Links and Notes for September 15th, 2023

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

• Public Policy & Politics
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming

Public Policy & Politics

The Roger Rabbit Theory by Taras Grescoe (Straphanger)

“In 1887, inventor Frank Sprague outfitted Richmond, Virginia, with a system of 40 sparking trolleys that drew power from a cat’s cradle of overhead wires. Streetcars quickly became the dominant mode of urban transportation in North America, carrying eleven billion passengers a year by the end of the First World War.”

“The Red Cars, as the big interurban trolleys were known, could be seen swaying through orange groves between Santa Monica and Arrowhead Hot Springs, and clattering over the sandy margins of Newport Beach all the way up to the tavern at snow-topped Mt. Lowe; on a straightaway, they could hit 60 miles an hour. At their peak in 1926, they laced together four counties and 50 communities, mostly along private rights-of-way; together with the Yellow Cars of the Los Angeles Electric Railway, Huntington’s network of smaller streetcars which ensured local service in central Los Angeles, they constituted the most highly ramified public-transport system in the world, with over 1,500 miles (2,400 kms) of track.”

It was ahead of its time.

“The result was a new kind of city, where walkable residential centers could be physically distant from downtown, but still within easy commuting distance. As long as the Red and Yellow Cars were running smoothly, Los Angeles delivered its residents both spacious living and a modicum of urbanity.”

“As car commuters and shoppers joined the half million workers who converged on the downtown every day, traffic ground to a halt, and Huntington’s Red and Yellow Cars routinely ran sixty minutes late during rush hour. To unclog the streets, the newly formed City Planning Commission took a radical step: on a hazy spring day in 1920, they decided to ban on-street parking during business hours. The plan worked—at least at first. For the first time in years, the streetcars ran on schedule, and workers got to their offices on time.”

“[…] federal grand jury found the corporations that owned City Lines guilty of antitrust violations and fined their directors one dollar each. They were convicted, however, not of conspiring to rid America of streetcars, but of colluding to agree to buy only GM and Mack buses. After the war, GM and the other conspirators sold their stock in City Lines and got out of the transit business altogether.”

“Just those little thing make such a big difference. Like the actress’s protest for her movie opening, a petty, selfish act can have enormous consequences.”

“[…] victim of the irresistible American love affair with the automobile. Trolleys, it was true, were having trouble operating as automobiles brought them to a near standstill in downtowns across the United States. Pacific Electric, forced to keep its fares at a nickel and maintain service on low-demand lines, saw its business stolen on profitable routes by unregulated “jitneys” and bus companies; its efficiency was further reduced by accidents as reckless drivers criss-crossed the tracks.”

Without regulation or a common vision, selfish rich people get what they want and to hell with everyone else—to hell with the community, to hell with any infrastructure that doesn’t benefit them. Those same assholes have retreated to helicopters and private jets now.

Unsweet Dreams by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“As the world turns ever more swiftly into a new order, Americans need and deserve foreign policy professionals who are serious, imaginative and a little courageous. There are plenty of such people among us, but this past week is a bitter reminder there is no place for them in Washington.”

“Reforming the multilaterals, those instruments of coercion, in favor of those nations they have forced-marched into neoliberal orthodoxies since they were created at Bretton Woods as World War II ended and the U.S. began dreaming of global empire? Come now. Joe Biden has sold Americans on a lot of silly things over the decades, but this is a silly thing too far. I haven’t read a word anywhere in the non–Western press indicating any member of the G–20 majority takes this thought in the slightest seriously.”

“However we name these sorts of spectacles, they are at bottom saddening. There is so much to be done in the world, and America could be key to doing much of it. But its purported leaders prefer dreams to responsibilities, it seems—so the past 10 days of faux-diplomacy tell us.”

86 Cents For a Day of Work Is a Reality For Most Incarcerated People by Tina Vásquez and Derek R. Trumbo, Sr. (Scheer Post)

“Steve works as a landscaper at the Northpoint Training Center, where he says he does his best to try to make the prison “look good.” Rain or shine, Monday through Friday, Steve spends eight hours a day mowing, hauling gravel, groundskeeping, painting, maintaining the field, laying concrete, and performing other backbreaking manual labor. For this work, he receives $1.76 a day—and there is no chance of a raise. These already meager funds rapidly dwindle once he purchases basic necessities from the prison.”

“Like many other prisons, Northpoint provides the bare minimum: five rolls of toilet paper, one tube of shaving cream, four razors, one tube of toothpaste, and four bars of soap for the month. Items like deodorant, shampoo, and fingernail clippers are seen as privileges and must be paid for out of pocket—often at prices that far exceed the regular cost in grocery stores.”

“Like many people who become estranged from their families and larger support systems due to incarceration, Thomas has no family, friends, or outside support he can rely on when his release date comes. “Upon my release, I’ll still have many problems and obstacles to contend with,” Thomas said. “Before I can actually begin the process of building a life for myself, I’ll have to rely on food stamps, government assistance, and live in a halfway house until I get a job. Then I’ll have to save until I can afford to pay rent, buy furniture, and keep the lights on. Only then will I be allowed to leave the halfway house.””

““I am not one of those guys that sits around all day doing nothing, expecting someone else to take care of me,” Thomas said. “Even here in prison, I work eight-hour days, five days a week like I would be doing on the street. The difference is that here, I make $2.66 a day doing what I could easily make $18-20 an hour doing outside the prison fences. I currently subsist on $50 a month, and there are no 401(k) plans in prison.””

“If Mike skips coffee for a few months, he’ll save $10. But this poses a larger question: Are incarcerated people entitled to any items or routines that give them even the slightest sense of normalcy? “I don’t have to drink coffee. I know that, but it’s the one thing I can do to feel normal in this place. You know? Drink a cup of coffee when I wake up—even if it does taste like worm dirt,” Mike said.”

The Pedagogy of Power by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“It is not that the criticisms leveled against these philosophers are incorrect. They were blinded by their prejudices, as we are blinded by our prejudices. They had a habit of elevating their own cultures above others. They often defended patriarchy, could be racist and in the case of Plato and Aristotle, endorsed a slave society. What can these philosophers say to the issues we face — global corporate domination, the climate crisis, nuclear war and a digital universe where information, often manipulated and sometimes false, travels around the globe instantly? Are these thinkers antiquated relics? No one in medical school is reading 19th century medical texts. Psychoanalysis has moved beyond Sigmund Freud. Physicists have advanced from Isaac Newton’s law of motion to general relativity and quantum mechanics. Economists are no longer rooted in John Stuart Mill .”

“What are our roles and duties as citizens? How should we educate the young? When is it permissible to break the law? How is tyranny prevented or overthrown? Can human nature, as the Jacobins and communists believed, be transformed? How do we protect our dignity and freedom? What is friendship? What constitutes virtue? What is evil? What is love? How do we define a good life? Is there a God? If God does not exist, should we abide by a moral code?”

“The ancient philosophers were not oracles. Not many of us would want to inhabit Plato’s authoritarian republic, especially women, nor Hobbes’ “Leviathan,” a precursor to the totalitarian states that arose in the 20th century. Marx presciently anticipated the monolithic power of global capitalism but failed to see that, contrary to his utopian vision, it would crush socialism. But to ignore these political philosophers, to dismiss them because of their failings rather than study them for their insights is to cut ourselves off from our intellectual roots. If we do not know where we came from, we cannot know where we are going.”

“If we cannot ask these fundamental questions, if we have not reflected on these concepts, if we do not understand human nature, we disempower ourselves. We become political illiterates blinded by historical amnesia. This is why the study of humanities is important. And it is why the closure of university classics and philosophy departments is an ominous sign of our encroaching cultural and intellectual death.”

“The most important activity in life, as Socrates and Plato remind us, is not action, but contemplation, echoing the wisdom enshrined in eastern philosophy. We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it. By digesting and critiquing the philosophers of the past, we become independent thinkers in the present. We are able to articulate our own values and beliefs,”

“Wolin argues that “an historical perspective is more effective than any other in exposing the nature of our present predicaments; if not the source of political wisdom, it is at least the precondition.””

“Neoliberalism as economic theory, he writes, is an absurdity. None of its vaunted promises are even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — 1.2 percent of the world’s population hold s 47.8 percent of global household wealth — while demolishing government controls and regulations, creates massive income inequality and monopoly power. It fuels political extremism and destroys democracy. But economic rationality is not the point. The point of neoliberalism is to provide ideological cover to increase the wealth and political control of the ruling oligarchs.”

“Wolin, once a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Review of Books, found that because of his animus towards neoliberalism, he had difficulty publishing. Intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer, Ayn Rand . Once we knelt before the dictates of the marketplace and lifted government regulations, slashed taxes for the rich, permitted the flow of money across borders, destroyed unions and signed trade deals that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world would be a happier, freer and wealthier place. It was a con. But it worked.”

““The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood,” writes the economist John Maynard Keynes. “Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.””

“The ruling class, like ruling classes throughout history, seek to keep the poor and oppressed uneducated for a reason. They do not want those cast aside by society to be given the language, concepts and intellectual tools to fight back.”

American Exceptionalism and Its Consequences by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Mut zur Ethik is a forum associated with a publishing cooperative that holds conferences twice a year in the environs of Zurich. On September 1–3 the group celebrated 30 years of conferences, the theme this year being “A multipolar world order takes shape.” The following is a transcription of the speech I was invited to give.”

“Americans have made America, true enough, but I am more interested for now in how America has made Americans—how it has shaped the psychology that defines Americans—the consciousness that marks them out, indeed, so distinctly from others.”

“The cruelly inhumane proxy war in Ukraine, the dangerously provocative encirclement of China, America’s unruly conduct in the Middle East, in Latin America—America’s claim to exceptionalism lies behind all of this.”

“Americans have not said to themselves since 2001, “We must think again. We must find a new idea of ourselves and our place in the world, a new idea of what we are supposed to do.” No, Americans have done just the opposite: They have attempted to deny their doubts, to suffocate them as if under a pillow, by becoming more shrill and insistent in proclaiming their exceptionalism—and ever-bolder in their assertions of it in their conduct abroad.”

“Can America do without its exceptionalist consciousness? Or is this consciousness what is in fact indispensable to America? In other words, can there be an America without its idea of its exceptional status, or if we subtract it will America no longer cohere, no longer know itself, and so no longer be America?”

“[…] it is a long journey from de Tocqueville’s time to ours, exceptionalism having gone from simple material observation to thought to article of faith, ideological imperative, a presumption of eternal success, and a claim to stand above the law that governs all other nations.”

“This is the exceptionalism whose many destructive consequences we now witness. It is an ideology whose most peculiar feature is that it is subliminally understood to be exhausted and that it rests in large measure on denial. No American political figure would dare now to speak sensibly against the exceptionalist orthodoxy. This is ever more the case as the orthodoxy becomes more obviously hollow, more detached from perfectly discernible realities.”

“The only alternative case here is Donald Trump. He is the first president in our modern history simply to shrug off the notion and survive the judgment. “I don’t like the term,” Trump said at a Texas campaign rally in 2015. “I don’t think it’s a very nice term. ‘We’re exceptional, you’re not.’” Whatever else one may think of him, Trump is to be credited on this point.”

“What I read in Sullivan’s assertions is little more than cynicism of the same kind we saw in Reagan. They both proposed to manipulate ideological belief as a means of controlling public opinion to revive domestic support for the conduct of the imperium abroad.”

“I suppose in the middle we have to allow for “fellow travelers,” as the old expression goes: Those who do not share the ideology but stand with those who do. And here I must be bluntly honest in saying I think of Europeans in this way.”

“Like all ideologues, and here I will make a generality I am prepared to defend, Americans, by and large, would much rather believe than think. This in itself tends to leave Americans isolated, because he who believes but cannot think is incapable of relating to the world with what Fromm calls “spontaneity.” He is instead in the way of an automaton, and I take this term from Fromm, too. Anyone who has met an American of this kind, and it is not hard to do so, knows well that it is difficult to communicate with people who prefer belief to thought.”

“Our exceptionalism also serves as a confinement: We trap ourselves within a fantasy of eternal superiority and triumph. So we cannot hope to speak the same language as the rest of the world, and we don’t. We do not see events the same way. We do not react to events in the same way. We do not calculate the same paths forward.”

“At home the intellectual confinements exceptionalist beliefs impose have debilitated us for decades. We are now greatly in need of genuinely new thinking in any number of political and social spheres even as we deny ourselves permission to do any such thinking.”

“I will share two concerns I have as I think about this large transformation. One, given the velocity with which America now ravages destructively around the world, will there be enough time to accomplish such a project before it is too late, too much damage done? Two, will others have enough patience to wait should we Americans determine to make such a transformation?”

Mucked Up by Rafia Zakaria (The Baffler)

“There are many troubles with the Burning Man Festival but one particularly noxious one is how oblivious Burners are of their privilege and of their exploitation of what was once a pristine landscape, the Black Rock Desert.”

“They sat down in the middle of the road and put up signs like “Burners of the World Unite” and “Mother Earth Needs Our Help.” The protesters wanted Burning Man to put an end to the ever-larger number of private jets used by celebrities and the ultrarich to get to the festival. The protesters were also demanding a ban on unlimited use of diesel-guzzling generators, propane, and single-use plastics.”

“When the festival first began in 1986 on a beach in San Francisco it was supposed to represent an act of radical inclusion and connectedness. Those idealistic initial intentions seem to serve a single intention now and that is to absolve all current attendees from thinking of themselves as hedonistic polluters. In recent years, an ever-richer group of attendees bring gas-guzzling RVs, erect ever larger air-conditioned domes, and use more and more generators without any concern for the climate impact of their actions.”

“the much-touted spirit of gifting and sharing end up enacting a vision of what rich people think it is like to be poor. The build-it-yourself, over-hyped costlessness of Burning Man suggests a mockery of the actually poor who do not have the choice to alter their economic situation on a temporary vacation from reality.”

“[…] the inclusion has meant that even reactionaries and absurd Washington elites are welcome to let loose for a week and imagine a society that looks nothing like the one that made them rich. In 2022, roughly 80 percent of attendees self-identified as “white/non-Hispanic.” When festival cofounder Larry Harvey was asked about this in 2015, he replied, “I don’t think Black folks like to camp as much as white folks,” adding that “we’re not going to set racial quotas.” That response ignores the glaring fact that being “radically inclusive” would mean making changes to a festival that has largely been created to serve an all-white audience.”

Roaming Charges: Just Write a Check by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“During the financial crisis of 2008, Democratic lawmakers leaned on the UAW to make numerous contract concessions to help rescue the industry from bad decisions by management and banks. These concessions were never restored, including a suspension of cost-of-living adjustments. Thus autoworker pay has slipped farther and farther behind the rate of inflation with average real hourly earnings falling 19.3% since 2008. Meanwhile, the profits of the Big 3 automakers–Ford, GM, Stellantis–soared by 92% between 2013 and 2022, topping $250 billion. While the pay of their workers fell, the compensation for the Big 3’s CEOs rose by 40% over the same period and shareholders cashed in with $66 billion in dividend payments and stock buybacks.”

“After a year of drenching monsoons and desert flooding, water level at Lake Mead, which has been rising for five months, has finally leveled off. But all of this remarkable rain has left the reservoir only 34% full.”

“There are currently more than 300 million electric motorcycles/scooters/2-3 wheelers on the road worldwide and they are displacing four times as much oil demand as all the electric cars in the world so far.”

How Do People in China View Trump’s Indictments? w/ Lee Camp by BreakThrough News (YouTube)

This is a great interview by Lee Camp with Zephyr, a Chinese Youtuber, who seemed quite sane and well-informed and pretty funny.

“Donald Trump scapegoated China for everything, so how are Chinese netizens responding to his serious indictments? There’s been an explosion of memes not just about Trump but the circus that is the U.S. political system. We dive deeper into what people in China, and the United States think about Donald Trump and the recent news.

“We are joined by Lee Camp @RealLeeCamp the most censored comedian in America, and host of the show Dangerous Ideas, and Zephyr @-360face, a popular Youtuber and Billibilli influencer based in China.”

I’ve missed Lee Camp. I’m glad to see him back!

Philosophy & Sociology

The Stations of the Meritocrat Cross by Freddie deBoer (SubStack)

“You have to laugh at these kids, a little bit, and it’s OK to do so because they’re going to be the masters of the universe in a decade. This is a self-inflicted problem among a cohort of people who have overwhelmingly strong odds to enjoy lives of fiscal stability and personal satisfaction. I can’t help but laugh a little at a group of future doctors and lawyers and nonprofit muckety mucks who only feel safe when they’re manically pursuing the next laurel. But I do, also, have sympathy. I’ve had many years of experience working with both young people scrambling to get into the most exclusive college they could and with college students who still seemed bruised by the process. I found it impossible not to feel for them, given our culture and the pressures it engenders. And I think the NYT story tells us a lot about American meritocracy and its crisis of faith.”

Technology

Biden called Arizona fab a “game-changer.” Analyst calls it a “paperweight” by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

“[…] a chief analyst for a semiconductor research firm called SemiAnalysis, Dylan Patel, told The Information that the “TSMC Arizona fab is effectively a paperweight,” unable to boost America’s advanced chips supplies without first sending a ton of chips “back to Taiwan.””

“TSMC employees told The Information that TSMC building a packaging facility in the US is unlikely because it would cost too much. That’s why TSMC “always develops its newest manufacturing and packaging processes close to home, where costs are lower and talent is easier to find,” The Information reported.”

“[…] the Arizona fab also won’t produce enough chips to entice TSMC to build a packaging facility in the US. When the fab is finally fully operational, it will produce 600,000 wafers per year to meet the US chip demand, CNBC reported, and that’s a relatively small amount compared to the 15 million total wafers TSMC produced in 2022.”

“Developing packaging processes domestically requires the US to invest in costly facilities and training US workers to achieve highly technical expertise. Although the US says it wants to build packaging facilities at home, NIST said that since “it will generally be difficult to build economically competitive conventional packaging facilities in the United States,””

Programming

Some notes on Local-First Development by Kyle Matthews (Bricolage)

“I see “local-first” as shifting reads and writes to an embedded database in each client via“sync engines” that facilitate data exchange between clients and servers. Applications like Figma and Linear pioneered this approach, but it’s becoming increasingly easy to do. The benefits are multiple: Simplified state management for developers Built-in support for real-time sync, offline usage, and multiplayer collaborative features Faster (60 FPS) CRUD More robust applications for end-users”

“These projects provide support for replicated data structures. They are convenient building blocks for any sort of real-time or multiplayer project. They typically give you APIs similar to native Javascript maps and arrays but which guarantee state updates are replicated to other clients and to the server. It feels like magic when you can build a simple application and and see changes instantly replicate between devices with no additional work. Most replicated data structures rely on CRDT algorithms to merge concurrent and offline edits from multiple clients.”

“Given Postgres’ widespread usage and central position in most application architectures, this is a great way to start with local-first. Instead of syncing data in and out of replicated data structures, you can read and write directly to Postgres as normal, confident that clients will be in sync.”

He’s focusing too much on the tech and too little on the value. DX is great and all, but it’s about the UX, no? Every app would benefit from realtime updates if it’s cheap and easy to build. Every app is multiplayer, if you think about it.

“For almost any real-time use case, I’d choose replicated data structures over raw web sockets as they give you a much simpler DX and robust guarantees that clients will get updates.”

No, my friend. Right conclusion for the wrong reason. If the tech is solid, it doesn’t negatively influence debuggability or tracibility. If it’s predictable, if operations can be correlated, if you don’t end up limiting your functionality to fit the framework, then go for it. Be aware of the trade-offs and be sure all of the stakeholders can live with them, given the upsides. What does good DX translate to for other stakeholders? Easier maintenance? Less complexity? Easier onboarding? You can’t build a product that provides good DX unless you’re making a framework, in which case it might matter. No-one cares about DX for real-world products. Having good DX might lead to other desirable things, but that doesn’t make it directly desirable. Don’t forget that.

Don’t Build Your Own Bespoke Company Frameworks on Top of Akka.NET by Aaron Stannard (Petabridge)

“No two domains are identical, therefore shared abstractions typically require a superfluous configuration layer in order to support each domain’s idiosyncracies and Shared abstractions between domains lead to coupling between them − so touching one piece of shared infrastructure means touching everything at the same time. This leads to “high volatility” changes, which are inherently high-risk.”

“Essentially, BCF developers are trying to limit .NET’s type system to a smaller universe of permissible expressions. This is a tremendous mistake [a]s it introduces coupling and becomes very expensive to refactor later if the BCF designer was too opinionated in their design (and BCFs, by their very nature, tend to be very opinionated.”