and Germany.

“So it appears that Lockheed bribed German officials and those of other countries to buy the F-104, which is very telling. Could it be that this sort of thing still goes on today? I have no proof of this, but if so, it would help explain why the F-35 is so popular with allied air forces despite its poor performance.”

My thoughts exactly. It explains Amherd’s mealy-mouthed justifications of what a good deal she got weren’t even partly convincing. I believe that she personally got a good deal out of it, though.

China’s Nationwide Protests Have Deep Roots: An Interview with Jane Hayward by Alex Doherty (Jacobin)

“This prompted protests because sometimes the transfers were based on dubious legality. People in villages were losing their agricultural land, which was being used to build tower blocks, often against their will. Meanwhile, local officials are getting quite rich from land revenue. They had strategies for dealing with the protests so that they didn’t spread across the country.”

And they say the Chinese are completely unlike us. Pish tosh.

“This is what Xi Jinping and the leaders at the top of the Communist Party have been trying to do: rein in the state-backed debt. This caused huge problems in the property sector because once all that state-backed debt began to dry up, as it were, the property industry began to get very shaky. Since the summer of 2021, we’ve seen companies like Evergrande, which is a massive construction company, start to get into real trouble. I’ve seen figures that say the Chinese economy is something like 30 percent based on the construction industry in one way or another. So this is a massive shock to the entire economy.”

But they declared that housing was not an asset…and then started doing something about it.

“One of the extraordinary things about this protest, and one of the reasons that it is so significant, is that workers usually operate in an extremely oppressive, closed-loop system whereby they have no life at all outside of work. They can’t leave. They don’t know when they’re going to be able to leave. It’s bordering on a prison system.”

“News of this traveled around the country and resonated with many. It was a fairly rare moment that produced cross-class connections, alliances, or mutual recognition. Those stuck in ongoing lockdowns had empathy for those working in such oppressive conditions.”

“My understanding is that there is a lack of information among many people about what has been going on in Xinjiang. I also think a lot of people see exaggeration by Western media, for example, even though reports on internment camps are based on serious empirical studies. On the other hand, it does seem that a lot of Chinese people have concerns about what’s going on in Xinjiang and are asking questions. I think that even people who think that the state is doing the right thing in educating people out of their superstitious beliefs might well see it as a future security problem and therefore perhaps not the most rational thing to be doing.”

Empirical studies. Clutch away at that straw to justify continued focus on Xinjiang as top priority.

“I did see one of an elderly woman in an urban residential complex saying to a crowd of neighbors: we should all stop wearing masks, they’re not wearing masks overseas and foreigners are looking down on us because we’re all stuck wearing masks. I thought that was quite striking.”

Yeah, that’s striking all right.

“China’s persistence in pursuing its zero-COVID strategy is not a crazy one given that the country’s health system is comparable to that of other middle-income countries. There’s a relative lack of ICU beds and not the number of health professionals, nurses in particular, that you would want, especially in rural areas. There is also the relative lack of vaccine uptake, particularly in the case of those over eighty years old.”

“In addition to this, the government may have thought that if it tried to push through mandated vaccinations, that would itself lead to coordinated protests. That may be one reason why authorities were resistant to pushing it.”

What? no mandate? People had a choice? In China? </sarcasm>

“The scale of the protests and their prominence are really extraordinary, and we haven’t seen anything like it since Tiananmen. So in that sense the comparison is fair. But attempts to see these more recent protests as students calling for democracy or even indeed students calling for liberal democracy is, I think, problematic. I think it was oversimplistic coverage of what was actually going on in 1989, and I think it’s an oversimplistic coverage of what’s been going on this time as well.”

“People in urban areas during the Mao period would be attached to their work units. That was a job for life, and they would be supplied with all kinds of social benefits, schooling, and housing. They may not have been able to make huge amounts of money or have huge amounts of freedom in terms of where they could go and look for jobs or move around the country, but they were protected. As the market reforms took off, there were all kinds of benefits that came with them, but people’s lives became more insecure than they had been. And so among the protestors demands was more social protection from these market reforms.”

“The press overseas didn’t pick up on these workers. It highlighted the student calls for democracy instead, equated those with calls for liberal democracy, and therefore misunderstood a really fundamental part of what the movement was about.”

What a fucking shock. That wasn’t an accident. The West sees what it wants to see.

“There is a group of loosely grouped scholars called “critical China scholars,” who are excellent. The group includes Eli Friedman, Rebecca Karl, and many others. There’s also a great online journal based at the Australia National University (although the editors are in different places around the world) called Made in China Journal. a collective of activists inside China and overseas concerned with articulating the protests in an internationalist way and from the perspective of workers, is also really important.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham Says Ukraine War Will Only End If Putin Is ‘Taken Out’ by Dave DeCamp (Antiwar.com)

“How does this war end? When Russia breaks, and they take Putin out. Anything short of that, the war’s gonna continue,” Graham said on the Fox News program America Reports on Wednesday.

“Graham said the US is “in it to win it, and the only way you’re gonna win it is to break the Russian military and have somebody in Russia take Putin out to give the Russian people a new lease on life.””

These are the words of a powerful, influential sitting Senator who’s been reelected umpteen times. He is not outside of the mainstream. He is dead-center on this issue as far as American politics goes. There are going to be a lot of Democrats who are going to piggy-back on this, saying, “I normally don’t agree with Lindsey Graham, but…”

These are the kinds of statements that people in Europe and Switzerland just never see. They have no idea how heated and dangerous the rhetoric is over there. I’m not sure whether the ignorance is willful, but, either way, people really have to reconsider their bedfellows or they’re going to get dragged into a completely different battle than what they signed up for.

It’s a long way from “help the invaded peoples of Ukraine!” to “take out Russia and take it over for ourselves”, but we’ll get there. Some people are very much already there, as you can see.

Mark Blyth: An Assessment Of Our Economic Future (3 Quarks Daily)

I love Mark Blyth and he’s very good in this podcast, but I am very unaccustomed to this style of podcast. It’s heavily edited. He makes a point like “If the Colorado River dries up and western agriculture collapses, will the U.S. still be a superpower if it is no longer self-sustaining food-wise?” and she just goes straight to the next question without a comment. That was a mic-drop moment, certainly worthy of a follow-up question, but this dipshit just blithely went on to the next question. Not only that, but I’ve never heard this podcast and it started with a two-minute spiel, trying to get me to donate money. There has to be a better way. I weep for the people for whom this is the standard.

I think his interview would have been better on a different podcast.

As Temperature Drops, Incarcerated People Prepare for Dangerously Cold Conditions by Katie Rose Quandt (Scheer Post)

“Regina has felt the cold in the prison firsthand. “It’s even cold in the visitor’s room,” she said. “I don’t have any hair right now, because I have cancer. So, I wear a head wrap or a hat, but I can’t wear it in there. Because you can’t have anything on your head.” She wrote three letters to the warden requesting a medical exemption, but never heard back. “So, I go in there with nothing on my head,” she said. “My head is freezing. But I want to see my son.””

Can we drop the focus on the quality of Russian prisons and just focus on our own inferno?

Journalism & Media

John Cleese on how wokeness smothers creativity by Nick Gillespie (Reason)

“I mean, it’s not as bad as Japan was, for example. I had a friend who studied there and said that the Japanese educational system was specifically designed to stop people thinking for themselves.”

Why are so many otherwise intelligent people willing to make sweeping denunciations of entire parts of completely foreign countries’ societies on the basis of a single second-hand anecdote?

“But he said to me, “Cleese, this isn’t a proper essay.” He didn’t have a go at me. He wasn’t nasty. He wasn’t particularly critical. He says, “No, we just don’t do things this way,” and that’s how our creativity gets stifled.”

Or, perhaps you weren’t as clever as you thought you were and you’re still butthurt about it seventy years later. 😘 A lot of anti-school people are like this: they think “I was too smart for school. They didn’t acknowledge me as an equal.”

Just use your smarts to blend in with as little energy expenditure as possible. Or is it that you deserve a larger share and more freedom on account of how awesome you are? How the hell do figure out who needs help if everyone’s free to do whatever they like? That would be fine if we didn’t need people to actually be useful. You know, to keep the lights on?

“[…] just consider this situation: If I actually pronounce the N -word today, which I’m not going to—relax! But if I did, it would be in the papers tomorrow. Now, how useful is that? The woke people, I think, miss something quite badly. The meaning of a word depends on its context. If I use sarcasm, then what I’m meaning is the opposite of the words I’m actually saying. If you don’t get irony, then if you take it seriously, you completely misunderstand the intention of the writer or speaker.”

“We were teasing each other and saying the most terrible things, and there was an atmosphere, not—I mean this seriously—not just of laughter, but of joy at the freedom of it. And then The Hollywood Reporter went back and quoted a couple of lines without giving any context at all, and then there was about two weeks of criticism. I mean, why? What are they getting out of it? There are people sitting there who are deliberately waiting for the thrill of being offended.”

“[…] the easiest people to work on are the creative people because they’re used to just letting things happen without trying to control them. You see, when you’re playing with your imagination, you shouldn’t be trying to control it. You’re just seeing where it takes you because there’s no such thing as a mistake.”

“I’ve been up against that all my life, because the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing. They have no idea what they’re doing, but they have no idea that they have no idea what they’re doing. And that’s the dangerous bit.”

“[…] when I was writing with this therapist, I got to know him very well and I said to him, “How many people in your profession really know what they’re doing?” And he said, “About 10 percent.” I was so intrigued by that. After that, every time I met someone who I suspected was particularly good, I would say to them, “How many people in your…?” The highest I ever got was 20 percent. Mostly it was 10–15 percent, one or two people who went as low as 5 percent. But why don’t the 85 percent get better? Because they don’t know they need to. They think they’re good already. Do you see what I mean? And if you think you’re good enough already, you’re not learning.”

Dunning-Kruger. And, yeah, that clocks for software engineers. No-one thinks thinks that they’re in the shitty eighty-five percent, so make of that what you will.

“[…] people—oh, this is going to sound very profound—don’t understand the difference between solemnity and seriousness. Now, we can have a perfectly serious chat like we’ve had now. We’re taking things seriously, but it’s not been solemn. People think that anything with fun or humor is not serious. No, it’s not solemn. You can always have a serious discussion with humor, and because people don’t realize the difference, they think that anyone who’s a little bit humorous lacks gravity. And I think that’s very sad.”

Science & Nature

New food technologies could release 80% of the world’s farmland back to nature by Chris D Thomas, Jack Hatfield, Katie Noble (The Conversation)

“Around four-fifths of the land used for human food production is allocated to meat and dairy, including both range lands and crops specifically grown to feed livestock. Add up the whole of India, South Africa, France and Spain and you have the amount of land devoted to crops that are then fed to livestock.”

“Despite growing numbers of vegetarians and vegans in some countries, global meat consumption has increased by more than 50% in the past 20 years and is set to double this century. As things stand, producing all that extra meat will mean either converting even more land into farms, or cramming even more cows, chickens and pigs into existing land.”

“Beef and lamb might contain plenty of protein but they use vast amounts of land.”

Land use per 100 grams of protein

“Even though Chris’s research is based on the assumption that global meat consumption will double, it nonetheless suggests that at least 80% of farmland could be released to be used for something else.”

“Since there would be less pressure on the land, there would be less need for chemicals and pesticides and crop production could become more wildlife-friendly (global adoption of organic farming is not feasible at present because it is less productive).”

Less productive! Stop buying the myth girded by externalized costs. It’s probably just as productive.

Roaming Charges: Hotrails to Hell, the Year in Climate by Jeffrey St. Clair (Roaming Charges)

“Iraq’s agricultural production has fallen by 40% in 4 years. Much of the decline is due to drought and heat. Over the next few decades, the UN projects temperatures in Iraq will rise by another 2 degrees. Livestock numbers have crashed.”

We cannot keep these animals alive with anything approaching dignity in these conditions. We should keep them out of misery by no longer breeding them so assiduously. Find other sources of food.

“A endangered Mexican wolf was tracked for days trying to find a mate, only to be repeatedly blocked by the border wall. According to my old friend Michael Robinson: “For five days he walked from one place to another. It was at least 23 miles of real distance, but as he came and went, he undoubtedly traveled much more than that.””

We’re ruining the ecological balance for the sake of something as stupid as political borders? Makes sense. We’re complete assholes. Just pathetic, petty shits.

“The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is now predicting that U.S. oil production will average 12.4 million barrels per day during 2023, soaring past the record high for domestic crude oil production set in 2019 under Trump.”

I can feel that Democrat-led green wave coming along any second now.

“Biden to the survivors of the Marshall fire, which destroyed 1100 homes on the high plains of Colorado outside Boulder: “The way you’re going to get through this, because we’ve been through a few things ourselves, is just hang on to on another. You will get through this & you’ll be stronger for it.” Is there any evidence at all that people emerge “stronger” after suffering the loss of their homes, jobs, cars, pets and family members?”

Also Biden: “Hang on to each other, because your tax-supported government sure as hell isn’t going to spend a dime helping you out unless you can figure out a way that your problems can be solved by weapons shipped to Ukraine, in which case you might be in luck.”

“New data from the Interior Department shows that the Biden administration approved 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first year, outpacing the Trump administration’s first-year total of 2,658 by 34%. Nearly 2,000 of the drilling permits were approved on public lands administered by the BLM’s New Mexico office, followed by 843 in Wyoming, 285 in Montana and North Dakota, and 191 in Utah. In California, the Biden administration approved 187 permits — more than double the 71 drilling permits Trump approved in the Golden State during his first year.”

I can feel that Democrat-led green wave coming along any second now.

“In a huge legal victory for the environmental movement, the DC Circuit Court ruled on Thursday that Biden’s decision to offer 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas leasing violated federal environmental laws. The court held that Interior failed to accurately disclose and consider the greenhouse gas emissions that would result from the largest lease sale in history and grossly underestimated the climate impacts and risks to Gulf communities.”

Good news! The courts are still capable of coolly stopping the rampaging Democrats.

“In the last year alone, China added 16.9 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, cementing its position as the world’s biggest market for wind farms at sea.”

Whatever you want to call China’s system, it seems much better able to incentivize what seems like sensible investment. Where in the West, a lot of this stuff doesn’t get off the ground until the handful of oligarchs currently running things figure out how to personally profit from any new thing, the Chinese seem able to push through comparatively climate-friendly energy-production (wind vs. coal, although coal grew as well, I’m not sure how much or how much relative to wind power, which would be important).

Lügen über Landwirtschaft by Florian Schwinn (NackDenkSeiten)

“In der Zusammenfassung der Studie heißt es: „Insgesamt gab es viele gut wirtschaftende Betriebe, aber leider auch einen beträchtlichen Anteil an Betrieben, in denen die verschiedenen Aspekte einer guten landwirtschaftlichen Praxis nicht eingehalten wurde mit Konsequenzen für die Tiergesundheit.“”

That is just glorious legalese.

Governing China’s Energy Sector to Achieve Carbon Neutrality by Philip Andrews-Speed (groupe d'études géopolitiques)

“This continuing increase of CO2 emissions is caused by the ongoing growth of the economy which in turn has been driving annual energy consumption rises of more than 4%. Fossil fuels are still dominant. In 2019, they provided for 85% of the primary energy supply, with coal accounting for 57%.”

“These structures along with the state ownership of most large enterprises along the energy supply chain have given the central government significant capacity to implement new energy policies over a relatively short timescales. The key to success has been the combination of administrative policy instruments and generous funding. Three historic examples are the energy efficiency campaign of 2005 to 2010, the programme to boost the deployment of renewable energy starting in 2009, and the measures to reduce air pollution from the power industry introduced in 2013.”

It’s a lot, but it’s not enough. The economic goals interfere, but without the economics, people plunge back into poverty.

“Electricity tariffs for such industries were also raised. The outcome of these and other measures was that national energy intensity declined by an estimated 19.1% over this period, not far short of the target.”

“Although the basic technology for UHV DC transmission had been developed in a number of countries, no commercial production of the equipment and no integrated UHV DC transmission system existed anywhere in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was the State Grid Corporation of China that was the first to commercialise the technology and to build an extensive network.”

“These and other examples show that China’s Party-State has the capacity, backed by ample funding, to take bold steps to address policy challenges and to take advantage of policy opportunities. The examples of renewable energy and electric vehicles reveal two additional features. First, that funding for research and development can be started decades before the appearance of commercial opportunity and, second, that strong synergies can be developed between industrial and energy policies.”

“The authority of the political leadership is transmitted downwards through three mechanisms: the nomenklatura system which controls staff appointments; the xitong system that allows the party to supervise activities across government agencies; and the dangzu groups that oversee the work of the Party Committees in all state-linked organisations. More recently, the Party has taken steps to increase its oversight not only of state-owned enterprises, but also of private companies.”

“[…] different localities have been able to pursue economic strategies that suit their conditions. Second, it has allowed the central government to carry out policy experiments in economic, administrative and political fields in a limited number of locations before deciding whether and how to roll out the policy across the country.”

“The key challenge for China’s central government in any field of policy is coordination. Although legally a unitary state, formal authority lies at three main levels of government: central, provincial or municipal, and city or county. This structure combined with multiple ministries, powerful state-owned enterprises and huge geographic scale results in a complex matrix of governance that led to the creation of the term ‘fragmented authoritarianism’”

“Poor coordination is often the result. This may be caused by excessive haste in implementation that does not allow supply chains to react appropriately, or by excessive enforcement of new policies without due consideration for such issues as economic viability, technical standards or safety.”

“In addition, local governments and state-owned enterprises retain the ability to ignore, undermine or distort central government policies to their own benefit. Such behaviours are often accompanied by false reporting, ‘feigned compliance’ and corruption, problems that date back to Imperial times.”

“A campaign to close large numbers of these mines was launched in 1998 on the grounds of safety, resource conservation and oversupply. This policy directly hit local economic interests. In response, many local governments systematically falsified their reports to higher authorities. Many mines that were reported as having been closed were either never closed or were closed and then quickly re-opened.”

“Local government support for coal-fired power has also been apparent in its encouragement for the construction of new generating plants in the absence of any obvious need in the form of an imminent supply-demand imbalance. In November 2014, the central government delegated the authority to approve the construction of new power plants to provincial governments. This led to permits being issued to 210 coal-fired plants with a total capacity of 165 GW in 2015 alone, mainly in coal-rich provinces. Very few of these projects were approved by the central government. Although the central government took back control over project approvals in April 2016, some 95 GW of new capacity was still under construction at the end of 2017.”

“The lack of action by the NEA relates to a range of technical and system management issues as well as the tension between these requirements and longstanding local practises. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment publically criticised the NEA and their local offices in January 2021 for failing to adequately implement a wide range of environmental policies. In the case of the renewable energy companies, they face a large power differential between them and the vast monopoly that is the grid company.”

Another thing in common with the West.

“By 2011, 40% of the country’s wind power equipment manufacturing capacity was idle.In 2012, it was reported that more than 2,000 enterprises in over 300 cities were developing solar PV manufacturing capacity. Capacity for producing PV panels had reached 20 times the national demand and twice that of global demand. This excess of capacity arose from the over-enthusiastic support from local governments”

“Initially, the national carbon market will cover only the power sector, including combined heat and power as well as the captive power plants of other industries. It will involve all units with annual emissions in excess of 26,000 tonnes of CO2 or energy consumption greater than 10,000 tonnes of coal equivalent. The power sector was chosen to be first as it has reasonably good data, relatively few points of emission, and is the largest producer of CO2 emissions in China.”

“China’s remaining oil and gas reserves are likely to be of marginal commercial value, at best. These are not attractive targets for national oil companies that are supposed to shed their non-commercial obligations. Further, given the current leadership’s preferential support for the state-owned industries, it is far from clear that the energy markets will achieve their potential economic benefits, as discussed in the previous section.”

“Chinese companies are accelerating their construction of facilities to transform coal into chemicals. By 2018, coal was the source material for 16% of China’s petrochemicals, up from 3% in 2010. These processes require large amounts of water and emit high levels of greenhouse gases. To ameliorate the environmental impacts, companies will have to invest heavily in water recycling and carbon capture. Not only will this undermine the commerciality of the projects, but they will also require more energy, most probably in the form of coal.”

“[…] the current leadership is pressing ahead by enhancing the role of market forces in the energy sector. In the absence of robust market regulation, local governments and state-owned enterprises are likely to retain the ability to distort these markets, at least to some degree”

“[…] the current leadership is pressing ahead by enhancing the role of market forces in the energy sector. In the absence of robust market regulation, local governments and state-owned enterprises are likely to retain the ability to distort these markets, at least to some degree. This will constrain the economic benefits to be gained from the energy markets as well as the environmental benefits from the carbon market.”

“The most profound of these tensions is between the need for economic growth to support employment and the rising living standards of a vast population and the requirement to keep economic growth relatively low and transition to a highly innovative, technologically-based economy. This challenge will be accentuated by the decline of the working age population and the low level of education being received by the 70% of children that have rural residence permits.”

Art & Literature

If a Russian Fighter had a Conversation with the Soldier Švejk by Monika Zgustova (CounterPunch)

“Hašek, and the whole pleiad of Central European writers, from Prague, Vienna and other cities, lived through a period of transition, the end of one era and the beginning of another. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing, a period that Stefan Zweig would later describe as “the world of yesterday” had come to an end. Change, war and fear of the unknown permeated the air. That’s when Hašek wrote his Good Soldier Švejk, Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March, Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind ; and Franz Kafka, The Trial.”

Teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in Prison by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“Over 95 percent of prisoners are pressured to plead out in the U.S. court system, which is not capable of providing jury trials for every defendant entitled to one, were they to actually demand one. In 2012, the Supreme Court said that “plea bargaining… is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.””

“The U.S. legal system, as under Stalin, shares a fondness for quotas, laying out in advance the number of arrests it needs, often for such non-crimes as selling loose cigarettes or having broken tail lights. Many police departments, prosecutor’s offices and even counties in the U.S. depend on revenue generated by imprisonment, tickets, fines and civil asset forfeiture — a form of legalized theft whereby the state can seize assets, including cash, cars and homes, alleged to be connected to unlawful activity, generally without requiring a conviction or even a criminal charge.”

“[…] continual interrogation for hours and days on end. My students knew from experience what Solzhenitsyn found out for himself, that “it is much smarter to play the role of someone so improbably imbecile that he can’t remember one single day of his life even at the risk of being beaten.””

“From the moment you go to prison, you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: ‘My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die — now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.’”

Philosophy & Sociology

Nicky Battles the Progressive Killer Robots by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)

“We can’t seem to finish one potentially apocalyptic cold war before starting another and the lesser evilism of our sham elections has reduced us to a pack of peasants bickering over which geriatric rapist should pretend to push us around for the next four years. But it doesn’t get much more batshit bizarre than the perverse dystopian spectacle of the most progressive city in America sicking an army of killer robots on the homeless.”

“But considering the San Francisco Police Department’s less than stellar track record for human rights and that America’s finest can and do regularly characterize an absurdly wide variety of shit as being potentially life threatening to justify their hyper-homicidal urges, these promises hardly inspire anything even remotely resembling hope.”

“Progressivism is generally seen by both its supporters and its detractors alike as the use of big government to further the cause of America’s downtrodden classes from on high and that is how this movement generally markets itself, but the reality is that progressivism has always been defined by the far more sinister goal of radically expanding the state into every facet of private life in order to affect a regime of top-down social engineering that purifies western civilization of its radical discontents or as stalwart progressive Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once referred to us, “those who sap the strength of the state for those lesser sacrifices.””

“The women folk were also afforded suffrage in order to increase the White Protestant vote against the unassimilated Catholic hordes who were expected to keep their own women home.”

“Child labor was abolished so that the minds of the nation’s youth could be carefully molded by state institutions that would create a more civil and obedient work force for the future. And the outrageous greed of the robber barons was reined in by replacing their widely despised private monopolies with more orderly federal cartels.”

Wait, women got the vote so that they could outvote catholics? And schools were invented not to end child labor but to indoctrinate a workforce? I forget how much some people hated school. They’ll believe anything. I suppose it’s possible, but that’s the least-generous interpretation I’ve ever heard. It’s provocative, though.

“FDR achieved this feat where Fuhrers failed with the New Deal, a massive corporatist Trojan Horse which offered the anarchists and Marxists of the Labor Movement a series of concessions like paid leave and the five-day work week in exchange for having their organizations effectively defanged and integrated into a federally regulated economic conglomeration.”

Again the least-generous possible interpretation. Gave them what wanted is not seen as any sort of victory, but a “defanging.” Maybe each of us deems themselves to be in the sweet spot of intellectual contentiousness, not too much and not too little. But some of this stuff requires more than just sophistry to convince me its not casuistry.

“So, the progressives went to work assimilating us the same way that they did with the once equally ferocious Labor Movement of the Old Left, by offering Queer freaks like me party favors like marriage equality and hate crime legislation”

What does victory look like, if not assimilation? Annihilation of the other? The complaint might be that they sold out too cheaply, which is a valid point. Recent capitulations and cooptations have been cringeworthy. But the beef here seems to be with the general mechanism.

Technology

Apple: Zwangsarbeit in Indien mit Foxconn by Werner Rügemer (NachDenkSeiten)

“Diese Frauen werden diszipliniert und gezielt verschlissen – und nach einigen Jahren intensiver Beanspruchung können Apple/Foxconn sie durch neue, unverbrauchte junge Frauen ersetzen – mehrere Vermittlungsagenturen sind dafür ständig in armen Regionen unterwegs. Die staatliche Arbeitsaufsicht lässt solche Verhältnisse durchgehen.”

“Foxconn montiert seit den 1980er Jahren für Apple, Microsoft, Intel und andere Silicon-Valley-Unternehmen: Die Niedrigstlöhner in Taiwan wurden in Heimen zusammengefasst, mussten täglich drei bis vier Überstunden ohne Bezahlung leisten, bekamen keinen bezahlten Urlaub. Es wurde und wird fast ausschließlich für den Export produziert.”

“[…] dürfen insgesamt höchstens 12 Jahre in Taiwan arbeiten: Spätestens dann müssen sie raus, dürfen im Alter nicht Taiwan zur Last fallen. Weil sie zudem meist bei Vermittlern hoch verschuldet sind, sind sie willig, billig, unterwürfig, fleißig. Gegenwärtig unterliegen so 700.000 Arbeitsmigrant*innen in Taiwan dieser Form der Zwangsarbeit. Sie machen die niedrigsten Jobs, die 3D-Jobs: dirty, dangerous, difficult. Während der Corona-Pandemie unterlagen sie ungleich härteren Einschränkungen als die einheimischen Beschäftigten. Dies ist zugleich eine moderne Form des Rassismus.”

“China schränkt seit 2006 solche Praktiken ein: die Löhne wurden schrittweise erhöht, die Arbeits- und Klagerechte der Beschäftigten wurden gestärkt. Apple, Microsoft & Co protestierten gegen die Verbesserungen in China.”

“Deshalb verlagern Foxconn und Apple seit über einem Jahrzehnt die Montage wie immer mehr in US-freundliche Niedriglohn-Staaten, nach Indien, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesien, Malaysia, aber auch in EU-Staaten wie Tschechien und die Slowakei. Mit neuen Aufträgen in Saudi-Arabien, Indonesien, Thailand und auch in gewerkschaftsfreien Regionen der USA forciert Foxconn seine Zulieferaufträge für e-Autos.”

Capital cares only about capital. The only way to stop it is to have every country forbid such working conditions for its people, so that there is nowhere left to turn for exploitative capitalism.

Programming

Chapter 1: Designing Systems by Brad Frost (Atomic Design)

“Style guides demonstrate to clients, stakeholders, and other disciplines that there’s a lot of really thoughtful work going into a website’s design and development beyond just “Hey, let’s make a new website.” A pattern library communicates the design language in a very tangible way, which helps stakeholders understand that an underlying system is determining the final interface.”

It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter by John Ousterhout (Arxiv.org)

The Decoupling Principle: A Practical Privacy Framework by Paul Schmitt, Jana Iyengar, Christopher Wood, Barath Raghavan (SIG Comm)

Fun

EDGE GUY ACCIDENTALLY BREAKS 2 by Stanley Sievers (YouTube)

“My hands are like a Bernini statue.

“90% of my friends are contingent on this personality trait. I don’t cut hair. I don’t do Jiu jitsu. My options are limited.

“It’s like when a vampire dies.”