Links and Notes for February 3rd, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Technology
• Programming

COVID-19

Vaccine Nationalism: China’s and Ours by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“If they wanted to give useful advice to Xi, they would have harped on his failure to get China’s elderly population fully vaccinated. This is something that could have in principle been remedied fairly quickly. The idea of quickly shipping over billions of doses of Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines was the sort of thing that would be laughed at anywhere other than the pages of the Washington Post.

“Furthermore, the obsession with mRNA vaccines is incredibly silly. There are a number of non-mRNA vaccines that have been widely administered to billions of people around the world, providing protection that is comparable to the mRNA vaccines. Most notable in this category is the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which was widely used in Europe. Our elite policy types have not felt the need to denounce European countries for vaccine nationalism for their failure to ensure that their populations received a mRNA vaccine.”

Yeah, it really is all about marketing and market share, at this point. In the first year, we were happy to have anything. Now, with multiple products on the market, Pfizer and Moderna are fighting to keep much-cheaper alternatives from sapping their market. Instead, they’ve increased the denigration of anything other than their products—and quintupled their prices. All of this with support and subsidies from western governments

Economy & Finance

Yanis Varoufakis exposes Europe's energy scam by DIEM25 (YouTube)

This is a great 9½-minute video about where the energy markets came from (e.g., Thatcher in England) and what the effects are today—scams and high profits sucking rents out of the poor.

“When they try to simulate a market with only one electricity socket coming out of your wall, they are scamming you.”

“End sanctions on Russian energy. The only people that sanctions help are Russian oligarchs and European oligarchs.”

Public Policy & Politics

The Pathology of Ukrainian Nationalism by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“The New York Times and the other major American dailies, which print when the Times prints and are silent when the Times is silent, do not tire of telling us Zelensky came to office in a landslide electoral victory four years ago. I wish they were honest enough to note that one policy, more than any other, won Zelensky 71 percent of the vote. This was a commitment to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Ukraine’s Russian neighbor and mend the fracture running down the center of the country between its western and eastern provinces.”

“Prior to the war, The Times and its pilot fish among the American dailies reported often enough on the neo–Nazi character of the Azov Battalion and other Ukrainian nationalists. Now they never do. Journalists who ought to know better, including estimable correspondents such as Roger Cohen, who I suspect does know better, now write routinely that this identification of Ukrainian nationalists with Nazi and Fascist ideology is nothing more than Russian propaganda.”

“The world’s largest black market in illicit weaponry, a human-trafficking cesspool, 122nd of 180 nations in Transparency International’s corruption rankings: Not even Vogue, with photographs by Annie Liebovitz, can make this look good other than among those with a crying need to believe the orthodoxy because they have a crying need to submit to authority.”

“Ukrainians had their plebiscite on the last day of March 2019, when they gave their consent to Zelensky’s two serious proposals–to eliminate the nation’s cancerous corruption and to settle up peaceably with Moscow. And the reply was, roughly, “Plebiscite, schplebiscite, I am not serious about the corruption and I will not give you your peaceful co-existence with Russia. I am going with the Americans, who had no vote and who do not respect yours, who will continue to run our country, and who want neither peace nor co-existence between us and Russia.””

“[…] this puppet of America’s neoliberal cliques, this clownish clod Central Casting dresses up in military costume, has deprived Ukrainians of their nation even as he claims to speak in its name.”

“When, not long after he was elected and before he had caved to the Americans, Zelensky went to the front line while the Ukrainian forces were bombarding their Russian-speaking countrymen in the eastern provinces, ultraright officers threatened to lynch him when he ordered them to stop the shelling. Whereupon Zelensky stepped back and the bombardments went on for many years. What does this tell us? These people have no interest in making a nation of Ukraine or serving a democratic citizenry. They have no idea of any such responsibility and no thought of assuming one. The project is to submit to an ideology that prominently features violence and a consuming hatred of others. War becomes the perfect “duty,” the thing one must do, the pure expression of the authoritarianism to which they are dedicated.”

Vermittlung unerwünscht by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Ein möglicher Vermittler müsste daher nicht zwischen Kiew und Moskau, sondern vor allem zwischen Washington und Moskau vermitteln. Nur so gibt es eine Chance auf Verhandlungen. Ob die Initiative aus Brasilien, Indonesien, Indien und China dies vermag, ist zurzeit eher unwahrscheinlich. Denn anders als die Ukrainer haben die Krieger in Washington, London und Berlin kein Messer an der Kehle; ihre Länder werden nicht durch den Krieg vernichtet und ihre Kinder sterben nicht auf dem Schlachtfeld. Die Strippenzieher eines Stellvertreterkrieges sitzen im Warmen. So war das schon immer.”

“Der Westen will diesen Krieg bis zum letzten Ukrainer führen und da Russland auf der anderen Seite auch seinen Blutzoll bezahlt und seine strategische Position in diesem Abnutzungskrieg schwächt, scheint die Zeit für den Westen zu spielen. Freiwillig wird Joe Biden nicht an den Verhandlungstisch kommen. Und ob der südamerikanisch-asiatische „Friedensclub“ gewillt ist, eine härtere Gangart einzulegen, um den Westen an den grünen Tisch zu zwingen, darf bezweifelt werden. Der Westen will keinen Frieden und daher wird das Sterben weitergehen.”

The Collapse of the Vertical by Oleg Sheyn (Russian Dissent)

“With the direct support of the state leadership, money was taken out of the country and thus withdrawn from taxes. Gazprom alone created 13 offshore companies in order not to have to pay into the Russian treasury. Rosneft, Aeroflot and all the others else did exactly the same. When there was a financial crisis in Cyprus and accounts were blocked, then-president Dmitry Medvedev said: “There, in Cyprus, they are robbing us of our loot. We need to help our business.” That is, the president of the country aided in the withdrawal of capital from Russian taxes.”

“Moving along a new path would have required the creation of a national production plan with high added value, an end to theft from the budget, the expansion of domestic consumption, open discussion among experts, and the restoration of political competition as a contest of of ideas and concepts. This path would mean the death of the vertical organization. But the choice between the future of Russia and the future of the tower was made in favor of the latter.”

Same story in the U.S. They constantly decide for the tower, the elite.

“The degree of Russia’s backwardness can be characterized by a census of our industrial robots: there are 630 robots for ten thousand workers in South Korea, 160 in Spain, 68 in China and three in Russia. Expenditure on education, science, and healthcare in relation to GDP during all twenty years of prosperity remained at a level half as low as in Poland or Sweden; that is, the vertical power simply ate away the Soviet legacy and sooner or later had completely devoured it.”

“Hence the tightening of the screws, including the transition to a “remote electronic voting system” − that is, the abolition of elections as an institution − and the constant search for enemies, and the drumming into the minds of people the myths about an “energy superpower,” about the supposed fact that “Europe will freeze,” “our great ally China,” “Kyiv will fall in three days,” and “we can return.””

“It is impossible to judge how and when it will end, but one thing is certain: the current vertical power is entering a period of disintegration. Many more smaller verticals may spring up in its wake, or we may see a transition to more collegial methods of governance, but within a few years a completely different political space will form around us.”

It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war by Seamus Milne on April 30, 2014 (The Guardian)

“The threat of war in Ukraine is growing. As the unelected government in Kiev declares itself unable to control the rebellion in the country’s east, John Kerry brands Russia a rogue state. The US and the European Union step up sanctions against the Kremlin, accusing it of destabilising Ukraine. The White House is reported to be set on a new cold war policy with the aim of turning Russia into a “pariah state”.”

Nine years ago, he wrote this.

“When the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover, politicians such as William Hague brazenly misled parliament about the legality of what had taken place: the imposition of a pro-western government on Russia’s most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.”

This is how the Guardian used to write about Russia and Ukraine. Compare and contrast with today, where their ideology is considerably more pointed and one-sided.

“But what had been a glorious cry for freedom in Kiev became infiltration and insatiable aggression in Sevastopol and Luhansk.”

“The reality is that, after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure, via an explicitly anti-Moscow EU association agreement. Its rejection led to the Maidan protests and the installation of an anti-Russian administration – rejected by half the country – that went on to sign the EU and International Monetary Fund agreements regardless.”

“Meanwhile, the US and its European allies impose sanctions and dictate terms to Russia and its proteges in Kiev, encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan. But by what right is the US involved at all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has never been a member of Nato, and whose last elected government came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality? It has none, of course – which is why the Ukraine crisis is seen in such a different light across most of the world. There may be few global takers for Putin’s oligarchic conservatism and nationalism, but Russia’s counterweight to US imperial expansion is welcomed, from China to Brazil.”

Again, nine years ago, the Guardian was capable of much more clear-eyed analysis than it is today. Today it, like almost every other western media organization is blinded by its erection for war.

“In fact, one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese “pivot” to Asia.”

“[…] a century after 1914, the risk of unintended consequences should be obvious enough – as the threat of a return of big-power conflict grows. Pressure for a negotiated end to the crisis is essential.”

We’re all still waiting for sanity.

In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia by John Pilger on May 13th, 2014 (The Guardian)

“Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”, as if the truth “never happened even while it was happening”.”

“The name of “our” enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to US domination. The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.”

“With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last “buffer state” bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.”

Nothing has changed about that in the intervening nine years.

“But Nato’s military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.”

You see? This wasn’t so difficult to predict, even nine years ago. Pilger is brilliant, of course, but pretty much anyone willing to see the facts could have made this prediction.

“These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine’s population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous of Kiev and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels”, as the western media calls them, but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.”

“Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of “special units” from the CIA and FBI setting up a “security structure” that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”

Israeli drones, warplanes strike Iran and Syria by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“The Jerusalem Post wrote, in a gloating tone: “Experts noted that the US and Israel just spent an entire week conducting military exercises around attacking targets, such as Iran, so carrying out such an attack immediately after these exercises could be meant to send a message as to their seriousness. They estimated that the visit of CIA Director William Burns to Israel just before the attack was evidence of a need for a special face-to-face meeting between the CIA and Mossad chiefs preparing the attack.””

90 Seconds to Midnight? by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post)

“Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.”

In a way that U.S. invasions and attacks didn’t? This bulletin of atomic scientists is bullshit—feels like a propaganda arm of the U.S. Why do we care how many minutes they say we have left when they only move the clock closer to midnight when enemies of the U.S. seem to be getting more dangerous?

“The fact that the esteemed members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists – which includes among its ranks ten Nobel laureates – seem ignorant of this history, colors their ability to comprehend the true nature of the threat facing the world today, […]”

“The two-tracks of this policy involve the imposition of economic sanctions linked to Russia’s decision to militarily intervene in Ukraine, and the prosecution of a proxy conflict in Ukraine designed to bleed Russia white. The goal of this policy is to engender massive unrest among a demoralized Russian population which would in turn rise and remove President Putin from power.

“The insanity of such a plan is incomprehensible. Imagine for a moment that Russia embarked on a plan of action designed to strip away Mexico from the US sphere of influence and, in doing so, promulgated a conflict the goal of which was to have Mexico re-take by force the territory encompassing the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The idea that the United States would sit idly in the face of such a threat is ludicrous. So, too, is any concept that Russia should do the same.”

“The truth is the world is one second to midnight, and the clock can strike at any time, something the presence of the Admiral Gorshkov off the coast of the United States proves only too well.”

Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“Since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, Congress has approved more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine and allied nations supporting the war in Ukraine. Three-fifths of this aid, $67 billion, has been allocated for military expenditures. There are 28 countries transferring weapons to Ukraine. All of them, with the exception of Australia, Canada and the U.S., are in Europe.”

“NATO military commanders understand that the infusion of these weapons systems into the war will not alter what is, at best, a stalemate, defined largely by artillery duels over hundreds of miles of front lines. The purchase of these weapons systems — one M1 Abrams tank costs $10 million when training and sustainment are included — increases the profits of the arms manufacturers. The use of these weapons in Ukraine allows them to be tested in battlefield conditions, making the war a laboratory for weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin. All this is useful to NATO and to the arms industry. But it is not very useful to Ukraine.”

“The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.”

“In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military; the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which oversees nuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them.”

“Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposes as an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.”

I’d been predicting for years that the anti-China and anti-Russia propaganda was softening brains for the next wars. It is not at all satisfying to have been right.

““While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power. “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro-military operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.””

The Shadows Descend in Ukraine by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“When The Times terms someone or some society or some chain of events shadowy or murky it scarcely has to do any reporting. Two words more or less without meaning point readers’ minds in precisely the desired direction.”

“Kirill Tymoshenko’s nonsense is not altogether nonsense: It is worthy of a few moments’ thought. What kind of man is he to behave as he has in this passage of the Ukrainian story? As to the others, same questions: What kind of man would steal funds meant to keep his own people warm? What kind of man would embezzle the money meant to feed troops defending their country, setting aside on behalf of what?”

Let’s not pretend that this isn’t exactly who we’ve come to expect to be involved in government. He fits perfectly into the picture of late-stage capitalism. This type of person is exactly who we’ve seen will always bubble to the top, given the incentives baked into the system. We are breeding for sociopaths—and that’s what we get. That they end up in charge and that they don’t care about the suffering of others means that they have absolutely no qualms about manipulating the system to ensure that it will continue to benefit them maximally. In the last several decades, the only improvement we’ve managed is that, while we still have rapacious sociopaths in charge, we’ve managed to make them pretend not to be rapacious sociopaths so that we can feel better about having them in charge. This allows them to increase the evil that they do without anyone complaining about it. Just call it humanitarian war and RTP and you not only have no complaints, you have full-throated support.

“[…] a failed state wherein many people are left with nothing in which they can believe, where there is nothing to which they can belong. At the top, a sordid greedfest. Everywhere else it is sheer survival in a state of constant anxiety. It is a terrible thing to recognize how utterly inadequate the people running the criminal state of Ukraine are to respond to this moving tragedy.”

He’s ostensibly describing Ukraine, but he’s also just described the U.S. quite succinctly.

CN Live! S5e2: Twitter Files & The Death Of Russiagate − Matt Taibbi, Chris Hedges & John Kiriakou by Consortium News (YouTube)

This is a fantastic and wide-ranging discussion from some of the best journalists and muckrakers today (including Joe Lauria running the interview).

Chris Hedges is great. See 57:00 for a great story that he really seems to enjoy telling. You also get to hear him swear: “They didn’t know what the f%#k they were doing!” At about 1:01:00, Kiriakou introduces the topic of mass manipulation and Taibbi takes the baton. Really good stuff.

Roaming Charges: See No Evil by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“French people are marching to retire at 64 with a guarantee of €2400 per month.

“British are marching to retire at 68 for €800 per month

“Americans are hoping to get a job at 80 at Chick-fil-A working for food.”

Arabs and North Africans watching Americans freak out over a balloon when an American drone just took out a whole village last Tuesday

US issues ludicrous “spy balloon” charge against China by Mike Head (WSWS)

“The claim that China would use such outmoded and difficult-to-control means to conduct surveillance over sensitive nuclear war sites, rather than sophisticated low-orbit satellites, is patently ridiculous. But the hysteria points to the increasingly strident war propaganda emanating from Washington against China, as well as the potential for such an incident to be inflated to trigger a military conflict.”

“In what appeared to be a conciliatory statement, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Friday that the balloon was a civilian airship used mainly for meteorological research. It said the airship had limited “self-steering” capabilities and “deviated far from its planned course” because of winds. “The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure,” it said, citing a legal term used to refer to events beyond control.”

It’s a fucking balloon, not a dirigible. What the hell. How could you control the flight of a weather balloon? You just set it adrift and let it measure the weather. That’s the purpose of it. If the winds take it over the U.S., then you just found out about a wind current. Nothing else. Nobody has used balloons for surveillance for 80 years—not since we invented satellites. China has a lot of satellites, but the U.S. would rather pretend that China is simultaneously an existential threat and also a backwards, balloon-spying power.

“Nevertheless, the Pentagon effectively dismissed the statement. “We are aware of the PRC [Peoples Republic of China] statement,” Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said. “However, the fact is, we know that it’s a surveillance balloon. And I’m not going to be able to be more specific than that. We do know that the balloon has violated US airspace and international law, which is unacceptable.””

What the hell does “unacceptable” mean? They apologized for it, even though it can happen. Does that mean the apology is not accepted? Does it mean that the U.S. is going to go boots-on-the-ground against China? It kind of does, doesn’t it? Or does it just mean that the U.S. will ramp up their ongoing war against China? They’re waging one, so far on the economic front only, which is harmful enough.

They are a bunch of fucking psychos over there.

Update from US military shoots down Chinese balloon over coastal waters (Ars Technica) (half a day after I wrote the notes above): The fucking psychos shot it out of the sky, just off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. They’re going to pretend that they can salvage something and will then tell everyone lies about what they found. You know, how they pretended to throw Bin Laden’s body into the ocean with no proof? Like that, but in reverse.

US Surrounds China With War Machinery While Freaking Out About Balloons by Caitlin Johnstone (Scheer Post)

“Americans were outraged over the Edward Snowden revelations not because spy agencies were conducting surveillance, but because they were conducting surveillance on American citizens. It’s just taken as a given that spying on foreigners is fine, so it’s a bit silly to react melodramatically when foreigners return the favor.”

“Now let’s contrast all this with another news story that’s getting a lot less attention.

“In an article titled U.S. secures deal on Philippines bases to complete arc around China, the BBC reports that the empire will be adding even more installations to the already impressive military noose it has been constructing around the PRC.”

“The U.S. empire has been surrounding China with military bases and war machinery for many years, in ways Washington would never tolerate China doing in the nations and waters surrounding the United States. There is no question that the U.S. is the aggressor in this increasingly hostile standoff between major powers. Yet we’re all meant to be freaking out about a balloon.

“Ask me to show you how the U.S. has been aggressing against China I can show you all the well-documented ways in which the U.S. is encircling China with weapons of war. Ask an empire apologist to show you how China is aggressing against the U.S. and they’ll start babbling about TikTok and balloons.”

European Union urges intensification of Ukraine war by Peter Schwarz (WSWS)

“The entire European Union (EU) leadership traveled Thursday to Kiev, where it met with the Ukrainian government for two days. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who was visiting the country for the fourth time, was accompanied by Council President Charles Michel, High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell and 15 commissioners, whose function is comparable to that of ministers.”

All I read in this paragraph is that Kiev is safe enough for the entire EU leadership to have absolutely no qualms about visiting at the same time. They are lying about the degree to which the west is being bombarded, else they would never have sent Uschi there.

“Since the Ukrainian press is subject to strict censorship and opposition media and parties are banned, it is difficult to obtain more precise information.”

“Zelensky’s government has long depended on the EU. This year alone, €18 billion of direct aid will be provided to keep the state institutions going. This corresponds to about one-tenth of the total EU budget. Military support, which is mainly provided by the individual member states and the US, is not included in this sum.”

““We reaffirm that the future of Ukraine and its citizens lies in the European Union,” the summit said in a joint statement. “The EU will support Ukraine as long as is necessary.””

Within “two years”, according to Uschi.

“The EU has no interest in a prosperous Ukraine. Nor is it interested in fighting corruption or securing democracy. It wants access to the cheap labour, fertile soil and raw materials of the country, which, in addition to coal and gas, include such critical items as lithium, cobalt, titanium, beryllium and rare earth elements, with an estimated value of €6.7 trillion.”

They’re positively slobbering at the prospect of having moved these resources from the Russian into the European sphere.

“Above all, Ukraine serves as a battering ram against Russia, with its vast land mass and raw material reserves. In order to militarily defeat and divide Russia and install a puppet government, the EU has rejected any negotiated solution to the war, even if it means turning Ukraine into a wasteland.”

Once that beachhead has been established, on to Россия! This is the dream, of course, the resources there are even vaster.

“At the same time, preparations are underway for the delivery of F-16 fighter jets that can penetrate deep into Russian territory and carry nuclear bombs. While US President Joe Biden still officially rejects this move, Ukrainian pilots are already being trained on these fighter jets.

“EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the F-16s would be delivered soon.”

Josep Borrell is a base animal, almost as bad as that fucking madman Jens Stoltenberg. Neither of them cares one whit about escalation—because they firmly believe that only the West can escalate. They firmly believe that Russia is incapable of doing so—or will be unwilling to use atomic weapons when faced with the choice. They believe this and are willing to gamble all of our lives and livelihoods on it. They don’t even consider the morality of constantly accusing the Russians of escalation, all the while escalating their own effort on the tacit belief that the Russians won’t escalate anyway.

The Russians have escalated—the bombing of Ukraine didn’t start in earnest until the Kerch bridge to Crimea was bombed. But it’s positively amoral to justify an escalation of your own imperial aims on the pretext of a potential escalation on the part of a not-yet-officially declared enemy that you simultaneously claim will never happen—or will, at least, never exceed certain bounds. As long as only Ukrainians are killed, they will not stop.

“Commission President von der Leyen, who was formerly Germany’s defence minister, promised that the EU would complete a “tenth sanctions package” against Russia by 24 February, the anniversary of the Russian invasion. The sanctions imposed so far have already caused considerable damage to the Russian economy. On Sunday, a price cap for Russian petroleum products will come into effect.”

And, yet, the German economy is doing worse than the Russian economy. As reported in German newspapers of no small renown (the Frankfurter Allgemeine, for example), the Russian economy is predicted to grow by a smidge this year, whereas the Germany economy is predicted to contract, and in 2024, the divide grows even more, as Russia is predicted to stabilize the relationships that will replace its European ones.

Aid to earthquake victims requires the immediate lifting of US sanctions against Syria by Niles Niemuth (WSWS)

“State Department spokesman Ned Price made clear that the Biden administration saw the disaster as an opportunity to rekindle its regime-change operation and funnel more money and aid to its proxy forces.

““It would be quite ironic—if not even counterproductive—for us to reach out to a government that has brutalized its people over the course of a dozen years now,” Price told reporters Monday. “Instead, we have humanitarian partners on the ground who can provide the type of assistance in the aftermath of these tragic earthquakes.”

“The ruthless refusal of the Biden administration to provide aid to the Syrian government, when it knows its actions will result in more suffering and death, recalls the remark of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 1996 that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children caused by US economic sanctions against Baghdad was “worth it” in the furtherance of regime-change.

“Meanwhile, President Joe Biden pledged “any and all needed assistance” to Turkey in remarks on Monday. However, one can be sure the Biden administration will seek to exploit the disaster to press its geopolitical interests against Ankara, in particular, over the war against Russia.”

So Much for Sanctions on Russia by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“More surprising still has been the unseen trickle of trade continuity in Europe that has been revealed by two reports.

“The first was published in August 2022. This analysis of a sample of 39 countries that accounted for 72% of Russian imports prior to the war, as the sanctions kicked in, found that exports to Russia dropped by 57%. But, since April, that has started to reverse. By June, exports were nearly back to prewar levels, going back up by 47%. The unexpected finding was that most of that recovery was attributable to countries, including European countries, who signed up for sanctions.

“The second was published at the end of January 2023. Russian consumers have maintained access to many Western goods by parallel imports that escape sanctions. Russian distributors simply order Western goods from counties that did not join the sanctions regime. Those countries buy the Western goods and sell them to Russia.”

“[…] major EU and G-7 companies announced that they were leaving Russia. The much advertised corporate exodus from Russia was celebrated as a show of global unity. But it was, in part, an illusion.

“On January 9, Russian State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin claimed that “75.9 percent of foreign companies remained in Russia.” It was not propaganda: Western reports have borne that out.

“Research published by Switzerland’s University of St. Gallen reveals that very few Western companies delivered on their announced withdrawal. Of 1,404 EU and G-7 companies with 2,405 subsidiaries in Russia at the time of the invasion, fewer than 9% had divested a single subsidiary by November 2022.”

“When Renault and Nissan sold their Russian assets, the deal included a clause allowing them to by them back within the next six years. Some companies shut their stores only to reopen them under the name of companies they hold in other countries. Reebok is now Sneaker Box. Coca-Cola pulled out of Russia. But Coke is still on Russian shelves where it is labeled Kind Cola and is still manufactured in Coca-Cola’s several Russian factories.”

Anyone who is wholeheartedly on the side of NATO has thrown in their lot with liars and hypocrites, as usual. To them, I say,

You feel that you’re helping, showing solidarity. You feel that all of Europe is leading the charge. They are not. You are. They shouted for volunteers. You took a step forward. The others shouted heartily…and took a step back. You may care about what you think are the principles of this war. They only care about money.

It is more lucrative to continue to do business with Russia than not. That is why the sanctions have failed even more spectacularly than usual, this time. They will continue the war and continue to profit on all sides, all while you read the papers feverishly, lapping up every positive bit of news about how it’s almost over. And you’ll stay in the limbo-state for years and years, until you can’t even remember a time when it was any different, until you can’t even remember what you wanted to have happened, until you’ve accepted this as the new normal.

Lee Camp & David Swanson: Can The March To WW3 Be Stopped? by Behind the Headlines (YouTube)

David Swanson is a refreshingly eloquent pacifist. This web site is World Beyond War. Excellent, excellent interview.

10 Ways The US Is Out Of Line With The Entire World by Lee Camp / Behind the Headlines (YouTube)

Believe What I Do, Not What I Say by Ted Rall

“Biden administration officials claim that Russia has dastardly plans to invade Eastern Europe unless it is stopped in Ukraine. If they really believed that, however, they wouldn’t be hesitant to send whatever weapons and troops were required to stop them. That overheated rhetoric is just a pose. Which is why the US has given Ukraine just enough weapons to keep fighting but never to win.”

Journalism & Media

Government By Panic by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“The comedy factor is off the charts. The F-22 is one of the most expensive weapons ever built, costing taxpayers $334 million per plane, with a program tab of more than $60 billion. The jet has the radar signature of a hummingbird, screams upward at 62,000 feet a minute, and is generally so super-awesome that we’ve banned its export, not wanting the Japanese or the Saudis or even the Australians to possess our secret Promethean fire.

“The idea that this celebrated super-weapon got its first air-to-air victory shooting down a fucking balloon is as perfect a demonstration of the pitiful mindset of modern American leaders as could be conceived. That it apparently happened before we were even sure it was a spy craft, just before supposed diplomatic talks with China, and while more sophisticated Chinese satellites zoomed over us in space made this an even more damning satirical bullseye.”

“We don’t ask, “Are we sure it’s not just a weather balloon drifted off course? Because we’d look stupid sending an F-22 to blow it out of the sky in that case.” It’s unlikely the press will follow up much on the question, either. The panic is now the point, and once that passes, so does our interest, no matter what the truth of what just happened.”

Science & Nature

Roaming Charges: See No Evil by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Since 1971, Greenland has lost ice equivalent in weight to 4 Million Empire State Buildings.”

Why Not Mars by Maciej Cegłowski (Idle Words)

“As for that space station, the jewel of human spaceflight, it exists in a state of nearly perfect teological closure, its only purpose being to teach its creators how to build future spacecraft like it. The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves. At 22 years old, the ISS is still as dependent on fresh meals and clean laundry sent from home as the most feckless grad student.”

“Microbiologists had long suspected that the 12,000 or so known species of microbes were just a fraction of the total, with perhaps another hundred thousand “unculturable” species left to discover. But when new sequencing technology became available at the turn of the century, it showed the number of species might be as high as one trillion. In the genomic gold rush that followed, researchers discovered not just dozens of unsuspected microbial phyla, but two entire new branches of life.”

“These new techniques confirmed that earth’s crust is inhabited to a depth of kilometers by a ‘deep biosphere’ of slow-living microbes nourished by geochemical processes and radioactive decay. One group of microbes was discovered still living their best lives 100 million years after being sealed in sedimentary rock. Another was found enjoying a rewarding, long-term relationship with fungal partners deep beneath the seafloor. This underground ecology, which we have barely started to explore, might account for a third of the biomass on earth.”

“At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere. Bacteria not only stay viable for years on the space station hull, but sometimes do better out there than inside the spacecraft. Environments long thought to be sterile, like anoxic brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea, are in fact as rich in microbial life as a gas station hot dog. Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals or Antarctic ice have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing without so much as a cup of coffee.”

“[…] adds support to the theory that life may have started as an interplanetary infection, a literal Venereal disease that spread across the early solar system by meteorite […]”

“It is difficult to get NASA leadership to explain the purpose of this mission, not because they’re obdurate, but because they seem genuinely confused by the question. We’ve already been to the Moon, and Mars comes after the Moon. What part of that is not clear?”

“in 2024, they plan to start launching pieces of a new space station, the Gateway, which by the laws of orbital bureaucracy will lock us in to decades of having to invent reasons to go visit the thing.”

“Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war.”

We do far dumber and more harmful things all the time—for much more. That doesn’t justify this waste of time and resources, but it’s at least not actively harmful—in that it kills people and destroys environments—but the lost opportunity cost will almost certainly do that (e.g., money spent on the Mars mission won’t be spent on taking care of the needy here).

“Even billionaires who made their fortune automating labor on Earth agree that Mars must be artisanally explored by hand.”

“When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.”

“At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.”

“This research gap is what makes it impossible to get to Mars quickly, even with unlimited funding. Unless you’re willing to risk the safety of the crew, there’s no way to avoid watching astronauts sit around on the Moon for a few years with their Geiger counters out.”

“Humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity, but a Mars mission can’t leave Earth without it.”

“If any fugitives from the spacecraft make their way to a survivable niche on Mars, we may never be able to tell whether biotic signatures later found on the planet are traces of native life, or were left by escapees from our first Martian outhouse. Like careless investigators who didn’t wear gloves to a crime scene, we would risk permanently destroying the evidence we came to collect.”

If microbes can survive in space, as you mentioned before, then we can’t be sure that we haven’t already fucked this up, with our robots.

“[…] why is bringing a leaky, bacteria-filled terrarium to Mars step one in our search for Martian life? What incredible ability do astronauts have that justifies taking this risk?”

“[…] the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now, we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena.”

“Discovering a phylum is a big deal; imagine suddenly noticing the existence of vertebrates, or flowering plants. The microbial revolution in the early 21st century found something like 30 new phyla; scientists expect to find 1,300 more.”

“Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.”

“The Viking landers were the cleanest objects ever sent to Mars; subsequent landers and rovers have received more of a quick wipedown.”

Schweizer Startup will die Atomenergie neu erfinden by Luigi Jorio (SwissInfo)

“Denn das meiste Uran, das als Kernbrennstoff verwendet wird, stammt aus Bergwerken in Kasachstan, Australien und Kanada.”

Und warum denn ist Frankreich in Niger?

“Dieser Mechanismus hätte den nuklearen Unfall von Tschernobyl im Jahr 1986 verhindern können.”

What a spectacularly stupid way of putting it. You mean if we’d had completely different technology for generating energy, then we wouldn’t have had a very technology-specific accident 40 years ago? You just absolutely wanted to write the word “Chernobyl”.

“Laut Carminati weist ein Thoriumreaktor mit Teilchenbeschleuniger viele Vorteile auf. Die radioaktiven Halbwertszeiten der Thorium-Nebenprodukte sind etwa viel kürzer als diejenigen einer Urananlage – 300 Jahre statt 300‘000 Jahre. Auch die Menge an gefährlichem radioaktivem Abfall würde erheblich reduziert. “Wir sprechen hier von einigen Kilogramm statt von Tonnen”, sagt Kernphysiker Carminati.”

“Der Thoriumkreislauf hätte auch den Vorteil, dass er eine allfällige Verbreitung von Atomwaffen verhindert. Die Nebenprodukte der Thoriumspaltung können gemäss Carminati nicht für den Bau von Atombomben verwendet werden.”

Oh. Too bad. Then, I guess we’ll just forget about it. 😉

“Auch die Schweiz hat sich für einen schrittweisen Ausstieg aus der Kernenergie entschieden. Die Vertreter:innen der bürgerlichen Parteien fordern jedoch, die Nutzung von Atomkraft im Rahmen der langfristigen Energiestrategie zu überdenken, um Versorgungsengpässe zu vermeiden.”

Have we? I don’t remember that vote.

“Allerdings, so Schaffner, wird es vielleicht noch 20 Jahre dauern, bis ein neues Kraftwerk ans Netz geht. “Ich glaube nicht, dass wir angesichts des Klimanotstands so viel Zeit haben”, gibt er zu bedenken. Zudem müsse man die Kosten und die Rentabilität einer solchen Anlage auch hinterfragen.”

““Kann diese Energie billiger sein als die Solarenergie, die derzeit günstiger ist als die herkömmliche Kernenergie?”, fragt Schaffner. Nach Ansicht des ETH-Experten wäre es sinnvoller, die bestehenden Kraftwerke so lange wie möglich weiter zu nutzen.”

“Bislang hat die Firma Transmutex acht Millionen Franken an finanzieller Unterstützung erhalten, davon fünf von privaten US-Investoren. Das Startup schätzt die Kosten für den Prototypen auf rund 1,5 Milliarden Franken.”

Art & Literature

A Vision of the Future: On David Cronenberg’s Videodrome by Walter Chaw (RogerEbert.com)

““Videodrome” saw in the proliferation of home video the seeds of YouTube, 24-hour cable news cycles, 4Chan, and the Dark Web. The values of the Internet are libertarian and social diseases once thought to be on the decline are thriving again. All of the cautionary nightmares of our youth have been met and surpassed in our middle-age.”

“The idea that a television show could change the way we perceive the world, could blur the border between reality and sick fantasy, used to be alarmist. Now it’s too late to go back and we’re in bad trouble.”

“She’s a brand, impossible to separate from her persona so that when it turns out Nicki is a sexual submissive with a penchant for body modification and self-mutilation the character becomes inextricably intertwined with existing cultural fantasies about her rock star persona. She is a performance artist playing the version of herself her stalkers imagine her to be: Interested in sex with them, receptive to control, open to flirtation with skeezy, unbalanced losers like Max Renn.”

“The idea driving “Videodrome” is that the moment technology allowed individuals to consume only what they wanted to consume, they would become intellectually frozen and ideologically perverse.”

““Videodrome” is a horror film, science fiction, prophecy—all of those things and also a detective story in which the more the hero learns the less he knows; a documentary now about how it is families have been Balkanized by a news-entertainment channel that fed its weakest, most terrified members a steady diet of images meant to metastasize the petty, pitiful cancers of the mind that lie dormant in all of us.”

““Videodrome” has lost none of its power to disturb, none of its potency as a catalyst to meaningful introspection. It is more an indictment of our predictability, our inability to escape our innate inherited behaviors, than an act of real fortune telling, […]”

Lee Camp & James Kennedy: Where's the Revolutionary Music? by Behind the Headlines (YouTube)

Technology

Exclusive Q&A: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence by Glenn Hunter (Dallas Innovates)

“All of my real abilities have always come from understanding things fundamentally, at the very deepest levels, where there are insights that you only get from knowing how things happen from the very bottom.”

“[…] if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that”

Um, OK. Yeah, that’s a solution to a problem we don’t have. This is figuring out how to build a world without messing with the dirty human parts of it. This is trying to figure out how to optimize civilization to the point where you don’t need it anymore. Carmack isn’t really thinking about what happens when people lose their reason to live—not because they don’t have jobs, per se, but because they won’t have anything to do with themselves.

That’s the danger of being such an intelligent, self-starting autodidact. You think the problem to solve is to give people less to do, so that they can focus on the things they love. It’s not just kids that need structure. Everyone needs structure. Some people are capable of providing themselves with structure. Those that aren’t, well, they start to drift.

Sure, maybe we could assign computing resources to do bullshit jobs, but—and hear me out—what if we just didn’t have bullshit jobs? What if people just did fulfilling, societally enriching things—for whatever level of society: family, neighborhood, city, etc.—instead of just things that the elites have decided are worth a lot of money? We could certainly plug up the brain-drain of people who are really smart and capable, and somehow still dumb enough to go to work for big tech or big finance because of the money.

“[…] while you could say, ‘I want to make a movie or a comic book or something like that, give me the team that I need to go do that,’ and then run it on the cloud—that’s kind of my vision for it.”

Jesus, it just keeps getting worse. So making a comic book is no longer a labor of love, an art-form, but just something that you can order, off the shelf. Part of the joy of reading a comic is knowing how amazing the artwork is, knowing the work that went into it, knowing that you are living someone’s vision of the world. How can you appreciate a comic when there are 200 more of them waiting for you, each as amazing as the last? Do these people not understand how human beings really enjoy things? Or they just don’t care? I fear that we are to be swallowed beneath the waves of a tsunami of content, we will dip beneath the floodwaters of passable mediocrity. Will some of it be amazing? Of course, of course, but it will also be mediocre, by definition. Why? Because it will all be the same, all equally good, and, therefore, all average.

“The world is a hugely better place with our 8 billion people than it was when there were 50 million people kind of like living in caves and whatever.”

For you it is, dude, because you’re at the top of the food chain. There’s a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering because we at the top don’t feel it, so we accept what we have as the best we can do, when it’s really the best that we’re willing to do.

“[…] like you have reinforcement learning, supervised learning, unsupervised learning. All of those come together in the way humans think about things, and we don’t have the final synthesis of all that yet.”

My prediction: Carmack and his libertarian ilk are going to end up putting more capital and effort into educating AIs than they ever would put into educting people. I’m not sure where they think that the people who build AIs are supposed to come from then, unless they plan on bootstrapping—or outsourcing education of humans to Asia.

“I am positioning myself as one of these random test points, where the rest of the industry is going in a direction that’s leading to fabulous places, and they’re doing a great job on that. But, because we do not have that line of sight—we’re not sure that we’re in the local attractor basin where we can just gradient descent down to the solution for this—it’s important to have some people testing other parts of the solution space as well.”

That’s a good way of thinking of it, though I tend to call it “avoiding the local maximum”. I like the optics of seeking a higher mountaintop more than spiraling toward an attractor, which makes me think of going down a drain.

“So, while I’ve got people that invested $20 million in my company, I’m not telling them that I’m likely to have the breakthrough for artificial general intelligence. Instead, I’m saying there’s a non-negligible chance that I will personally figure out some of the important things that are necessary for this.”

“There’s some work from like the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that I actually think might be interesting, because a lot of things happened back then that didn’t pan out, just because they didn’t have enough scale. They were trying to do this on one-megahertz computers, not clusters of GPUs.”

«Auto-Vervollständigung gibt uns nur Bullshit» by Pascal Sigg (InfoSperber)

“«Diese Systeme haben keine Vorstellung von Wahrheit. Manchmal liegen sie richtig, manchmal nicht. Sie sagen einfach Dinge, die andere Leute gesagt haben und versuchen, die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass dies nochmals gesagt wird, zu maximieren. Es ist nur Auto-Vervollständigung und Auto-Vervollständigung gibt uns nur Bullshit.»”

“Marcus warnt: «Nehmen wir einmal an, dass wir Anzeigen mittels falscher medizinischer Informationen verkaufen wollen. Und seien wir ehrlich, es gibt Leute, denen ist es egal, ob sie falsche Infos verbreiten, solange sie die Klicks kriegen. Wir bewegen uns in Richtung dieser dunklen Welt.»”

Da sind wir ja schon längst, auch ohne KI.

“«Das gegenwärtig dominante Paradigma funktioniert für Probleme, für welche man unendlich viele Daten erhalten kann oder diese günstig sind und man das Problem fast mit Gewalt lösen kann.”

Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time by Ted Gioia (The Honest Broker)

“But that’s exactly what the confidence artist always does. Which is:”

• You give people what they ask for.
• You don’t worry whether it’s true or not—because ethical scruples aren’t part of your job description.
• If you get caught in a lie, you serve up another lie.
• You always act sure of yourself—because your confidence is what seals the deal.

“Technology of this sort is designed to be a con—if the ancient Romans had invented ChatGPT, it would have told them that it’s cool to conquer barbarians and sacrifice slaughtered bulls to the god Jupiter. Tech like this—truly made in the image of its human creator—can only feeds back what it learns from us. So we shouldn’t be surprised if ChatGPT soaks up all the crap on the Internet, and compresses it into slick-talking crap of a few sentences.”

The article included a link to a tweet by Mark C. (Twitter) that shows just how badly sequence-prediction works for problem-solving.

ChatGPT talkin' 'bout eggs 1ChatGPT talkin' 'bout eggs 2

In fairness, “2 eggs left” is a good initial response! It makes sense that you would fry, then eat the eggs. The formulation in the question suggests strongly that the eggs that were fried and the eggs that were eaten are different eggs, but it’s also possible to interpret it otherwise. However, when asked to explain its reasoning, it didn’t remember its previous answer and, instead it explained a different answer, devolving into pretty poor grammar at the end.

Its third answer is even worse, though, because it shows that it doesn’t understand anything of what it’s writing, contradicting itself within the same sentence. It has no idea what numbers are. When the prompter lies to it about its arithmetic, ChatGPT picks up the incorrect answer and runs with it, not noticing the basic arithmetic error.

It never loses confidence in its ability to take part in the conversation at any point.

OY, A.I. by Jaron Lanier (Tablet Magazine)

“The response to a relatively simple and early AI chatbot called ChatGPT has been huge, consuming newspaper space and news feeds, and yet there is hardly ever a consideration for how it might be fruitfully applied. Instead, we seem to want to be endlessly charmed, frightened, or awed. Is this not a religious response?”

“Theatrics become indistinguishable from hypothetical objective quality. ChatGPT, for instance, was similar in power to other programs that had previously been available, but the chat experience was more theatrical. Suddenly the experience was a huge deal.”

“There is much concern in the tech world about what is usually called imminent “reality collapse” or “the existential crisis.” Soon, you won’t know if anything you read, or any image or video clip you see, came from a real person, a real camera, or anything real at all. It will become cheaper to show fakes than to show reality. A fake will only require that you enter a sentence asking for it, while reality will demand showing up with a camera. No comparison. We must now invent systems to avoid a complete descent into self-destructive, insane societies, but there is so much work to do. We have set ourselves a tight timeline.”

“We constructed Wikipedia as a singular oracle in which contributors are generally hidden, even though there was no practical reason to demand this.”

We absolutely did not do that—and that’s a bullshit argument. You are more easily able to find out which people edited which entries at what time than you can for Brittanica, which is a largely faceless organization.

“The problem is not just economic, but spiritual. If a person is not valued economically in a market-oriented society, then they are not valued in a profound way. If we expect people to sit around feeling useless while waiting for the largesse of tech titans, then we should expect an awful lot of smashing in short order.”

Or maybe not have a market-oriented society? One where you can feel good about creating value regardless of whether you have the blessing of larger society. We have to learn to think bigger. Yes, people need to feel valued. But direct economic remuneration is the system we came up with to facilitate this. It is no longer working, then we should adjust it. Making money isn’t even in the top five ways of feeling valued, FFS.

“Indeed, why can’t people become proud, recognized, and wealthy by becoming ever-better providers of examples to make AI programs work better? Why can’t our society still be made of humans?”

Oh they absolutely will. They just won’t be remunerated for it. The lords of creation will focus on rent-extraction at the chokepoint they control, not at the messy edges. Those will become ever-more chaotic, as more and more people are pushed into this area—fighting over ever-shrinking scraps of value. The lords of creation sit outside the chaos they cause, inhaling a steady, stable, and seemingly indestructible stream of value that they have not earned in any sensible or societally beneficial sense of the word.

Programming

Carving The Scheduler Out Of Our Orchestrator by Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io)

“OK, having all the workers stampeding to grab conflicting jobs is inefficient. But at most cluster sizes, who cares? Have the workers wait a random interval before claiming. Have them randomize the job they try to claim. It’ll probably scale fine.”

“It doesn’t have to be hard. Assume our cluster is an undifferentiated mass of identical workers on the same network. Decide how many jobs a worker can run. Then: just tell a worker not to bid on jobs when it’s at its limit. But no mainstream orchestrator works this way. All of them share some notion of centralized scheduling: an all-seeing eye that allocates space on workers the way a memory allocator doles out memory.”

“To qualify as “fussy”, a scheduler needs at least 2 of the following 3 properties:”

1. Place jobs on workers according to some optimum that is theoretically NP-hard to obtain (but is in practice like 2 nested for loops).
2. Accounting for varying resource requirements for jobs using a live inventory of all the workers and something approximating a constraint solver.
3. Scaling to huge clusters, without a single point of failure, so that the scheduler itself becomes a large distributed system.

“These tenets of fussiness hold true not just for K8s, but for all mainstream orchestrators, including the one we use.”

“Omega has these properties:”

1. Distributed scheduling, so that scheduling decisions could be made on servers across the cluster instead of a monolithic single central scheduler.
2. A complete, up-to-date picture of available resources on the cluster (via a Paxos-replicated database) provided to all schedulers.
3. Optimistic transactions: if a proposed decision fails, because it conflicts with some other claim on the same resources, your scheduler just tries again.

“Hashicorp took Google’s Omega paper and turned it into an open source project, called Nomad.”

“Instead, flyd operates like a market. Requests to schedule jobs are bids for resources; workers are suppliers. Our orchestrator sits in the middle like an exchange. ratemysandwich.com asks for a Fly Machine with 4 dedicated CPU cores in Chennai (sandwich: bun kebab?). Some worker in MAA offers room; a match is made, the order is filled.”

“In Nomad-land, our Firecracker driver doesn’t keep much state. That’s the job of huge scheduling servers, operating in unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the maddening beating and monotonous whine of the Raft consensus protocol […]”

“Corrosion is what would happen if you looked at Consul, realized every server is its own source of truth and thus distributed state wasn’t a consensus problem at all but rather just a replication problem, built a SWIM gossip system, and made it spit out SQLite. Also you decided it should be written in Rust. Corrosion is neat, and we’ll eventually write more about it.”

“Here’s what doesn’t happen in this design: jobs don’t arrive and then sit on the book in a “pending” state while the orchestrator does its best to find some place, any place to run it. If you ask for VMs in MAD, you’re going to get VMs in MAD, or you’re going to get nothing. You won’t get VMs in FRA because the orchestrator has decided “that’s close enough”. That kind of thing happened to us all the time with Nomad.”

“What we’re doing more generally is carving complex, policy-heavy functionality out of our platform, and moving it out to the client. Aficionados of classic papers will recognize this as an old strategy.”

“What we’ve concluded is that these kinds of scheduling decisions are actually the nuts and bolts of how our platform works. They’re things we should have very strong opinions about, and we shouldn’t be debating a bin packer or a constraint system to implement them. In the new design, the basic primitives are directly exposed, and we just write code to configure them the way we want.”

“We hope this is interesting stuff even if you never plan on running an app here (or building a platform of your own on top of ours). We’re not the first team to come up with a bidding-style orchestrator — they’re documented in that 1988 paper above! But given an entire industry of orchestrators that look like Borg, it’s good to get a reminder of how many degrees of freedom we really have.”

The Guide To Responsive Design In 2023 and Beyond by Ahmad Shadeed

Using Modern CSS:

• The typography is responsive to the viewport width via [the] clamp() function.
• The spacing is responsive to the viewport width via the clamp() function.
• The hero section is responsive to its content via flexbox wrapping.
• The cards grid is responsive to the available space with minmax(), no media queries.
• The card component is responsive to its wrapper via size container queries and style container queries.
• The margins and paddings are responsive to the websites language via logical properties.

Using Media Queries

• The site navigation is responsive to the viewport width.
• The theming is responsive to the user preferences in their operating system.
• The card hover effect is responsive to what the user is using (touch vs mouse).

“With CSS features like the flexbox, grid, and clamp() comparison function, we can instruct the browser on what to do in certain situations. We don’t have to manually tackle every single detail in a design.”

“Responsive design isn’t about media queries anymore.”

“We can also use wrap-reverse to reverse the order of the thumbnail vs the content.”

When the space isn’t enough, we want the title to wrap into a new line. Here is all we need:

.section-header {
  display: flex;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
  gap: 1rem;
}

.section-header__title {
  flex: 1 1 400px;
}

The 400px value for the title is the custom breakpoint that will make the wrapping happen. When the title is 400px or less, it will wrap into a new line.

Consider the following CSS.

.wrapper {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(290px, 1fr));
  grid-gap: 1rem;
}

We have a grid with 3-columns, and we want them to resize when the viewport size gets smaller. The minmax() function mixed with auto-fill is perfect for that.

h2 {
  font-size: clamp(1rem, 0.5rem + 2.5vw, 3rem);
}

The font size will change as per the viewport width.

Other cool uses of clamp() are:

.wrapper {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, minmax(200px, 1fr));
  gap: clamp(1rem, 2vw, 24px);
}

.hero {
  padding: clamp(2rem, 10vmax, 10rem) 1rem;
}

“What happens if I want to have fluid sizing based on the container, not the viewport? This is possible now with container queries.

“We can do that by simply replacing the vw with cqw.”

This is a great demo of container queries (CodePen). It keeps it simple, but shows exactly where they are useful.

SQLite Code of Conduct: First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart by D. Richard Hipp (Hacker News)

“Contributions need to demonstrate that they will be useful to a very wide audience, and that they will not diminish our ability to maintain the code for decades into the future. Most of the effort in a project like SQLite is long-term maintenance. People might be really proud of the work they have done on some patch over a day, or week, or month. But the amount of work needed to generate the patch is nothing compared to the amount of work they are asking the developers to put into testing, documenting, and maintaining that patch for the life of the project (currently projected to be 27 more years).”