Links and Notes for August 29th, 2025

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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
• Journalism & Media
• Labor
• Economy & Finance
• Science & Nature
• Medicine & Disease
• Art, Literature, & Cinema
• Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
• Technology & Engineering
• LLMs & AI
• Programming
• Sports
• Fun

Public Policy & Politics

Trump & the Russophobes by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“I say this because Russophobia is about more, much more, than near-term geopolitical strategies and policy choices. This is a question that goes to the ideology that makes America America, to the collective psyche, to Otherness and identity (which are intimately related in the American mind).”

In Europe and Switzerland, too. People here in Switzerland are 100% convinced that “defeating Russia” is a top-priority goal. They have no idea what would come next. They just know it’s super-important that Russia lose. When pressed, they say it’s because we need to show that “you can’t just attack other countries.” Again, when pressed about Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Yugoslavia, or Afghanistan (an incomplete list of targets of NATO in the last quarter-century), then they run out of words.

“Can Trump put a long, regrettable past thoroughly into the past, or at least set America on a path such that it may finally embrace the 21st century instead of continuing to fall behind in it?”

No. He will almost certainly fuck it up. It is unfortunately too delicate a solution for the bull elephant to find by stumbling about. That’s even assuming that he actually wants that solution. Or that he can summon the concentration to actually get it.

“Seven decades later America swooned into the first Red Scare in response to the Bolshevik Revolution. And two more decades after that, what? With the World War II alliance against the Axis Powers, F.D.R., clever man, had Americans referring to Stalin as “Uncle Joe.”

“Alas, the extraordinary powers of media and propaganda. No sooner was World War II over (and Roosevelt in his grave) than America plunged into the second Red Scare, a.k.a. the McCarthyist 1950s. And after that the détente of the late 1960s and 1970s, and after that Reagan’s “evil empire” nonsense.

“After the Soviet Union’s collapse we had the Russia-as-junior-partner years, when the inebriated Boris Yeltsin stood aside while Western capital raped the formidable remains of the Soviet economy. And then to the Putin years. What we live through now would amount to a third Red Scare apart from the fact Russia is no longer Red.”

“No war can be waged in the long term without the majority consent of the population. A psychologist serving in the Swiss army once stated with regard to war propaganda that it takes about three to four years to persuade a population of the necessity of a war. However, since this consent would be almost impossible to obtain if people were told the complicated truth—in essence that foreign policy is determined by the energy companies, the arms manufacturers, the military, the “monetary guardians,” and other interest groups—another, more easily understood reason for war must be provided.”

“An enemy who threatens the country and can be portrayed as fiendish and diabolical has always been the best propaganda argument. If Putin is a criminal who has Ukrainian children kidnapped to “erase their identity” in reform camps, this will convince many people that rearmament and war against Russia is the only solution.

“Anyone who succeeds in making people believe that the enemy commits violence against children has achieved the perception of this enemy as a bestial monster. With an enemy so devoid of humanity, there can be no understanding, no peace negotiations, no mercy. Anyone who wants to make a population “bellicose” is bound to portray the enemy in this manner.”

Trump administration re-imprisons Abrego García, initiates plans to deport him to Uganda by Jacob Crosse (WSWS)

“After Abrego Garcia was seized by ICE agents on Monday, his lawyer Simon Sandoval-Mosheberg declared: “There was no need for them to take him into ICE detention. He was already on electronic monitoring from the U.S. Marshals Service and basically on house arrest. “We asked the ICE officer what the reason for his detention was. The ICE officer didn’t answer. The ICE officer stated that he will be taken to a detention center. We asked the ICE officer which detention center. The ICE officer said that they weren’t able to say.””

TRUMPS INSANE CNBC INTERVIEW by HasanAbi (YouTube)

I have to admit that I think that Hasan Piker[3] does very worthwhile analysis. This is a half-an-hour of more Donald Trump interview than I think I’ve ever heard, all with real-time context and fact-checking added in, with as little fanfare as possible.

“It’s true. He is the most influential president of this century. He has single-handedly changed American politics. I said this before the election. We are now living in Trump’s universe. We’re living in Trump land. We’re living in Trump politics. Even if he lost, he would have forever changed the Republican party.”

Then, after a commentator was nearly peeing his pants in excitement that there is probably going to be “net-negative migration” (more people leaving than entering), Hasan says,

“But I don’t think he understands. This is not like a good thing about immigration. […] people are leaving. Why is this a good thing? Why would anybody celebrate this? Oh my god, we’re so dumb. Ah, dude. It’s just like we’re so dumb. This is such a stupid country. What do you say? What do you do?”

“they’re getting $8000 a month??” by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Or there’s this one, which discusses the recent outing of so many so-called liberal influencers who’d been getting paid about $100K per year to glaze the Democrats.

They’re Lying About Venezuela While Moving War Machinery Into Place by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“They’re just lying. The US empire lies about all its acts of war. Trump tried to orchestrate a regime change in Venezuela the last time he was in office, and he’s doing it again for the exact same reasons. It’s an oil-rich nation that refuses to bow to the dictates of Washington, and all the worst warmongers in the imperial swamp are eagerly pushing to absorb it into the folds of the empire.

“That’s all we are looking at here, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

Immigration Enforcement by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (YouTube)

The Marshall Plan turned Western Europe into one big US Vassal (Reddit)

The Marshall Plan was and is a psyop

“The Marshall Plan was an imperialist investment to make Western Europe dependent on american oil, to neoliberalize its economy, to crush workers’ unions, and to attack communist movements/parties”

Comments:

“People for some reason don’t just read the Marshall plan agreements, which explicitly required privatization and for laws to change to be more business friendly”

“In history class the Marshall plan is literally portrayed as America giving a boatload of cash to Europe for free, just to spite the soviet and prove communism wrong.”

ICE ad in the 20 minutes newspaper

“Defend the Homeland. Join ICE today.”

This ad appeared in the Swiss 20min news app while browsing it in the U.S. And there’s a picture of Kristi Noem trying to look all tough in the cab of what is presumably an unmarked SUV. That woman is pond scum.

TRUMP'S MILITARY REVENGE by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Almost every line in this video was important and necessary for people to hear. I dare say …. brilliant. This video seemed completely extemporaneous. It’s Hasan expressing his deeply held and well-considered beliefs, pretty much all of which I agree with.

“What could be a solution to crime? Great question. This has been something that thinkers have gotten together and and tried to find solutions to since the ancient times. Okay. From ancient Greece onwards, the answer has always been the same. Solve poverty and you solve crime. That’s it.

“Just as Americans and their inability, the American government’s inability to address any of these problems and then their solutions are always just like to basically make the problems worse. With the conversation around crime, the solutions are identical.

“They are basically doing the just one more lane on the highway and we will fix this traffic issue. Please, one more lane. But in terms of addressing the crime, the real solution to lowering traffic density, as we all know, is not more lanes on a highway. It’s actually public transit. Okay? Making a less car reliant infrastructure would be the perfect solution to the traffic density problem. But we don’t do that. And we just keep adding lanes onto the highway. But you still get bottle-necked when you enter the city. That’s just how it works.

“And the same principle applies to every single thing that these guys are seemingly trying to solve. If militancy was actually an adequate solution to crime, then America would be crime-free. We have the most militant police force on the planet. Nothing comes near the militancy and the militarization of our domestic police force. This is before we even talk about utilizing the military.

“[Reading from the chat] ‘But I like my car is the only freedom we have at this point.’

“This is what I mean. No, true freedom is not having to sit in traffic. True freedom is actually being able to have a much more affordable alternative to having a car. You can still have a car if you want to, but like real freedom would be the freedom to have a diversity in transport options as opposed to just simply being in your car. But Americans just do not comprehend that at all because it’s been sold to you. This has been sold to you since birth that like cars are actually—cars equate to freedom.

“But anyway, that’s like that’s just one aspect of this. Here, give me any problem that has a major impact on American day-to-day existence and I will show you that they do the same every single time.

“[From the chat] Gun violence, school shootings.

“Okay, the solution is simple. Gun control is the most effective means to at least cut down some of the gun violence. And yet, no one wants to do that. So, we constantly look for other alternative reasons. Okay, we’re like, “Oh, door control. Oh, we you need more guns. We need to give the teachers guns.”

“Okay, it’s so stupid. You’re not solving the problem. You’re making the problem worse. I already gave you the example of just one more lane on the highway for traffic density.

“Same with healthcare. Solution to healthcare is to take out the profit incentive from healthcare. It should be free. It’s free in many other countries, in almost every single country. Every country that has decent governance has realized that this is the bare minimum thing that they need to do.

“In America, we don’t do that. And we’re like, “No, no, you don’t understand. We need to let the free enterprise thrive even more and then it’ll automatically solve itself.” Nope. It hasn’t. Why would you think that doing the same thing over and over again and leaning into the private enterprise aspect of it is going to actually solve this problem?

“And the same goes for crime. Same goes for crime. The only solution to crime is the eradication of poverty because that is where crime manifests. Crime manifest as a byproduct of people’s material conditions. Crime increases when people are poor. When they feel as though they have no alternatives.

“The American government is already like pretty ruthless in terms of dealing with crime have refused to reckon with this problem. they just say nah actually it’ll be different this time. The best mechanism to solve crime is more deterrence, more violence, more punitive measures and, if that was the case, we’d be crime-free already, as opposed to like all these other countries. But all these other countries have significantly lower crime rates than we do.

“All these other countries have significantly lower recidivism rates than we do—the likelihood to re-offend—right? Once someone is in jail and that’s directly a consequence of the way our prison structure works, our prison system works is so ruthless and so violent that you become like a better criminal. You become like…you are pushed into being a more rugged criminal once you go to prison as opposed to like rehabilitate and reintegrate into society.

“It all stems back to this like insane concept that we have. It’s the profit motive. We have private prisons in this country which is abhorrent, morally repugnant obviously, but then also on top of that it’s the lack of interest in solving any of these real problems because someone can make more money off of not solving these problems.”

“Why do you think people in high crime neighborhoods want more police? Because they also believe the same that everyone believes. They believe the same that your uncs in the suburbs believe. The false notion that like more police presence is actually actively solving crimes or is like active deterrent. Also, these under-served neighborhoods oftentimes do have a ton of police presence, but they’re just not doing the normal function of policing. And that is precisely the reason why they think, “Oh, if there were more cops, maybe they would actually solve these problems.” When, in fact, a big problem with policing is that they’re just not doing their jobs. That’s the issue.

“I’m not saying ‘no police’. I’m saying do your job. Okay? Do your job. Do your job. The theoretical job of a police force, whether it’s a democratic design or not, is supposed to be: to protect and serve the citizens, protect and serve the public. But policing historically and in contemporary American society simply protects and serves capital, the interests of capital. That’s all they do. Their active response time to incidents in rich white neighborhoods is far better than their active response time in black neighborhoods, in poor neighborhoods in general. That’s the reason why a lot of people that live in areas where there are higher rates of crime think like, oh, if we have more if we had more cops, maybe they would like actually come faster.”

“Attorney General Pam Bondi has made clear that cities and states with these so-called sanctuary policies which limit local law enforcement from working with federal agents to enforce immigration policies. Also, that has nothing to do with crime.

Ironically enough, sanctuary city policies are oftentimes backed by the local police because is a successful way to have undocumented migrant communities collaborate and cooperate with the authorities without fear that they’re just going to be like unjustifiably deported for being a witness to a crime. That is the real reason why sanctuary cities were implemented. Okay? Or, at least, one of the reasons why sanctuary cities were implemented. It is so ridiculous that these dudes are trying to bring up the the lack of collaboration between federal law enforcement that’s mechanism is to violently prosecute civil offenders.

“Like imagine you you just get like ripped away from your family and sent to a totally separate country for a moving violation. You know what I mean? a traffic violation. And I’m not even talking about like DUIs. I’m talking like a tiny offense cuz that’s what it is to cross the fucking border. That’s literally what that is. That’s just how it’s seen in the legal system. And it shouldn’t even be seen as an offense really cuz the best possible way to fix that problem is to document these people, right?

“So, they’re basically saying the real issue is that like these criminal scum, you know, that work every single day to make your lives better for pennies on the dollar. Those are the real rugged criminals. Okay. And they must be violently seized and kidnapped by mass-armed thugs of the state and ripped away from their families. And if we don’t do that, then, you know, crime is out of control. I think many Americans still don’t fully comprehend this issue. And I can’t even necessarily fault them for their clear lack of humanity, like their clear lack of recognition for the humanity of undocumented migrants because like there’s not that many people out there convincingly speaking on this issue, convincingly speaking on the humanity of migrants in the way that I try to do every single day.”

“I think it still loops back. I hate to be a broken record on this, but I think this still loops back to white supremacy, right? What I mean by this, is like immigrants are black and brown in the minds of like many Americans. So, you can kind of turn a blind eye to like over-policing in those communities, no matter how unconstitutional or ridiculous it is without ever actually having to care about their humanity or their contributions to American society and American existence and the social fabric that keeps everything together.

And the same goes for black neighborhoods and black cities in general where it’s just like, this, the assessment from like regular Americans, from all different backgrounds, is that like higher-percentage black cities and higher-percentage black neighborhoods are just like scary and filled to the brim with crime. And therefore you just have to be violent and brutal to these people and you know if you use the military like this then it’s still good.

“They don’t even think about it like, “Bro, that’s your city, too.” You know what I mean? They don’t even comprehend it, because they just think, “Oh, it won’t happen in my city. There’s not a lot of black people here, so it’s fine.””

We must build a system…

We don't have rights; we have conditional privileges

“Listen, if a Bad President can come in and take away our rights and we’re dependent on a Good President replacing them in four years to give us back our rights, then we do not have any rights.

“If politicians can take or distribute them, then they’re not “inalienable” and they’re not “rights.”

“We don’t have inalienable rights we have conditional privileges, divvied out according to the whims of whoever currently holds the reins.

“And if we want to have actual rights, then we must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.”

The State of the ‘State of Palestine’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Fidel Castro, a year and nine months in power, addressed the General Assembly in September 1960. The U.N. asks members to limit their time at the podium to 15 minutes; the fiery Fidel spoke for four hours, a nonstop rip into the history of U.S. imperialism and its abuses of Cuba since the 1959 revolution. The U.N. calls Castro’s speech “epic” and a “pivotal moment.” These are fair descriptions, in my view: It was an early announcement that Latin America intended thenceforth to speak up and stand up to los norteamericanos, just as it then learned to do.”

“Will Bibi Netanyahu attend this year’s General Assembly? He customarily does, rarely missing a chance to denounce the Assembly and the whole wide world represented there as a horror show of anti–Semites — his murderers-as-victims act. But this repulsive man is wanted under international law for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

“However this turns out, it will be notable either way. If Netanyahu walks the halls of the Secretariat next month we will have to accept the near-total impotence of the courts that adjudicate international law; the Western powers will have completed their disemboweling of another of the institutions that mark out our international public space. If Bibi stays away, well, we will be pleased to say international law counts for something after all, and we can look to bigger things from there.”

“Francesca Albanese is entirely right to assert that we must not let a raft of diplomatic recognitions distract us from the suffering and loss of life among Palestinians and the urgent imperative to stop both. The inverse seems just as true to me. The Western powers are plainly in no hurry to abandon wholesale their support of the Zionist state. No, the road to that is long. But those about to lend their support to Palestinian statehood will take a step on it, gingerly as this may prove.”

If Israel Stops Fighting, A Genocide Ends; If Hamas Stops Fighting, Ethnic Cleansing Moves Forward by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Israeli politicians and official government social media accounts have begun pushing the narrative that Muslim immigrants are a threat to Europe, the implication being that Europeans should support Israel because Israel is helping to kill the Muslims.

“Israel’s Arabic language Twitter account recently posted a graph showing the number of Mosques across Europe accompanied by right wing “great replacement”-style talking points, saying that “This is the true face of colonization. And this is what is happening while Europe is oblivious and does not care about the danger.”

“Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett tweeted last month that “Europe is becoming Islamized,” fearmongering about the number of Muslim immigrants throughout Europe.”

“Haaretz reports that an IDF commander named Haim Cohen received intelligence warnings immediately prior to the Hamas attack on the Nova music festival on October 7 but took no preemptive action, and that “Cohen was also the officer who initially approved the festival on Tuesday of that week.”

“This is just the latest addition to a large body of evidence that Israel appears to have intentionally allowed the October 7 attack to happen after deliberately provoking it in order to advance a preexisting agenda to steal more Palestinian territory.”

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “I don’t care what the UN says” when challenged by the press about his assertions regarding Venezuela’s responsibility for America’s drug problems, claiming that “Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker in the United States and he’s a fugitive of American justice.”

“You really couldn’t get a more honest representation of US foreign policy than the top American diplomat saying “I don’t care what the UN says” and then claiming that the leaders of sovereign nations are subject to “American justice”. These freaks really do believe this entire planet is their property.

“As we discussed previously, this is just cover for a longstanding regime change agenda against an oil-rich socialist government that Washington has sought to depose for many years.”

Journalism & Media

TRUMP DOWNPLAYS SLAVERY by Hasan Piker (YouTube)

“Yeah. It’s like, hey, uh excuse me. How about you offer some praise to the good
man Adolf Hitler? After all, he was responsible for killing Adolf Hitler. That’s the type of [ __ ] argument she’s making here. It’s crazy. What do you mean? The fuck is this? What are we doing? This is on CNN, bro. This is not Fox News. I feel like a decade ago, this would be the outlier on a Fox News panel. And even they would have other Fox News hosts be like, “Okay, maybe that’s a bridge too far. You’re saying the quiet part out loud. That’s not supposed … we’re not supposed to say that.””

“It’s so funny because nobody ever says, “Hey, Trump, why are you too focused on how sad the history of slavery makes you feel?” People only turn around and go, “Why are you calling this racist?” Classic. It’s not the other person that’s being racist that’s a problem for you. It’s the fact that someone is calling that out accurately for what it is. That’s the issue. Okay.”

“I don’t know what these guys think the purpose of a f@&king museum is. Like, what? Like, museums are not supposed to be presenting like a future vision of what things are going to look like in the future. It’s the history of African-Americans in the nation that’s doing its function.”

This is the main point here: these arguments about museums not being uplifting enough are profoundly stupid. They’re not arguing about whether the information in the museum is accurate; they’re arguing about whether it makes them feel bad or uncomfortable. What an absolute tragedy that so many people are on board with this. The anti-intellectualism in the U.S. went up another level. You should check out the Topographie des Terrors museum in Berlin if you really want to see how it’s done. No punches pulled there.

These are a bunch of snowflakes who are too stupid or too venal to even see how snowflake-y their arguments are.

JD VANCE VISITS UNION STATION by Hasan Piker (YouTube)

“Why is it that in American politics, you only have two options? Either you just kill the homeless with the military, you kill them dead, or you have to act like they’re not there. Why no third option? Why is this the only two available options at our disposal in American politics?”

Why Wikipedia works by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“The emergence of this threat in the USA is a potential game-changer for the Wikipedia Foundation, which has long relied on its US domicile – and the First Amendment – to protect the core project from political censorship. Wikipedia’s status as the best, most trusted source of information on the internet has painted a crosshairs on its back: leaked Heritage Foundation slides detail a plan to force Wikipedia to unmask editors who contribute criticism of Israel to the project.”

Because of course Israel has to ruin Wikipedia too. There is just nothing that the U.S. and Israel are unwilling to destroy in order to make the world think like them.

“The Media Research Center has called for the Big Tech monopolists – Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all openly allied with Trump today – to block Wikipedia until it agrees to treat Newsmax, OANN and other conspiratorial publications as reliable sources.

“Ironically, one of the things the right hates most about Wikipedia is that it takes affirmative measures to identify and correct its bias, for example, by actively encouraging editorial participation by members of minorities who are underrepresented in Wikipedia’s volunteer editor cohort. Right wing demagogues call this “DEI,” even as they demand that the government force Wikipedia to institute DEI for conspiracy-addled right wing trolls. As the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.””

Billionaires Keep Buying the News… CBS Just Got Hit by Hasan Piker (YouTube)

“You have to be as open-minded as possible, take on as much emotional labor as possible, and be as charitable as possible. I know it sounds nuts when you’re like, “Well, this guy is like engaging in uh you know, hasbara or genocide-denial in perpetuity. Like, what the do you mean I have to be nice to this person?” Like, no. If you think that the person that you’re talking to is open-minded—which by the way, your expectation should be that everyone is charitable until they show you that they’re not, until they prove to you that they’re not. Um, but you have to just remember that we need the numbers no matter what. In order to in order to keep uh pushing, in order to keep uh creating pressure, you need more numbers always.”

Labor

More DEI! Louder! by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“Today, the Trump administration is a racist organization. It exists to put into effect policies that arise due to racism. The president has called out the National Guard into the streets of Washington, which has a black mayor, and Los Angeles, which has a black mayor, and is vowing to send more troops into cities that he believes to be dirty and crime-ridden, including Oakland, which has a black mayor, and Baltimore, which has a black mayor, and Chicago, which has a black mayor.”

And New York, I think? New York City has a black mayor but Adams loves Trump, so Trump’s going to wait until Mamdani is finally elected before sending in troops to wipe that smile off of that dirty brown Arab Muslim Ugandan’s face.

“I didn’t used to like the term “DEI.” It was a cold and corporate term, a product of more concrete concepts like “civil rights” and “racial justice” being subjected to the ideological rock tumbler of capitalism and emerging as something bland enough to fit even the least radical palates. But you know what? I’ve changed my mind. Now I like it. The fact that a concept as tepid as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” caused our nation’s racists to become so enraged that the backlash to it threatens to end the American democratic experiment once and for all has made me reassess the virtues of the term.”

“If this utterly unthreatening, HR-crafted version of basic fairness and minimal consciousness of history was enough to cause millions of middle-aged office workers to accept “rebuilding the Confederacy” in order to get out of having to potentially hire a non-white person for the VP of Sales position, the concept must be more potent than I thought.”

Let him cook.

“An entire nation full of middle managers who just a few short years ago were speaking like Harriet Tubman have had their masks yanked off, Scooby Doo-style, to reveal the pathetic little bureaucrats inside.”

“Today, the advances of the civil rights movement are under attack, unapologetic racism has wormed its way back into polite society, and masked secret police roam the streets of our cities trying to snatch up our friends and neighbors, destroy the lives they have built, and throw them out of the country.”

The metaphorical mask is off, while the actual mask is on (ICE).

“The fact that it may feel a little uncomfortable to do so in today’s environment is exactly the reason why it is necessary.”

The fact that you would go out of business in upstate NY is more than a “little uncomfortable.”

Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“[…] in political economy, friction isn’t something you reduce, it’s something you redistribute, typically downward, to people with less political power than you. Think about your job. If you are on a salary, your boss has to pay you even when there’s no work to be done, which means that during times where there’s no income, your boss still has to pay your wages, meaning that a long slow patch could kill the business. But if your boss can eliminate or reduce your wages when there’s no work, the friction of figuring out how to keep your boss’s business a going concern is shifted to you.”

“If you’re a driver, you only get paid for the time when you’re on a delivery or have a passenger, and you bear the expense of the rest of the hours you spend prowling the streets, waiting for a call-out. This allows gig companies to build up a giant workforce that can absorb orders when they come in, while shifting the friction of living on half-wages to the workers who only get paid on the way out to a delivery, but not on the way back.”

“The friction your boss experiences from furiously fantasizing about how lazy you’re being at home is swapped for the friction of your commute, the friction of having to reschedule deliveries that you weren’t home to sign for, the friction of having to eat a packed lunch or waste your pay on overpriced, additive/grease/salt/sugar-laden quick-service food.”

“The airline that fires most of its customer service staff shifts operational frictions onto passengers, from the friction of arriving two hours early to see one of the few check-in clerks to the friction of waiting for three hours on hold to rebook a canceled flight or find a lost bag.”

“SWA [SouthWest Airlines] would sell tickets for more flights than it had planes, and then cancel the flights that had sold the fewest tickets.

“That’s quite a magnificent piece of friction-shifting. SWA is relieved of the friction of buying and maintaining a fleet of planes. They don’t have to bear the friction of guessing which planes will and won’t be full in advance. But SWA passengers get all the friction and more, when their flight is cancelled because other people – whom they have no control over – failed to buy enough tickets for it.”

All the Things That You Need a Billion Dollars to Buy Are Bad by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“America’s 1,135 billionaires make up 0.0003% of the country’s population. Collectively, they own $5.7 trillion, about 4% of the nation’s wealth. Their comrades in the top 0.1% of the wealth distribution—a group you can enter with a paltry $50 million—own 14% of the nation’s wealth. The top 1% of the wealth distribution owns 31% of the nation’s wealth. The top ten percent owns two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. The bottom half of the wealth distribution in America owns 2.5% of the wealth. Effectively nothing.”

Economy & Finance

Bank CEOs Rake In Big Profits as Wall Street Ramps Up Fossil Fuel Financing by Derek Seidman (Scheer Post)

“The report shows that banks based in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan account for around 83 percent of fossil fuel financing globally, highlighting the massive imbalance of fossil financing profiteering that comes from the Global North while disproportionately impacting the Global South.”

“All told, the 65 biggest banks in the report have committed a staggering $7.9 trillion in fossil fuel financing since 2016, the year the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, went into effect, the report notes.”

“Leading fossil fuel financiers like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo had previously celebrated their self-proclaimed climate concerns by joining the NZBA. But in the face of rising opportunities to capitalize on fossil fuel expansion — from corporate mergers and expanded drilling practices to a new oil-friendly Trump administration — these banks and many more have quit the NZBA entirely.”

Chinese EV buyers are cooling on Tesla and BYD by Jonathan M. Gitlin (Ars Technica)

“But perhaps Tesla shareholders shouldn’t worry about cratering sales. On Monday night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk used his social media network to yet again prophesize that the company’s future is not cars. Despite the fact that selling cars brings in 75 percent of the revenue and is responsible for the carbon credits that keep the company in the black, EVs are but a mere distraction. Instead, Musk claims that 80 percent of Tesla’s value will come from selling humanoid robots.

“Musk has been promoting Tesla’s humanoid robot for some years now, with flashy demos that, instead of actual robotics, were waldos in action, mindlessly copying the motions of human controllers who were operating them remotely.”

At lunch today, before I even saw this article, I was predicting nearly exactly this scenario, saying that Tesla’s stock price is so divorced from reality that they could probably stop making cars entirely and the price wouldn’t drop: just the P/E would increase dramatically. I said that they would pivot to making robots that don’t exist and their shareholders would sue them for continuing to waste money on making cars.

Science & Nature

Sea Level by Randall Munroe (xkcd)

xkcd sea level 2x

A: Hey, where’s that big island we were looking at this morning?
B: Oh, it’s underwater. The ocean’s depth here goes up and down by like ten feet every day.
A: What?
B: It’s because the planet has a big moon orbiting near the surface. It causes weird gravity effects.
A: What???

People here are used to them, but tides are one of the weirdest and most sci-fi elements of life on Earth.

Medicine & Disease

Make America Healthy Again by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (YouTube)

If you think things can't get worse… by Hasan Piker (YouTube)

This video discusses Jim O’Neill, who’s the new acting director of the CDC. He is a brain-dead libertarian who’s a member of the Seasteading Institute (this is the video that Hasan plays: Jim O’Neill − The Seasteading Institute Conference 2009).

“O’Neal had given a talk in 2014 in which he advocated for pushing drugs onto the market without assessing whether or not they work. Let people start using them at their own risk. He argued, ‘let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.‘

“What I never understand about these guys is that that’s how it used to be. There is a reason why that’s not how it is now. And the reason is because people died, bro. That’s the whole point. There is a reason why we set these rules, man. What the are we doing, dude? This is so dumb.

“Like, being a libertarian must be awesome. Cuz you just run around being like ‘every rule that was written—with blood, okay?—is actually bad and wrong. And we should revert back to a time when those rules didn’t exist that made those rules an inevitability because people died.‘

“That’s why like the anti-OSHA advocates are so stupid. Like all of that regulation exists: not so that people can be annoying; it exists because it was a necessity. Oh my god.”

Art, Literature, & Cinema

Hays Code (Wikipedia)

“[…] a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most motion pictures released by major studios in the United States from 1934 to 1968.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Towards a Theory of Trads by Mary Cadwalladr (Hinternet)

“Most of this was happening in the first half of the 2010s — the last moment in history when members of Gen X could make any plausible claim to be the apex drivers of mass culture, and indeed the last moment in history when the apex drivers of mass culture remained internet non-natives, carrying with them, in their musical and creative sensibilities, some significant memory of a world still mostly unmediated by screens.”

“Ever since then, the progressive left, or even just the left-by-default but mostly apolitical world of musical and creative Bohemia, gave up any claim at all to roots, to ancestral ways, to folksiness, and threw itself, entirely and incoherently, into the welcoming arms of the biomedical establishment, of Hollywood franchises, fast food, and infantilizing fandoms centered on corporate IP.”

“This earlier migration brings us, within a decade, from a broadly humanitarian and egalitarian spirit, forged in part under pressure from the Soviet political project of celebrating ethnographic diversity within their own empire, to a libertarian-tinged American triumphalism more or less concomitant with the Nixon Shock that ended the gold standard and made American economic hegemony identical with American readiness to back up its claim to hegemony with violence instead of gold.”

“The more recent migration from the hipsters to the trads moves, in turn, from a broadly Clintonite-Obamaite liberal centrism to something I take to be unmistakably far-right in character.”

This is where I feel that Justin’s ordinary acumen fails him. He seems unable to see that the only difference between Clinton, Obama, and Trump is who they’re willing to sweep up. It’s one of degree. It’s telling that people consider the guy who quadrupled the prison population (Clinton, though Biden wanted credit, too) and the guy with the deportation high score and whom they called the Drone Bomber and who destroyed Libya (Obama) are considered liberal-centrists, whereas, now that some heretofore untouched, privileged, and white elites are being targeted, well, now it’s fascism.

“[…] betray the hipsters’ place in history as the cultural wing of Clintonite-Obamaite ideology: capitalism is tough, it’s unfair, but there’s nothing we can do about it and we’re sorry to see you, neighbor, getting evicted. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got 300 crates of vinyl to move in.”

“I see their discomfort now as having at least something to do with an awareness, perhaps subconscious, of their own role as agents of neoliberalism, and of the imminent dead-end of the political order that had produced and enabled their brief cultural dominance.”

“But theirs is an entirely through-the-looking-glass variety of counter-Enlightenment. A trad’s idea of ancestral folkways is shaped mostly or entirely through the mediation of a digital screen. It is a hastily recomposed virtual pastiche of tradition, thrown together a good number of years after the rise of digital media and of ubiquitous screen-mediation of social reality had already created a rupture with tradition so complete that any attempted recomposition of it, for any political purpose, could only have come out as a simulacral farce.”

Technology & Engineering

The Truth About Those Age Verification Pop-Ups by Evan Edinger (YouTube)

0:54 Details of the UK’s Online Safety Act
3:19 Recent “unavoidable” Data Leaks 
4:55 Why the Online Safety Act Immediately Fails
7:10 How Free VPNs can decrease your data privacy
8:24 How the Online Safety Act is filtering the news
9:10 How the UK Looks on the World Stage in Technology
10:30 How little Parliament seems to know about VPNs
14:25 How to actually keep your data private online
15:16 My best tip for searching Google
17:13 Don’t set your 2 factor authentification up wrong
18:09 How an Internet Router and VPN Work
20:31 How the UK’s Online Safety Act will affect UK businesses

This 21:36-long video is chock-full of useful information: use a real VPN (not a free one; be sure of the vendor), hide your real email address wherever possible, stop clicking sponsored links in search results (although he doesn’t recommend to use a search engine other than Google), use an authenticator app for 2FA instead of text messages, etc.

This Record Label Is Trying To SILENCE Me by Rick Beato (YouTube)

Rick Beato was forced to hire a lawyer to defend his fair-use playing of artist’s music in his videos. The labels abuse the copyright-strike system and Google cheerfully goes along with it.

He has “successfully fought thousands of them—never lost one—they still keep coming in.”

There is no way for him to defend himself against these without a lawyer. UMG (Universal Music Group)—or, most likely, the third-party firm that they hired to enforce their copyrights—are not punished at all for raising invalid claims against people who are rightfully claiming fair use. If they’ve failed at thousands of claims, why should they get to continue to lodge complaints for free, wasting everyone’s time and making it more difficult to create interesting interviews and analysis? Google clearly doesn’t care, as this has been going on since nearly the beginning of their purchase of YouTube.

This is the world they have built for us. They hate us. The despise it when we do anything that doesn’t make them money.

Back to work, monkey.

Outlook thinks I'm not using Teams

“WORK TOGETHER EFFICIENTLY Get more done with chat, calls, and meetings all in one app—Microsoft Teams. Open Teams now”

This is a deeply pathetic message to show in Outlook. Teams was running at the time. Teams is always running. I’ve been using Teams for years. How little telemetry do you have to collect to not even know this about your products? This is the product of a $4T company. Clearly this is societally well-assigned value.

Building a Watch From Scratch In Brooklyn by Worn & Wound (YouTube)

LLMs & AI

Generic AI / Crypto / Trader Bro Face

That’s the face that launches the following video:

The $10 Trillion AI Revolution: Why It’s Bigger Than the Industrial Revolution by Sequoia Capital (YouTube)

The title is just so douche-y and desperate. That it comes from Sequoia Capital is not a surprise. That the guy looks like he summered every year on his dad’s sailboat off of Martha’s Vineyard also surprises no-one, I hope.

The video was expected, an LLM-written rehash of everything you already knew about what AI-focused investment companies want you to believe about the direction of human achievement.

AI, Science and Society Conference − AI ACTION SUMMIT − DAY 1 by IP Paris / Yann Le Cun (YouTube)

The segment starts at 06:45:00 if YouTube doesn’t jump there on its own. The talk goes on for about 45 minutes, after which Le Cun stays on stage for a “fireside chat”. This part was OK but not as interesting as the talk itself.

In particular, the discussion of regulation was so siloed, with Michael Jordan (not that one) blustering about that there should be no regulation because it “stifles innovation” while Stéphane Mallat quite reasonably pointed out that the regulation is part of the innovation because you can’t design regulation in at the end. It’s like “adding security” to a product at the end: it never works and it will never work.

Honestly, Jordan sounded like a caricature of an American capitalist, where only private capital is capable of making decisions for all of society, completely and utterly unimpeded by the opinion of the demos as expressed by the agencies created for this purpose by the people’s representatives. He and the lady (who’s not even listed in the notes for the Fireside chat, WTF, but whose name I learned from the conversation is Asu Ozdaglar) both said that they would be happy to have the government incentivize good behavior but what the hell is the difference of incentivizing vs. regulation? Like, they think that companies with all of the money should get even more money to try to keep them from behaving badly? Like, isn’t that how it already works? Or doesn’t work? They just suck up all of the incentives and do whatever they want anyway, because there is no regulation.

Jordan jumped in at some point to tell Bernhard Schölkopf that he can figure out for himself whether he’s wasting time reading something written by an AI. We don’t need regulation to label AI-generated content up-front, right? Cool. So, we allow the laziest members of society, using AI to mass-generate slop, to waste the time of the more-intelligent and useful members of society. Cool idea, bro. Jordan makes decent points about the meaninglessness of discussion of ethics and bias in the context of AI but here, again, he’s like a sledgehammer smoothing out any form of nuance. In this group, he kind of sounds like a moron. The others agreed that they were all talking about regulation of one kind or another but that Jordan didn’t want to call it that—perhaps because of a deep aversion to the word engendered by a lifetime of U.S. propaganda.

I thought that Stéphane Mallat was the most well-spoken. He even managed to shut down Le Cun’s argument that the solution to bad AI is more AI because of a “monopoly situation” that also exists in journalism. This monopolization is immanent in the system we have and won’t be solved by throwing AI at it; it will only be solved by changing the system. Jordan actually agreed that the quarter-century experiment with social media has clearly had very negative outcomes, although I’m not sure he was arguing that the influence of AI will have the same negative influence on overall societal value and quality. Actually, his conclusion was much more enlightened than his bull-in-a-china-shop approach throughout the rest of the conversation. He actually wants “AI for science that makes us happier. I want people in the picture.”

That conclusion is probably better than Le Cun’s who used the word “smarter” so many times that I wanted to slap him. The word “smarter” is about as meaningless as bias.

To the question of “how do you make yourself relevant in an AI world?”, Jordan said, “music, mathematics, learn how to think, learn how to think abstractly.” You can use the AI as a tool and build on top of that, so you no longer do whatever the equivalent is or basic arithmetic. Asu adds “optimization and foundational knowledge.”

I kind of agree but also feel that skipping learning how to do basic arithmetic will somehow lead to a smoother brain. You can’t skip all of the basics because we, at base, still biological. We cannot learn to interpret texts without learning how to read. We can try to listen instead, but we won’t understand. We have to practice for dozens of thousands of hours. Don’t think that you can skip that. But be prepared to move on from it. You can’t just learn math and then spend your life doing arithmetic. It would be nice if you could but no-one needs that. We have tools to do that now. Similarly, AI will fill a bunch of places that were previously filled by people. This is great thing! In a just and sane society, the answer would be that people would have more free time to use those tools to learn more, to build more. Instead, our answer is that they have to do some drudgery for a pittance that doesn’t have tools yet, while the rest of the world benefits from the fruits of the tools. The problem, as always, is one of class. The problem is that our system isn’t going to distribute the benefits and productivity gains equitably. It’s not at all interested in doing so. Our system is interested only in plunder, from the strong to the weak.

It’s a very interesting talk. If you’ve seen him before, then you’ll more-or-less know what he’s going to say. He’s saying that the current LLMs are a dead end for actual intelligence, that there’s not way to reduce the solution space to only viable solutions because the basic predictive technology doesn’t understand anything. Adding more tokens, more iterations, optimizing to an expected result can help but they’re all brute-force hacks that don’t scale and don’t have legs for the long haul.

Errors diverge exponentially and it's not fixable

The problem is that every intelligent creature has a knack for hierarchical planning, whereas LLMs have absolutely no capacity for building or executing hierarchical plans. They need an actual intelligence to parse out the high-level plan into individual hierarchical steps (e.g., “going to the airport” becomes “taking a taxi to the airport” and “catching the flight”, which becomes, “pack a bag” and “arrange a cab” and “leave the building” and might eventually include “update app to call cab” or “enter credentials” or “update payment option”, and so on).

He is of the opinion that everything everywhere will be mediated by virtual assistants. He doesn’t really admit any future that doesn’t incorporate this nearly dystopic level of mediation. He might very well be right but he really doesn’t understand how the world economy and ruling structure works if he thinks that this will be anything but absolutely nightmarish for anyone not in the elite. He doesn’t think that this infrastructure should be mediated by a handful of companies (either from the U.S. or China). He works for Meta but he pushes the idea of open-source.

Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up by Mike Judge

“These claims wouldn’t matter if the topic weren’t so deadly serious. Tech leaders everywhere are buying into the FOMO, convinced their competitors are getting massive gains they’re missing out on. This drives them to rebrand as AI-First companies, justify layoffs with newfound productivity narratives, and lowball developer salaries under the assumption that AI has fundamentally changed the value equation.

“And yet, despite the most widespread adoption one could imagine, these tools don’t work.

“My argument: If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam.”

As bad as it already is, the author’s point is that it’s not gotten measurably worse.

If AI allowed pretty much anyone to build an app (the proposal buoying the AI bubble), then we’d be flooded with a tsunami of crapware rather than just drowning in a ocean of it.

“The most interesting thing about these charts is what they’re not showing. They’re not showing a sudden spike or hockey-stick line of growth. They’re flat at best. There’s no shovelware surge. There’s no sudden indie boom occurring post-2022/2023. You could not tell looking at these charts when AI-assisted coding became widely adopted. The core premise is flawed. Nobody is shipping more than before.

“The impact on human lives is incredible. People are being fired because they’re not adopting these tools fast enough6. People are sitting in jobs they don’t like because they’re afraid if they go somewhere else it’ll be worse. People are spending all this time trying to get good at prompting and feeling bad because they’re failing.

“This whole thing is bullshit.”

“If these tools feel clunky, if they’re slowing you down, if you’re confused how other people can be so productive, you’re not broken. The data backs up what you’re experiencing. You’re not falling behind by sticking with what you know works. If you’re feeling brave, show your manager these charts and ask them what they think about it.”

“Look at the data. There are no new 10xers. If there were — if the 14% of self-proclaimed AI 10xers were actually 10xers — that would more than double the worldwide output of new software. That didn’t happen. And as for you, personally, show me the 30 apps you created this year. I’m not entertaining this without receipts.”

“[…] billions of dollars have been invested in these tools. Billions of dollars will continue to be invested in these tools. The problem is that they’re being sold and decisions are being made about them — which affect real people’s lives — as if they work today. Don’t parrot that nonsense to me that it’s a work in progress. It’s September 2025, and we’ve had these tools for years now, and they still suck. Someday, maybe they won’t suck, but we’d better see objective proof of them having an impact on actually shipping things on the large.”

“There are no indicators that prompting is hard to learn. Github Copilot themselves say that initially, users only accept 29% of prompted coding suggestions (which itself is a wild claim to inefficiency, why would you publicize that?), but with six months of experience, users naturally get better at prompting and that grows to a whopping 34% acceptance rate. Apparently, 6 months of experience only makes you 5% better at prompting.[4]”

“We all know that the industry has taken a step back in terms of code quality by at least a decade. Hardly anyone tests anymore. The last time I heard the phrase “continuous improvement” or “test-driven development” was before COVID. You know as well as I do that if there’s a tool that can make people 10x coders, we’d be drowning in shovelware.”

“none of these “AI First” coding shops reportedly provide any training on how to become a 10xer with AI coding. “Experiment and figure it out yourself” is the common advice. Meanwhile, the official prompting guides are apparently not worth paying attention to because they don’t work.”

From the comments:

“My opinion is that AI isn’t actually the root of the problem here. It’s that we are heading towards a big recession.

“As in all recessions, people come up with all sorts of reasons why everything is fine until it can’t be denied anymore. This time, AI was a useful narrative to have lying around.”

Very astute.

From the comments on Reddit:

“Today (actually not joking) a manager told me”

“AI should make you 10x more productive, what takes you 10 days should take you 1.”

“Which I figured was bullshit because Tuesday he asked”

“Can we compile OpenSSL v3.6 for RHEL-5? Docker makes this easy right?”

“IDK how AI makes me 10x more productive when I spent 4 hours in meetings to realize we actually needed to update our LuaJIT (on RHEL-10) not compile a version of OpenSSL (???)”

This is truly the point. They’re searching for their keys on the sidewalk under the streetlamp when they lost them in the bushes. Getting people to address inefficiencies in priority order would be a much bigger lever than letting them take the easy way out by bikeshedding with AI or by trying to force people to USE AI DAMMIT to run in the wrong direction.

What’s the point of doing something faster that doesn’t need to be done?

Smartphone Buyers Care Even Less About AI Than They Did Last Year, CNET Survey Finds by Abrar Al-Heeti (CNet)

Almost no-one cares about AI on their phone

“In 2024, the biggest motivation for US smartphone owners to upgrade their devices was longer battery life (61%), followed by more storage (46%) and better camera features (38%). Just 18% said their main motivator was AI integrations. This year, it appears that number is even lower, even as AI capabilities become more ubiquitous. ”

“Just 13% of people say they use AI on their phone to summarize or write text, 8% say they tap into AI image creation tools and 7% use AI on their phone for photo editing. Additionally, 20% admit to not even knowing how to use the AI features on their handset.”

That’s not surprising and it’s probably not just the AI feature, so beware of this statistic. These are people who barely know how to use anything on their phones. They use it by ritual. If an icon moves or changes color, they’re lost. On the other hand, the low-usage numbers are damning. People aren’t using it and don’t care that they might be missing out on something. In a world of FOMO, and with the incredible push for AI, this is damning. It may very well be that the hype is hyper-focused on the tech world and the rest of the world doesn’t even really notice.

“Samsung, for one, says on its website that Galaxy AI features “will be provided for free until the end of 2025 on supported Samsung Galaxy devices.” Apple is also expected to eventually start charging for some of its AI-powered iPhone features. You’ll also need to pay to unlock Gemini’s full power across Google’s apps. Amid so much subscription fatigue, that could be a tough sell. Half of people surveyed say they’re not willing to pay extra money to access AI features on their phone. That’s up 5% over last year.”

Wait. Almost no-one is using AI features but only half of all users would be willing to pay for those features? That implies that there is a large subset (1/3?) who would be willing to pay extra for features that they don’t use. Oh, never mind. That tracks.

Actually, the numbers from the chart below, only 3% of all adult users are willing to pay for AI features, and 50% said that they would expressly not pay more.

Users don't know how to use AI, don't want more, and don't want to pay for it

I can’t help but include the methodology section at the end of the article because it was so cool that they included it in such detail.

“CNET commissioned YouGov Plc. to conduct the survey. All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. The total sample size was 2,201 adults, of whom 2,129 own a smartphone. Fieldwork was undertaken May 13 to 15, 2025. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18 plus).”

Programming

Announcing .NET Aspire 9.4 − Let's Explore the Latest Features by dotnet (YouTube)

Aspire is getting better and better, I think. The trace view looks more and more useful, the more services you integrate. This is something you’d almost certainly not build for yourself but the visualization is so much more useful than digging through log files.

NET Aspire 9.4 − Visual Request Trace

The two factions of C++ by Mond (Here Comes the Moon)

“We’re basically seeing a conflict between two starkly different camps of C++-users:”

• Relatively modern, capable tech corporations that understand that their code is an asset. (This isn’t strictly big tech. Any sane greenfield C++ startup will also fall into this category.)
• Everyone else. Every ancient corporation where people are still fighting over how to indent their code, and some young engineer is begging management to allow him to set up a linter.

“One of these groups will be capable of handling a migration somewhat gracefully, and it’s the group that is capable of building their C++ stack from versioned source, not the group that still uses ancient pre-built libraries from 1998.”

“I can only imagine how much sweat, tears, bills and blood must’ve flown to turn big tech codebases from terrifying balls of mud into semi-manageable, buildable, linted, properly versioned, slightly-less-terrifying balls of mud.”

“Legacy C++. Anything that’s not that. Any C++ that’s been sitting in ancient, dusted-up servers of a medium-sized bank. Any C++ that relies on some utterly ancient chunk of compiled code, whose source has been lost, and whose original authors are unreachable. Any C++ that sits deployed on pet-type servers, to the point that spinning it up anywhere else would take an engineer a full month just to figure out all of the implicit dependencies, configs, and environment variables. Any codebase which is primarily classified as a cost-center. Any code where building any used binary from source requires more than a few button presses, or is straight-up impossible.”

Sports

If You’re a Socialist, Root for the Green Bay Packers by Josh Androsky (Jacobin)

“[…] only the Green Bay Packers are publicly owned.

“They operate as a nonprofit by selling shares to fans on terms that would make a Wall Street executive kill himself: no dividends; no reselling of stocks; they only sell every ten to twenty years when they want to renovate the field or otherwise put more money into the institution itself; and no single person can own more than 5 percent of the team. And when they say nonprofit, they mean it. There is no majority shareholder hoarding wealth — no gods, no owners.

“Every single other team is owned by some idiot who knocked up a Walmart heiress or by a tech billionaire who can’t stop throwing drinks in people’s faces like a Vanderpump bit player, and if you’re lucky enough to have an owner who dies or has to resign because he calls Joe Biden the N-word, your entire fandom is at the whim of a faildaughter who needs to prove herself to daddy’s ghost by firing people at random.

“Every NFL fan basically lives as a subject under Habsburg rule: I sure hope the next guy has all the chromosomes where they’re supposed to be! Except for Packers fans, who actually have a say in who runs the team. Now granted, it’s a small say, but if the team president or CEO spectacularly screwed up to the point where we needed to get rid of him, we wouldn’t have to fly a plane over the stadium begging him to do the right thing — we could just organize to vote him out!”

Fun

First Sight by DUST (YouTube)

A bit uneven at the start but pretty cool overall. I like the idea of hijacking your eyes to force you to pay a ransom. Creepy.

let’s use the alphabet… TO RATE THE ALPHABET?? by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

Dinosaur Comics − comic2-5073

“Alphabet Mod 5: every fifth letter, which is then removed from the set, repeated until no letters remain. Functionally useless, aesthetically unnerving, this godless combination of math and memory is utterly without grace OR utility. Zero stars.”

“Alphabet, but each letterform is replaced by a full-length Garfield comic: it is a symptom of our fallen world and a fatal blow against Leibniz that we do not communicate through CLASSIC GARFS. An easy FIVE STARS; with perfection achieved, our exercise is concluded.”