Links and Notes for March 20th, 2026

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Cuba Will Survive: a Diary by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“I hugged everybody: the woman who checked me in, the man who stamped my passport, the ground staff. I had hugged all my friends tightly the previous day, my tears fighting for the right to stream down my face. It felt as though, through these hugs, I wanted to somehow transmit my trepidation about what could possibly happen to Cuba, the Cubans, the Cuban Revolution – all of it – because of the madness of Donald Trump.”

“What has the world become? It is as if billions of people have become bystanders of the atrocities imposed by the United States and Israel: the genocide of the Palestinian people, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, the pummeling of Iran without cause, and of course, the attempt to asphyxiate Cuba. The decadent brutality of the US government, sharpened by the foolhardiness of Trump, is unpredictable and dangerous.”

In major concession to Trump, Cuban government opens island to investment by Miami exile capitalists by Andrea Lobo (WSWS)

“Beyond the symbolism of a Castro relative inviting the exiled bourgeoisie, whom Fidel dubbed as “gusanos” or “worms,” to return as investors and potential owners, provides a base of support and operations for mafioso elements that are intent on radical regime change and a vindictive bloodbath. Fidel Castro repeatedly said barring Cuban‑American capital was a necessary defense against US imperialism and the blockade, denouncing the exiles as instruments of CIA‑backed terrorism who sought to restore the semi‑colonial order personified by the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. In January 1961, he mocked them:”

“They have come to believe that someday their imperial masters will put them here again with a little flag that pretends to be a national standard … and with a little color on the map to sustain the fiction that the worms govern and command. And worms can only live off putrefaction.”

“These fascistic forces, who organized bombings of airliners, schools and hotels and launched the Bay of Pigs invasion under CIA protection, are now being invited back as “strategic partners” in ports, tourism, energy, mining and infrastructure, as specified by Pérez-Oliva.”

“In Cuba’s case, Washington’s weapon is not (yet) saturation bombing but a genocidal fuel blockade enforced through threats of tariffs on suppliers and a naval siege. Cuban officials admit that not a single tanker of fuel has docked in three months. Energy expert Jorge Piñón of the University of Texas has warned that if no tanker arrives by mid‑March, Cuba will hit “zero hour”: “There will be no stockpiles, no strategic reserves; they will be out of operation.” He notes he has “never seen … a country where 100 percent of the fuel disappears,” pointing out that even the sugar harvest has been canceled. Underscoring the depth of the crisis, Cuba suffered an island-wide blackout on Monday, depriving the entire population of power. Trump has gloated over this breakdown as a lever for regime change. After earlier promising a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, he now says: “It may be a friendly takeover; it may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter because … they’re down to, as they say, fumes.””

“Washington is negotiating with the Cuban ruling elite over how to share out profits from the island’s assets while preserving a section of the ruling elite as local overseers.”

“The regime’s capitulation to Trump takes place amid the worst social crisis since the 1990s “Special Period” that followed the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union. In many respects, the current crisis is far worse. In the past five years, Cuba has lost nearly a quarter of its population to emigration, with the resident population now around 8 million, according to demographer Juan Carlos Albizu‑Campos.”

“The invitation to capitalist “gusanos” and the FBI expose to millions of workers and youth that the Castroite leadership is not a bulwark against imperialism but a bourgeois layer ready to become partners in Trump’s recolonization scheme in exchange for its own survival.”

The World According to Gaza by Chris Hedges (Substack)

“There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs. Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.”

“They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,””

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,”

“Eric Fromm writes in “The Sane Society.””

“The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted.”

“We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.”

Iran and Gaza Are ONLY THE BEGINNING (@ Princeton) by Chris Hedges (YouTube)

“James Baldwin presciently saw this regression to our innate barbarism and just the students here if you have not read James Baldwin you don’t understand America he warned that there was a”

“[…] terrible probability that western populations struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives and unable to look into their mirror will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which if it does not bring life on this planet to an end will bring about a racial war as the world has never seen and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.”

“The savagery in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter, and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions. The Iranians, Lebanese, and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted.”

You Can’t Make People Cheer For Your Wars After Committing A Live-Streamed Genocide, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“These assholes really thought they could commit a genocide in full view of the entire world for years and then expect everyone cheer for them to win.

“Of course we’re seeing more “anti-Americanism”. You don’t get to commit horrific atrocities year after year and then cry when the world starts to hate you.”

Roaming Charges: Trump’s Little Excursion Hits the Straits by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“ Rep. Virginia Foxx: “One of our colleagues just talked about the fact that wealthy people pay small percentages of their income on taxes. But what he didn’t say is they pay over 50% of all the taxes paid in this country, and that working-class people don’t pay nearly as much as they do.””

Yeah, you old dingbat, it’s because they took all the money. Do you not understand percentages? Do you not understand basic arithmetic? OK, how about this: if one person owns the entire town, then that person would be the only one paying property taxes, right? Is that fair? Those damned landless peasants aren’t paying any property taxes. They are moochers.

Try to work through whether that might be the same reason that working-class people aren’t paying so much taxes anymore. It’s because they’re not making any money anymore. You fucking asshat.

But why should she understand that? She probably doesn’t know any working-class people. She’s paid not to.

“Percent of the population of the US with a net worth of $1 million or more: 7

“Percent of the population of the US Senate with a net worth of $1 million or more: 73”

Meanwhile,

“Over half of Americans say health care, a weeklong vacation and a new car are unaffordable.”

Why Iran Is Better Off Without Nukes by Indrajit Saramajiva (Indica)

“The overactive American imagination has been long trained to fear the idea of nuclear weapons in the hands of non-White people, and to desire the use of nuclear weapons to discipline them. Thus the fear (for the world) is not that Iran has nuclear weapons but that America (via ‘Israel’, it’s all one White Empire) will use them. Thus enough White people in the cable-TV colosseum are sold on this latest entertainment, on racism alone.

“However, even people who break out of the racist conditioning still think as White people do. They might oppose America now, but they still think like Americans. They still want to tell Iran what to do. Such people will say this would have never happened if Iran had nukes. Or, Iran must have secret nukes already. Or, now that Khamenei is dead, I hope they hurry up. This is better, I guess, but it’s still coming from the conditioned perspective that nukes are a solution to problems, which is not the Iranian perspective at all. And if you’re really going to support Iran, you have to start by respecting them.”

“I suppose everything is a reboot in the Muslim world also, though on a much longer loop. It feels like They’re talking about the Ramadan War now, when I read the Quran from long ago. The relevant point here is the latter, that”

“you may exact retribution from whoever transgresses against you, in proportion to his transgression.”

“Proportionality is key, as it is in international law.

“You can see Iran follows this principle, they did not fight until attacked, they did not hit oil and gas fields until they were attacked; they always act defensively and in proportion (though they do not hit schools, there are rules). In this sense, Iran might acquire and use nukes if they were attacked with them first, but not before. And, indeed, their actions fit this view. Iran keeps enough enriched uranium to produce a nuke, but has not done so. This might seem maddening from a pure game theory perspective (just do it!), but they’re not playing, and certainly not for the cheap seats in the Colosseum. Iran actually is an Islamic Republic and they behave accordingly, for a higher audience than this world.”

“America actually killed more people with conventional munitions than nukes (in Japan, Germany, and Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). Just regular burning people to death with lots of bombs rather than one nuke. Nukes are cinematically very compelling, but tactically you can do the same thing with regular shelling. Even using depleted uranium, as the Americans did in Fallujah, caused more birth defects and other horrors than Hiroshima. A nuke is not a necessary weapon, unless you’re a script writer with limited patience. You can do terrible things with conventional weapons, just slower. The whole world, in fact, has seen at least 10 nukes dropped on Gaza, just in smaller packages. It took two years rather than 10 seconds, but the equivalent damage still happened.”

The U.S. slaughtered far more Japanese by fire-bombing Tokyo than they did in Nagasaki and Hiroshima with nuclear weapons.

“I do not try to map Western views onto them, and I try to understand them on their own terms. I approach them with respect and try to learn from them, especially if I don’t immediately understand what they’re doing. The first point is that Iran obviously takes their faith seriously and I agree with Khamenei that nuclear weapons are bad, I think everybody does. This is both a Quranic imperative and a Kantian categorical imperative. I don’t know when everybody got so cynical, but Iran is showing in many ways that taking a moral stand is possible and I support this wholeheartedly.”

“Fundamentally, Iran is better off without nukes because they’re better people and they know what they’re doing. This is a battle between good and evil and I don’t think you win it by being more evil.”

The Ramadan War Comes Home (To Sri Lanka) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Sri Lanka has declared Wednesdays a holiday and started rationing fuel because of the Ramadan War. Previously, we got perks for participating in White Empire. Now we’re getting jerked because the Axis of Resistance is changing the world. I’m all for it, but not gonna lie, it hurts.

“The Ramadan War first came home to Sri Lanka when dead Iranians washed up on our shores, after America attacked them and left them to drown. Sri Lanka saved those we could and recovered as many bodies as possible. This is very much our role in White Empire. Cleaning up after White people.

“Now the Ramadan War has stayed home, because of what doesn’t wash up on our shores. Steady oil and gas, for the foreseeable future. Petrol and diesel are rationed now, and cooking gas will be next to go. This is happening all over the region, from India to Sri Lanka to Bangladesh (just the places I know).”

“The Fifth Fleet is in retreat and the US Navy has been defeated, first in the Red Sea and now in the Persian Gulf. Losers like this don’t dictate terms, they take them. Now America is asking China for help, and China is like bro, we’re good. Iran has been shipping more oil than ever, much of it going to China. So now everybody is blowing up Iran’s phones, trying to get similar terms, while imperial refineries burn. Oh, how the tables have turned.”

“The White Empire cannot guarantee delivery of oil and fertilizer from the Middle East. Indeed, if you collaborate with the Empire, you’re guaranteed to get the least. The monsoon winds are changing and I can feel it.

“That’s why I say that Iran has already strategically defeated the White Empire. This is different than imperial losses in Vietnam and Afghanistan and all of its other colonies. In all of those cases they lost the land but kept the seas. Every former colony reintegrated into colonial capitalism, or suffered tremendously. Now we suffer for our integration, and can only prosper insomuch as we leave. The strategic calculation has changed entirely. Before we bowed if we wanted to eat. Now if we don’t stand up, we don’t eat. This is a sea change. Literally.”

“I tell you the war has come to Sri Lanka now, in bodies and out of fuel. I’ve been through a few collapses before so I think I recognize it. And please don’t feel bad for me, feel bad for yourself, it’s just a timing difference, and we’re used to it. The last time (2022) we had an energy crisis was when Western money-lenders wanted their pound of flesh, and they cut our credit and shut off energy supplies.

“[…] This was the imperial system working as intended, enforcing power through control of energy and trade, shearing sheep and putting them back into the fold. This is why I say Sri Lanka is inside the White Empire. At any point they can turn the lights off. But now Iran has that power. As the Westerners say, there’s a new sheriff in town.”

Ramadan War 20: Iran Takes Power (Haifa and F-35s) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“[…] the F-35 is hideously expensive, perennially back-ordered, and now basically unmakeable. It’s more than an illusory power projection, the plane itself is somewhat illusory. They’re shipping current deliveries with gym weights in the nose because they can’t make the radar anymore. The F-35 was always a bit of a joke, but joke’s on them now. The F-35s did work as a very expensive illusion of power but now that illusion is [sic] shattered.”

“[…] the American military isn’t built for this sort of ‘horizontal’ warfare. They follow an outdated vertical model of warfare (drop bombs down) whereas Iran is horizontal (shoot smart missiles across). They don’t have many ‘horizontal’ munitions which is why they now have to risk their irreplaceable planes going over Iran. Which they can’t. They can’t even survive over Iraq.

“[…] This is a huge strategic loss, because America’s whole air strategy is dropping expensive bombs on poor people and they can’t do that to Iran. This is also a great victory for poor people across the world.”

The Greatest Depression Is Coming And I Feel Fine by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Today, South Asians are catching a stray. We’re getting the economic fallout of the Ramadan War immediately. We’re the passport slaves stuck in the Arab states, the sailors stuck without ports, the labor that replaced Palestinians under occupation. We are, in short, the fall guys, and the economic collapse falls on us first. But who cares? Poor people getting poorer is not a story. It’s just the way of the world.

“However, the world turns, doesn’t it? Collapse over here—if you remember COVID-19—is just a timing difference. It’ll get there soon enough. There are no margins in a globalized economy, and margin calls come for us all. What affects canaries affects coal mines, and eventually capitalists too. And unlike Global South countries that are used to collapse, Global North countries will experience this coming crash as something cataclysmically new.”

“At this point the entire Western economy is just a big, artificial bubble waiting to pop. Their stock market is just Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Oracle in a trenchcoat, selling each other dodgy GPUs and flashing investors. And what does this pyramid scheme depend on, at the very bottom? Energy, hideous amounts of it, literal money to burn. But now the whole pyramid scheme is sinking in the Middle East, where the dumbest money was.”

“AI is the Western economy, which has left base reality long ago. They tried to keep the fraud going with crypto, with the metaverse, and with AI they found a lie that stuck. But without cheap energy at the bottom of it, the pyramid scheme collapses. And this time they have far less tools to build it back up. Yes, they made the 2008 crash just go away by giving Monopoly-money to monopolists (and taking away people’s homes). And, yes, they made COVID go away with the same trickery (sacrificing millions of souls). But, no, it won’t work this time around, because something really real is really wrong.”

“Just look at the oil markets, which are going bipolar trying to process the yawning contradiction. They’re trading oil, on paper, at $107 (Brent) when it trades, over the barrel, at $162 for Asians (Oman). As you can see, this is not normal. The US Treasury is manipulating the paper price of oil with reserves and tweets while the actual commodity is taking an actual shit.”

The Greatest Depression Is Coming And I Feel Fine by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“You can thus understand the World War III (if you included colored people and Slavs) raging since 2001. America has been attacking competitors (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia, Venezuela, Iran) to corner the market for themselves. Not necessarily to take their oil, but to just take them out. Energy could either be priced in dollars and routed through the US Treasury (like Iraq and Venezuela) or just sanctioned out of the market (like Russia and Iran). The Empire doesn’t really care. It’s not even blood for oil, it’s blood to spoil things for everyone else.

“Despite this war against the world killing at least 5 million people from violence alone, plus tens of millions through sanctions (White word for sieges), nobody called it a World War because that can only come from a specific region in France or something, ie it has to bother White people. That’s really the mentality. So now we’re in the midst of the full-blown extermination of the largest concentration camp in history (Gaza), a madman invading countries on multiple continents, and no one calls it a World War because Europeans aren’t bothered. But, oh, they will be, and I, for one, am here for it.”

He cites Why has the surf one out? by Isabella Weber (Twitter)

“Do you remember the days when the world already knew that there was a Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan and that it was spreading rapidly, but you were not under lockdown yet? An in-between moment when it was clear a catastrophe was coming, but not what it meant. This stage of the US and Israel’s illegal attack on Iran is another such moment. The shock is here. The shockwaves are on their way.”

“If you look at the map up top, you can see the other arm of Hormuz snaking up to Europe. America isolated Europe from Russia, forcing them to depend on more expensive energy from America and Qatar. Now Qatar is cut off, leaving Europe completely isolated. It couldn’t happen to worse people, but, boy, are they going to hate it. And the dominoes won’t stop there. Like I said, a globalized economy is, by definition, interconnected. ‘America’ is just delaying its fall by throwing ‘allies’ in front of them, but the margin calls for them too.”

“This is the third major collapse that I’ve gone through personally. I got my batteries, I do my charity, I know the drill by now. But for those about to lose their petty bourgeois privileges—and you will—it’s going to be a real reckoning. And I, for one, am here for it. Honestly, God damn you people, and They will, inshallah.”

A Retreat Turning To A Rout (Ramadan War 21) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The White Empire has lost land and has been unable to set foot in Iran entirely. Its bases in the Middle East are permanently defeated. They cannot rebuild these bits of rare earth without Chinese resources, Iranian permission, and the work ethic of their grandfathers, none of which are forthcoming. Meanwhile the White Empire’s troops and spooks are hiding in hotels, their embassies are being evacuated, and their ships are either weeks away or sailing in the wrong direction. This is a retreat turning into a rout.”

Nuclear Power Plant Attack, Oil War Escalation, Restraint Off | Larry C. Johnson by Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz (YouTube)

“Larry: The Reagan administration doubled down on that policy and then provided the chemical precursors for chemical weapons which were first used in Iran in August 1983, and they used them 19 more times after that, until August of 1988, at which time a peace was ultimately negotiated.

“What’s fascinating is, during that entire time, when Iran is being hit with chemical weapons, Iran never retaliated with chemical weapons. They didn’t have them and they didn’t try to develop them. Goes to the haram, the sin. They were not going to commit a sin against God, which they saw that as.

“Pascal: So Iran fights wars with some ethical limitations.

“Larry: Yep. And some could argue that disadvantages them. But again, I think that they showed themselves for what they were in that instance, not killing civilians deliberately and and not using a weapon that could cause mass casualties without being able to control it.

“But you know, that’s the thing. I mean, I think the people actually know that—the war planners in Tel Aviv and and in the Pentagon—they’re aware of this. And they’re using that restraint of Iran to their advantage by just saying like, okay, we are much less constrained than they are, so let’s hit them hard. Hegseth actually said, so this is not a fair fight. We beat them when they’re down.

“Pascal: What what do you think Iran is trying to do against this, to offset that kind of self-imposed limitation—which I’m glad they do, because killing civilians is always a terrible crime against humanity. But, what do you think that they’re now trying to achieve?

“Larry: Well, I don’t think they’re going to back away from that. We just saw that with the attack—the western attack from the desalinization plant in Iran. And Iran did not retaliate in kind against the Gulf Arabs, knowing that if they knocked out the desalinization plants in those countries, people would die. They don’t have enough fresh water.

“So, I think throughout all of this is, you know, Iran’s tried very hard to maintain its sort of moral integrity.

“Pascal: Yeah.

“Larry: And they adhere to Islamic law, Islamic principle. And actually, I think that’s going to be their ultimate strength. That’s why they’ll prevail over the West in this case because, I think the West—particularly the United States—is gonna run out of gas. They’ll lose the energy they need to sustain the war at the tempo that Iran’s going to dictate.”

S13 E06: Iran & Police Stings: 3/22/26 by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (YouTube)

This was a pretty good report that will likely fall on completely deaf ears.

• There was one example of a 22-year-old who’d been entrapped by the police, which posed as a 26-year-old to reel him in—including at least one photo—and then dropped casually that they were actually 13 years old after two months of online chatting. He thought that she was just making a joke and agreed to meet up with her for a first physical date. The police pounced and he was convicted and sentenced to house arrest for two years and a lifetime of being on the registered sex-offenders list. I’m starting to wonder whether
• There are also examples of the FBI entrapping hundreds of supposed terrorists over the last 25 years. It’s good that Oliver’s covering this but this is all well-trodden territory. Nearly all high-profile cases—e.g., Gretchen Whitmer—involve mostly paid informants and undercover officers running the whole plan until they swoop in and arrest a whole bunch of people for stuff that they not only would never have thought of themselves, they would have been completely incapable of carrying anything out without money and contacts.

The Problem Isn’t “Kings”, The Problem Is US Presidents by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Trump is not some freakish aberration; he is the product of the same American political status quo as his predecessors. He became president the same way they did, and the powers he now wields were given to his office via mundane executive, legislative and judicial decisions and precedents before he was ever elected.

“But because the “No Kings” protests are organized by liberal defenders of that same political status quo, the demonstrations cannot address any of this. The whole thing is designed to be as large and inclusive as possible while also ensuring that it doesn’t disrupt the established order in any meaningful way. They make no real demands. They coordinate the demonstrations with police and government officials. Protesters show up for a few hours with their brunch signs and their orange guy shirts, and then they go home without inconveniencing anybody.

“They are not protesting against the US empire. They just want a more polite, photogenic empire.”

I mean, have fun at the protest, but man, the problem is less that the U.S. has a king and more that it doesn’t have a functioning government.

That is, the government does stuff, but not anything that most people want. Instead, its every action promulgates an empire that, at this point, benefits only a narrow elite. They are, admittedly, very much like a self-selected monarchy, so “kings” is not inappropriate.

I understand that that’s a bit much for a placard.

My sign would definitely be one of those where it’s obvious the person started writing and then made up some more stuff, so half of the text is all droopy on the left-hand side, dripping down vertically like the clocks in Persistence of Time by Dalí.

The cost of doing business by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“This property is called “administrability,” meaning, “the degree to which an authority can administer the policy.” There are many dimensions to administrability, including “Is it even possible to detect whether this policy has been violated?” In that same vein, there’re questions like, “If you discover someone has violated this policy, will you be able to stop them from continuing to do so?””

“You have undoubtably clicked on dozens of agreements this year wherein you warranted that nothing you were doing violated copyright law (a neat trick, given that you probably have no idea whether any of the activities you routinely engage in could violate copyright) and further, you indemnified someone else for “all costs arising from any claims” associated with your activity.

“That’s an unbelievably shitty, one-sided clause for you to have “agreed” to, since “any claims” includes claims with no merit and “all costs” includes “money we paid someone who brought a bullshit claim to just go away.”

“In other words, you routinely click through these nonsense “agreements” where you promise to give every cent you have to anyone who wants it, if the company that made you click through that bullshit decides to promise some deranged rando a million bucks to settle their wild accusation that you violated their copyrights.

“For complicated reasons, we’re not all drowning in copyright lawsuits all the time, but if someone really wanted to fuck you up and they had deep enough pockets, they could use the fact that you’re a giant, routine copyright infringer (just like everyone else) to wreck your life for years.”

The other morning, I purchased a ticket for the SBB. Before I was allowed to pay, I had to agree to terms and conditions. I was required to agree to this before my “first purchase”, but I’ve been purchasing tickets for this train system for 15 years through this app. I already have concerns about being identified as a first-time customer.

At any rate, they’ve decided that this is my first purchase—presumably since they changed the terms and conditions—and that I’m no longer allowed to purchase a ticket for the national train system without agreeing to those terms and conditions. If I don’t get a ticket before I get on the train, I will be fined CHF100.-.

Obviously, I had plenty of time to read this agreement to determine whether I agree with it or not and whether I agree to use the train system that my taxes pay for. Isn’t that neat? The public-transportation system I pay for has outsourced their payment system and then allows that payment system to force all of the taxpayers to agree to completely unknown terms in order to travel on that system.

To sum up: I entered into an agreement this morning—a contractual agreement—in order to be able to use the bus. I have no idea with whom I entered the contractual agreement. I have no idea to what I agreed. I just know that my supposedly advanced country no longer allows me to ride the bus legally without entering into an agreement with an unknown party.

Either that, or I have to accept that I have to take an hour to read the agreement and determine whether I want to enter into it before I’m allowed to ride the bus, missing my appointment and ruining my day. If I decide not to enter into the agreement, then I have literally no other alternative other than cycling, walking, or driving my car to wherever I had planned to go. An extorted agreement is not legally binding.

“This is the sort of thing you end up believing in if you incur the kind of neurological injury that arises from pursuing an economics degree, which causes you to be incapable of reasoning about (or even perceiving) power. “Revealed preferences” tells you that if someone sells their kidney to pay the rent, they have a “revealed preference” for having one kidney.”

The new Numbers is another example. The other day, an older version of number refused to save a document to an iCloud file-share because it was no longer supported. You could only write to that volume with a newer version of Numbers. This is not a technical constraint. This is bullying.

How Iran Is Changing The Subject Of History by Indrajit Saramjiva (Indica)

“As Samuel Huntington said, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” So the Resistance is teaching them in the only language they actually understand. Superior, better organized violence. Case in point, Iran.”

Why Israel Wants a War with Iran (w/ Gideon Levy) by Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

“Chris Hedges: You’ve also written quite scathingly about the Israeli media, that it’s just a propaganda machine for war.

“Gideon Levy: Even worse than this, I think the big shame was in the Gaza war. Then it reached really the bottom of its last remains of dignity and professionalism. Gaza, as you know, was not presented in Israeli media for two and a half years. Nothing except for few smaller outlets. You had no idea. Anyone in Kansas saw more of Gaza than anyone in Tel Aviv.

“Now they did so and this is the criminal side. They did so voluntarily. It’s not because of political pressure by the government, not by the secret services, not by the military. Israel has still a free media. But this free media has decided that for commercial reasons, we are not going to bother our readers or viewers and we are not going to let them know anything which might bother them.

“And 1,000 babies killed in Gaza is something that most of the Israelis don’t want to know. So we will not tell them. And 70,000 victims in Gaza is something that our viewers don’t want to see. So we will not show it to them. And this is the big betrayal of Israeli media.

“Now it repeats itself now in Iran but in different scale because in the war in Iran. We know very little and I think you Americans know also very little. Nobody really knows what’s going on there. We hear all kind of official announcements but what is really taking place on the ground we don’t know. So now we are also in darkness.

“But the real moral darkness was the behavior of Israeli media throughout the war in Gaza. This is unforgettable. They made Israel totally ignorant about what’s going on on our behalf in Gaza and they made Israel live in peace with everything that happened there.”

“Look, I am a graduate of Israeli education system—in different times obviously—but when I look forward, you know that, until the age of 20, I never heard the word Nakba. I had no idea what it is.

“I saw the ruins in Tel Aviv all over Israel. I never asked, “What are those ruins? Who are their owners? Where are they? What happened to them? Why aren’t they with their properties? Nobody told us. We were told all kind of things by the education system. At this stage, it’s really the education system.

“We’re told all kind of things which basically conducted or concluded few basic values that every Israeli gets with the milk of his mother. Namely, that we are the biggest victims in the world, that we are the David against the Goliath, that we are the chosen people. Yes, we are the chosen people and therefore we have the right to do whatever we want, and that the Palestinians were born to kill and that’s the only thing in their mind, is how to kill us, and to push us away from here.

“And when you are brought up in such an atmosphere, with all those values—and to the fact that, in my childhood, it was a few years after the Holocaust, so all those things were even more intensified—you get a very special Israeli, namely an Israeli who is totally convinced in anything that his army and his state is doing, who is not ready to get any criticism and immediately labels any criticism as anti-semitism, who thinks that international law does not apply to Israel because Israel is a special case, who believes that Israel is a victim and there is no other victim like Israel in the world.

“And that’s a very dangerous and obviously that we are the chosen people. All this mindset is a very unhealthy mindset and you see the outcome now when Israelis live in peace with Gaza and they will live in peace now with Lebanon.”

“First of all, censorship in Israel in the 50s and the 60s was 100 times worse. Because the scope of issues that we had to send to the sensors was nothing to compare with today. Today, it’s really more or less only military issues. In those years, the energy policy of Israel, we had to send to the censors. The immigration policy of Israel, I mean, nothing to compare. Those who, many times, long to the good, beautiful Israel, forget that Israel in the first two or three decades was very problematic in terms of democracy.

“You know, the teachers, Arab-Israeli teachers had to be approved by the Shin Bet, by the Israeli secret services, teachers in the Arab schools. So let’s not think that now it’s the worst. The worst was many years ago.

“Secondly, I would like to um argue with you that the censorship, as disturbing as it is, is not the main problem of Israeli freedom of speech. The problem is the self censorship. This is much worse because to self-censorship there is no resistance.

“Look, let me be personal for a moment. I used to be often on Israeli TV: at least once or twice a week as a panelist. Ever since the war in Gaza started, I was twice in two and a half years. I was twice on Israeli TV. This is not censorship. Neither by the government nor by the army. Nobody told them not to bring me to this studio. They chose to do so because they know that this might make some viewers annoyed or whatever.

“This is the real censorship when you do it by yourself for all kind of commercial or because you are a coward and you you censor yourself.”

Do you condemn Hezbollah? by BreakThrough News (YouTube)

Rani answers quite well, considering the provocativeness of the question. Her answer is, basically, I’m not going to condemn the only people fighting back against even bigger monsters who are not only actively tearing my country apart, but are promising to do even more.

Piers Morgan’s arrogance is completely self-unaware. He can’t see that it’s easy to condemn all sides when you don’t have any skin in the game. He has never once been threatened—either physically, fiscally, or psychologically—by the machine that has granted him the enormous privilege from which he benefits every single day. He personally doesn’t care who prevails in Lebanon, so he can breezily condemn everyone. He just wants stability so that his empire can return to focusing on shoring up his personal privilege.

I would also have noted that it is unfortunate that, seemingly, the only way to resist atrocities, is by being willing to commit atrocities of one’s own. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be like this, but it is often the only way to stop the initial bleeding. Pleading and being all Gandhi about it doesn’t matter when you’re being attacked for genocide rather than conquering. All of the non-atrocity-committers have been swept aside and/or murdered. The only people left are those who have been hardened by slaughter. They are not (or perhaps no longer) interested in discussions about morality. They just want revenge. You do not want to have these people rule but it has often been the case that the enemy cannot be repelled without them.

'Hezbollah exists because Israel keeps invading Lebanon' by BreakThrough News (YouTube)

Iran’s Strategy In Maps by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“To quickly take you through the map the white parts are the colonizers and their settler colonies. [U.S.A., Canada, EU, Australia; I think Japan should be here as well] These are united by white supremacist organizations like NATO, vague terms like ‘the West’ and ‘international community’, and regularly gather for murder-tours of the Orient. These are Europeans and their descendants, and the slaves and passport slaves they increasingly depend on to keep the Empire running.

“Most of the world is in imperial jail, marked by pinstripes here. We can supply labor, we can supply resources, but if we ever get too sovereign, they coup, corrupt, or bomb us. As a rule of thumb, if you’re not fighting the White Empire, you’re in it, and under their thumb. Most of us are in imperial jail, our minds also.”

“Some nations have declared sovereignty and paid dearly. These are the people fighting White Empire (Russia, Iran, Palestine, half of Yemen), those who fought it off (Vietnam, North Korea, Afghanistan), and the places Empire would love to fight but is scared of (China). Venezuela and Cuba were free, but I now mark them as in danger.”

I would classify Vietnam as “in danger”, at best.

“The free world has little in common (political systems, ideology, culture) beyond not being in the White Empire. They are simply sovereign, which takes many different forms. I won’t comment on their internal politics because that’s none of my business. The urge to judge other countries internal affairs is the imperialism talking, and we don’t do that.

“No one gives a shit what a random Sri Lankan thinks about X or Y country and we should give less shits about Western opinions, which are far worse informed, and come punctuated with explosions. Just put that shit down and we’ll move on.”

I suppose we currently have bigger fish to fry but at some point, we’re going to need to talk about the repression in those “free” countries. We have to at least think about how “not free” most of the people living there are.

Black Sea turns into a battlefield: A Turkish-operated tanker carrying Russian oil was hit by Barış Demir (WSWS)

“The attacks in the Black Sea are being carried out with NATO’s knowledge and approval. In early December, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte implied that they had approved such attacks, stating: “We are strengthening our support for Ukraine and increasing pressure on Russia. This includes countering Russia’s Shadow Fleet and other measures to pose strategic dilemmas for the Kremlin.”

“Meanwhile, the UK military will be sent to board ships suspected of being part of Russia’s sanctions-evading “shadow fleet.” According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Belgium, Finland and France have all seized or detained tankers; Germany, Italy, Latvia, Norway and Sweden have boarded or detained cargo and bulk vessels.

“Russia also announced that Ukrainian forces had carried out more than a dozen attack attempts this month on facilities supplying the TurkStream and Blue Stream natural gas pipelines, both of which pass through the Black Sea, and that these attacks had been repelled.

“According to Reuters calculations based ‌on market data “at least 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity is at a halt following Ukrainian drone attacks, a disputed ​attack on a major pipeline and the seizure of tankers.” It reported that this month Russia’s major Western oil export ports, including Novorossiysk on the Black ​Sea and Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea, were hit.”

NATO is already at war with Russia. The decades of sanctions were war. Deeming their shipping a “shadow fleet” is war. Attacking civilian vessels is war. It is more of the same mendacity, pretending that they’re “policing” when they’re just helping enforce the empire that sits on their own neck. They can’t help stumbling over themselves to lick the boots of the master.

Journalism & Media

US-Iran war explained by Chinese AI animation: Legend of the Valley of Gold by Taipology (YouTube)

“Chinese state media made an AI-generated cartoon about the US-Iran conflict. Complete with fighting Persian Cats! Well I subtitled it for you so you can enjoy it in all its trope-laden glory! Remember kids, the mountains will stay standing while the green water flows, and the true art of war is not figuring out how to fight, but how to stop!”

4chan lawyer tells the UK to stuff it by @prestonjbyrne (Twitter)

“As has been explained to your agency, ad nauseam, the United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War. We are not in the mood to discuss the matter further, and have not been in the mood for 250 years.

“[…]

“My client reserves all rights and waives none. Reserved rights include the right to sue you again and/or to respond to future correspondence with an even larger rodent, such as a marmot.

“Or, maybe, you could just stop sending Americans stupid letters and acknowledge the sovereignty of the United States.”

Finally, Good News: Free Speech Wins Big in Court by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“Friends and colleagues regularly challenge the utility of a court case and scandal that allowed Trump and his own more-than-questionable approach to speech issues a chance to prevail in 2024, by capitalizing on Joe Biden’s idiotic government-wide jawboning program.

“To this I ask, what was the alternative? Letting it go? A ruling permitting the behaviors detailed in Missouri v. Biden would have been far more devastating. If you’re concerned about a hyper-empowered chief executive intent on deamplifying, say, derogatory content about the war in Iran, you need it enshrined in law that threats and pressure to social media companies are strictly forbidden. In that regard, everyone irrespective of party should be happy about this result.”

“Enough people expressed enough disgust about these behaviors that the First Amendment has been updated in the books, boasting a fresh coat of paint for the social media age. It’s good for everyone. When was the last time we could say that?

“Congrats to Aaron and his co-plaintiffs, who went through a lot on the road to this result. Historians won’t know what a disgusting process it was to get here, but I’ll remember, and I hope Racket readers will as well. The plaintiffs who hung in deserve a hearty pat on the back. As John Vecchione, counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance put it, “Freedom of speech has been powerfully preserved by our clients.” It’s true, and a happy thing that a few people cared enough to see it through.”

Labor

As Trump escalates war on Iran, a strike wave spreads across the United States by International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (WSWS)

“These contradictions will be intensified sharply by the escalating war against Iran. The conflict is already driving price shocks for gas and other basic commodities, while the Trump administration prepares a major new escalation, including plans for a ground invasion and a further $200 billion war funding request. Workers are being told there is “no money” for wages, staffing, schools, housing or healthcare, while unlimited sums are demanded for bombs, aircraft carriers and other instruments of destruction.

“This expanding strike movement expresses the same underlying contradictions of capitalism that are erupting in imperialist barbarism. At the same time, the growth of working class struggle points to the objective means of stopping war, through the independent mobilization of the working class.”

“The strikes that have erupted are only a pale reflection of the depth of social anger accumulating in the working class, and they have tended to break out most sharply where the union apparatus has less direct day-to-day control. Beneath the surface there exists a powerful sentiment for broader, unified action, including a general strike. But the central obstacle is the trade union apparatus: a layer of highly paid functionaries in the top 5 percent of income earners.”

“But it is precisely the independent intervention of the working class—its “interference” in the course of events—that is the decisive factor. War, dictatorship and capitalist oppression will not be ended by appeals to those responsible but by the mobilization of the social power of workers to halt the war machine, resist repression, and unite struggles across workplaces and borders. The development of rank-and-file committees is the necessary basis for transforming mounting anger into an organized force, capable of opposing the drive to barbarism and opening a way forward for humanity.”

Economy & Finance

Investment advice by @tonyhawktruther (Twitter)

“What stocks should I buy right now” Bro you need to be planting cabbage.”

Some Economic Consequences of the Iran War by Jack Rasmus (ZNetwork)

“There’s a ‘flow rate’ limit of release from the SPR which is no more than 2 million barrels a day. That means it will take 200 days—not 20—for the SPR and other sources to reach global oil markets. So global supply is still reduced by 18 million barrels a day due to the Hormuz closure. The SPR release will hardly dent the supply effect of the Hormuz closure and so little to dampen rising global crude prices in coming weeks. Nor will it effect much the price of US gasoline at the pump which will also keep rising—as Biden discovered when he released SPR oil back in 2022.”

“Whenever there’s a jump in crude oil supply—due to SPR release or other causes—US oil companies simply reduce their output accordingly and/or US drilling companies take a number of their drilling rigs temporarily offline. The result is not a net increase in supply of gasoline even if there’s an excess of crude oil supply from the SPR.”

“US oil companies control the retail price of gasoline at the pump by manipulating refinery output—not by changes in crude supply. They have purposely not built a new refinery in the US in 50 years! As a result, they can turn off the supply spigot at the pump whenever they want by simply reducing refinery output regardless of crude supply changes.”

“A significant supply of fertilizer, petrochemicals, plastic packaging, and some metals also pass through the strait. Their supply will be disrupted as well, with various price impacts. The supply of fertilizer may especially have an impact on crop production and food prices in emerging markets in Asia and Africa. There’s also the matter of the disruption of the supply of shipping containers. A significant supply of containers are locked up now in the Persian Gulf. That will have repercussions on the availability of shipping containers world wide, creating shortages in places and raising container prices.”

Helium too.

“[…] most US car owners buy premium but the media likes to quote regular […]”

Really? I don’t know anyone who buys anything but the lowest-octane gasoline. I did a quick survey of my family in the States and it was about 80% regular, with only two people writing that premium was “required” for their vehicles.

“Economists generally overlook the role spiking oil prices played in the 2008-09 great recession. It was in the spring-summer 2008 that global crude oil prices shot up to $147 a barrel—a record level which helped precipitate the great recession that year.”

“Europe gets much of its oil and most of its natural gas from the Gulf states. With that blocked, it will have to buy more from the US—at likely even higher prices. The rising cost of energy may well push the major economies of Europe—Germany, France, UK—over the recession cliff. The Gulf states economies are in even worse state than Europe’s. Their main money engine of oil and gas is virtually shut down or damaged. It will take months, perhaps years, to restart production and repair damages. Their economies are clearly already contracting sharply. Asian countries like South Korea and Japan are heavily dependent on middle east oil and gas. Japan had created a significant stored reserve. But South Korea had not. That country will almost certainly have to start rationing energy use soon.”

“China has developed alternative global sources for its oil imports and has amassed a reserve of oil that reportedly can last five months. In addition, it can always import more from Russia. Its net assets will rise appreciably with the rising price of gold, which it has been acquiring and storing for years.”

The price of gold has dropped 20-25% since Rasmus wrote this article.

“Its total expenditure is now more than $1.1 trillion. And that doesn’t include other obvious ‘defense’ or ‘war’ expenditures like funding the CIA and intelligence agencies, costs of past wars in veterans benefits, development of nuclear weapons in the Energy Department budget, military aid and assistance to allies, […]”

“[…] is estimated the US has been spending $2 billion a day on the war in Iran. And that probably doesn’t include weapons replacement costs. Deploying three aircraft carrier tasks forces is not cheap. Committing one third of US aircraft to the region isn’t either. Nor repairing eventually the damage to the US dozen plus bases in the Gulf and aid for the Gulf states to replace their destroyed air defense systems, the radars of which alone cost $1 billion each.”

Corporate Consolidation Fuels the Decline of Skiing by John LaConte (Jacobin)

“What people don’t realize is that this consolidation and profiteering didn’t have to be this way. Most ski resorts operate on vast swaths of public land — massive mountainsides owned by American taxpayers and overseen by federal regulators, at least theoretically.

“And the government once nearly intervened, thanks to an all-but-forgotten scandal that triggered public outrage and heated hearings in Washington: In 1975, two Colorado ski resorts wanted to raise ticket prices from $10 to $12.”

““They’re not buying up these ski areas as independent operations to maximize their profits; they’re buying up all these ski areas to actually control skiing in America,” Accetta told the Lever. “Then they can charge whatever the hell they want, because there’s nobody to stop them, and there’s no alternative but to go to some place that they own.””

“Eight years later, however, the bill was exhumed by Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Republican from Wyoming. But Wallop stripped all language about preventing monopolistic control, improving environmental oversight, and regulating pass prices. All that was left was Haskell’s concession to the ski industry.

“According to the legislation, ski area permits could last up to forty years, with no restrictions on the size of the resort. And ski operators could acquire as many Forest Service permits to operate on public lands as they wished, with no additional congressional approval required. Wallop’s bill passed both houses of Congress, and President Ronald Reagan signed it into law on October 22, 1986 — just in time for the ski season.”

“This was demonstrated this season when, despite historically low snowpack, Vail Resorts’ flagship property, Vail Mountain, was charging $356 per day on New Year’s Day, and Alterra’s crown jewel, Deer Valley, was charging $349. The properties had only a fraction of their terrain open due to the lack of snow, conditions that would appear to demand reduced prices. But the companies had already fixed their prices months in advance, and now they wouldn’t budge.”

“Ski instructor Bryan Griffith told a judge that he would often be scheduled to work seven-hour shifts, “but of those seven hours, on many of those shifts I’d only get paid for one hour, the one single hour that I was in a lesson.””

“It’s exactly the type of scenario Tony Accetta predicted might happen fifty years ago, when he warned that “a corporate monopoly will punish people who dare to speak against it by withholding favorable season pass privileges.””

“In New York, the state-owned ski areas of Whiteface Mountain, Gore Mountain, and Belleayre Mountain are operated by the New York State Olympic Regional Development Authority, which was created by the state to manage the facilities built for the 1980 Olympic Winter Games.”

Impact of Iran war on global economy intensifies daily by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“Countries throughout the Asian region are the most heavily impacted so far because of their reliance on oil and LNG which comes through the Strait. Only one LNG cargo ship from the Gulf is still expected to arrive in Asia.

“Thailand has to import 90 percent of its crude, half of which comes via the Strait. Some 30 percent of its LNG comes from the Middle East.

“The situation in Pakistan is even more severe. Some 99 percent of its LNG imports came from Qatar last year. It has not received any supplies since the third day of the war.

“India, which at present is considered the world’s fastest growing major economy and the world’s fifth largest after Japan, is also being hit on both the supply and financial fronts. Half of its energy imports come from the Gulf states. There are already widespread shortages of gas used for cooking.”

“The war is not only causing disruption to oil and gas supplies, but a range of other commodities is also being hit. These include the supply of urea, a source of nitrogen-based fertilisers vital for agriculture around the world and sulphur also vital for the production of fertilisers.

“There have been warnings that if the disruption caused by the war continues the situation will be much worse than 2022 in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Helium, a by-product of natural gas processing, for which Qatar provides around a third of the global supply, is also being impacted. It is a vital raw material in the production of computer chips.”

Goodhart’s Law vs “prediction markets” by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“This is where Goodhart’s law comes in. The idea that betting markets improve the wisdom of crowds because participants have “skin in the game” only works if the cheapest way to win a bet is to be right. If it’s cheaper to win by cheating, well, “incentives matter,” and you’ll get cheating.

“Any prediction market needs an “oracle” – a decisive source of truth about how an event turned out. “How much new solar capacity came online in Pakistan” this year sounds like an empirical question, but unless every bettor agrees to travel to Pakistan together and walk the land, counting solar panels and checking proof of their installation dates, these bettors need to agree on some third party assessor as authoritative and trust whatever they say.

“Which means that the single most important factor in any prediction market is the quality of the oracle.”

“[…] those journalists are being murdered for political reasons, because someone has an ideological stake in suppressing the truth. Fabian’s talking about an entirely novel – and far less predictable – threat; namely, that you will piss off someone who guessed wrong about the outcome of some arbitrary event and who thinks that they can salvage their bet by intimidating you.”

“[…] prediction markets create an incentive to corrupt our best sources of information, the oracles that every prediction market absolutely requires if it is going to hope to function.”

“Markets are absolutely capable of inducing reward hacking in participants. The metric becomes a target. You think you’re betting on the outcome of an event, but what you’re really betting on is what an oracle will say the outcome was. No matter what the outcome is or how robust it is against outside influence, the oracle can be influenced with a gun to the temple.”

We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America by Derek Thompson (Substack)

“[…] in this weird new reality where every event on the planet has a price, and behind every price is a shadowy counterparty, the jittery gambler’s paranoia—is what I’m watching happening because somebody more powerful than me bet on it?—is starting to seem, eerily, like a kind of perverse common sense.”

“A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.”

This has been inculcated by relentless propaganda. The author writes as if it just happened.

“[…] the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre […] argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.”

Science & Nature

Environment & Climate Change

The Relentless Nightmare of Fukushima, 15 Years On by Joshua Frank (CounterPunch)

“The nuclear industry has a reasonably polite name for a disaster like the one that was rocking Fukushima. They refer to it as a “beyond design-basis accident” because no single nuclear plant design can account for every possible problem it might encounter in its lifetime. The fact that there’s a term for this should make you anxious.”

What a naive thing to write. Let me empty your home of things that have design limits. You will have nothing left.

“After years of research, scientists discovered that cesium-rich microparticles had blanketed the greater Tokyo area, an unpopular discovery that drew backlash and threats of academic censorship.”

It was unpopular but was it dangerous? Unpopular is such a weasel word.

“Prior to the earthquake, the ocean’s cesium-137 levels near Fukushima were 2 Becquerels (a unit of radioactivity) per cubic meter, well below the recommended drinking water threshold of 10,000 Becquerels. Just after March 11, 2011, cesium-137 levels there spiked to fifty million before decreasing as sea currents dispersed the radioactive particles away from the coast. The ocean, however, had been poisoned.”

Even here, he uses numbers to sound scientific, but where did the level of cesium end up? Back at two? Or higher? Instead he writes “poisoned.”

“In 2023, over a decade after the incident, radiation levels remained sky-high in black rockfish caught off the Fukushima coast. Other bottom-dwelling species have been found to be laden with radioactivity, too, including eel and rock trout. Further concerns have been raised about the treated radioactive water that TEPCO continued to release into the ocean, prompting China to suspend seafood imports from Japan. Aside from those findings, there have been very few studies examining the effects of Fukushima’s radiation on ecosystems or on the people of Japan.”

Thank goodness; this is more factual.

“[…] overlook the inseparable connection between nuclear power and atomic weapons.”

Just as the author overlooks the use of nuclear products in medicine.

“The operators and regulators at Fukushima were wholly unprepared for what unfolded on that fateful day in 2011. They never imagined that an earthquake of such magnitude could trigger a tsunami so immense that it would destroy the power grid, knock out water pumps, and disable backup generators. Likewise, no one can guarantee that nuclear plants or radioactive storage tanks are safe in war zones, or that the rivers and lakes needed to cool reactors globally won’t one day run dry or become too hot to do so — something that has already happened in Europe.”

Risk analysis is not about mitigating every possible risk: it’s about identifying and categorizing risks. You can’t eliminate all risks or you’d never do anything. The author argues like a simpleton who’s not only never designed any of the things, services, or societal constructs on which he daily relies, he’s never even thought about how difficult it is to balance trade-offs, even with the best intentions.

Roaming Charges: Trump’s Little Excursion Hits the Straits by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“In the last 20 years, beef production has caused four times as much deforestation as the cultivation of any other food source.

“Economist Tony Annett: “Renewables are now the cheapest form of energy in electricity generation. People who claim otherwise still think it’s 2010…”

“Fueled by drought, lack of snow and extreme winds, the wildfires racing across the plains of Nebraska have now charred nearly a million acres.”

2026’s historic snow drought is bad news for the West by Alejandro N. Flores (Ars Technica)

“Data from the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that out of approximately 70 river basins across the Western US, only five are at or above the 1991–2020 median snow water equivalent for this time of year. Most of those are clustered around the Yellowstone region of western Wyoming and eastern Idaho.”

2026 snow-water basin levels relative to 30-year historical median

“The Western US, therefore, got a triple whammy: Two of the three critical snow-accumulation months were too warm, and the third was too dry.”

“Water managers in Wyoming and Washington are already signaling that some water rights holders—cities, irrigation districts, individual farms, and industries can take limited amounts of water from rivers, canals, and aquifers—can expect to receive less than their full allotment of water in 2026. It’s not unreasonable to expect other states to soon follow suit.

“Throughout the Western US, water rights are administered according to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation—those who hold the oldest legitimate claims to water from a river, reservoir, or aquifer are entitled to receive their allotments first.

“Junior water rights holders who may be at risk of receiving less than their full allotment of water likely have difficult decisions ahead related to the planting and management of their crops. The challenges are compounded by the likelihood of increases in fertilizer and transportation costs associated with the ongoing war in Iran.”

I bet that you can buy older claims, even if you’re a “junior” entrant.

“In years like this, with near-normal precipitation but low snowpack, are there difficult-to-observe stores of water in the deeper subsurface that can help buffer against loss of snow for periods of time? That’s one of several questions my colleagues and I have been working on.

“This year’s snow drought presents a timely, albeit high-stakes, stress test for the West. Everyone will be watching.”

Medicine & Disease

Keine Kraft mehr by MAITHINK X (YouTube)

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Roaming Charges: Trump’s Little Excursion Hits the Straits by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

Tuesday Poem: Practicing Art by Kurt Vonnegut (posted by Jim Culleny) (3QuarksDaily)

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They’re
a very human way of making life more bearable.
Practicing an art, no matter how well or not, is a
way to make your soul grow,
for heaven’s sake,

“Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories.
Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy one.
Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an
enormous reward. You will have
created something.”

'Mistakes' (New Zealand road safety advert) by Los Hooligun in 2014 (YouTube)

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

IRAN FROM HEIDEGGER TO KANT by Slavoj Žižek (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

“When Saddam Hussein was captured and put to trial, Iran quite reasonably demanded to add to the list of his crimes also the attack on Iran, which cost more than a million casualties; the US rejected this demand because it would bring to light the US’s complicity with Iraq.”

“The protests combined different struggles (against women’s oppression, against religious oppression, for political freedom against state terror) into an organic union. Iran is culturally different from the ‘developed West’, so Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (’Woman, Life, Freedom’, the slogan of the protests) is very different from the ‘Me Too’ movement in Western countries. Iran’s protests mobilized millions of ordinary women, and were directly linked to the struggle of all, men included – there is no apparent anti-male tendency, as is often the case with Western feminism.”

“[…] in spite of all the horrors of the Iranian regime (it is almost as oppressive as that of Saudi Arabia…), we have now to support Iran. Iran is now de facto fighting not just for its own sovereignty, but for the global principle of sovereignty.”

“The Iranian inner circle maintains an incredibly high level of intellectual debate – not just corrupted brutalists. Khamenei himself wrote books on Islamic ideology, governance, and private spiritual life, among them An Outline of Islamic Thought in the Quran and The Compassionate Family.”

“[…] the key person was Seyyed Ahmad Fardid (1910–1994), a prominent philosopher and a professor at Tehran University. He is considered to be among the philosophical ideologues of the Islamic government of Iran which came to power in 1979, following the revolution. Fardid was under the influence of Martin Heidegger, whom he considered “the only Western philosopher who understood the world and the only philosopher whose insights were congruent with the principles of the Islamic Republic.”

“Fardid decried the anthropocentrism and rationalism brought by classical Greece, replacing the authority of God and faith with human reason, and in that regard he also criticized Islamic philosophers like al-Farabi and Mulla Sadra for having absorbed Greek philosophy. Fardid coined the concept of “Westoxication,” which, after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, became one of the core ideological teachings of the new Islamic government of Iran.”

“Mohammad Khatami, who received a BA in Western philosophy at Isfahan University. He served from 1997 to 2005. Khatami had run on a platform of liberalization and reform. During his election campaign, Khatami proposed the idea of Dialogue Among Civilizations as a response to Samuel P. Huntington’s 1992 theory of a Clash of Civilizations. The United Nations later proclaimed the year 2001 as the Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations, on Khatami’s suggestion. During his two terms as president, Khatami advocated freedom of expression, tolerance and civil society, and constructive diplomatic relations with other states, including those in Asia and the European Union. The Iranian media are forbidden, on the orders of Tehran’s prosecutor, from publishing pictures of Khatami or quoting his words, on account of his support for the defeated reformist candidates in the disputed 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

“Larijani holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and mathematics from Aryamehr University of Technology and holds a master’s degree and PhD in Western philosophy from the University of Tehran. Initially, he wanted to continue his graduate studies in computer science, but changed his subject after consultation with Morteza Motahhari. Larijani has published books on Immanuel Kant, Saul Kripke, and David Lewis. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Kant and followed that with these three published books: The Mathematical Method in Kant’s Philosophy, Metaphysics and the Exact Sciences in Kant’s Philosophy, and Intuition and the Synthetic A Priori Judgments in Kant’s Philosophy. (One should note that Larijani wrote books on the scientific-cognitive aspects of Kant’s thought, not on his practical philosophy.)”

R.I.P.

“[…] the fact remains that intense and very serious intellectual debates are constantly taking place in the very centre of the Iranian Shia elite which holds power – can one even imagine Larijani, if he were to be elected supreme leader, debating with Trump, who would have no idea whatsoever about what Larijani is talking about? I leave it to my readers to decide if the high intellectual level of debates in the Iranian leadership is a good thing or a bad thing, i.e., something that makes the turn towards brutal authoritarianism easier.”

Maybe that’s why the U.S. killed him.

Overlearning by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“A cheap but real setup, in other words, something that has been built with sound quality in mind, which you could assemble for $1,500 to $2,000, well below the entry point audiophiles would even consider serious. The superiority over the Spotify-through-Bluetooth experience will not be subtle. The soundstage opens up; instruments occupy distinct space; vocals have body and texture; bass is felt as well as heard. This isn’t a matter of imagination or expensive expectation but a straightforward consequence of playback hardware that was engineered to move air in a room rather than vibrate a tiny membrane pressed against an ear canal.”

“[…] similar logic infected the genuine and correct observation that some child predators pose as trustworthy adults, which produced a generational overcorrection in the 1980s and 90s that has arguably never unwound − the “stranger danger” narrative and all of its excesses. Children stopped walking to school, playing unsupervised, or talking to unfamiliar adults. The statistical reality that children were and are incredibly unlikely to be the victims of random crimes and, when criminally harmed, overwhelmingly harmed by people they know, was buried under a totalizing suspicion of strangers that has measurably stunted children’s independence and risk tolerance for decades.”

“The overlearning lay not in building it, but in what building it did to their strategic, diplomatic, and political minds. Having correctly identified that fortified lines were nearly impregnable, they treated impregnability as a strategic solution rather than as a tactical asset. The Line was not meant to be one component of a flexible defense; it was meant to be the defense. The psychological confidence it generated all reinforced a static orientation toward the coming war.”

“[…] what the French overlearned was the dominance of the prepared position, and that overlearning expressed itself in an army doctrinally committed to absorbing a blow rather than maneuvering. When the blow came through terrain they had mentally filed as infeasible, as a non-problem, there was no adaptive response available to them. The Line held! The much-maligned, historically-mocked Maginot Line held. Everything behind it collapsed.”

You also have limited resources. You can only prepare for so much. You have to invest resources in what you perceive to be the likeliest attack. You might guess incorrectly. Perhaps even foolishly, but not necessarily so. Once you’ve prepared, you’re tired. Your people are tired. They just put a tremendous effort into building something. They don’t want to tear it down and build something else. They want to live by rote for a bit. They want to feel secure. They will fool themselves into believing that they are secure. This is just how people are.

“The Maginot Line was not a mistake dressed up as wisdom. It was wisdom that calcified into a mistake, which is precisely what makes it such a pure specimen of overlearning, a foolish decision is easy to identify in hindsight. But a decision that flows logically from correct premises, applied one step further than the evidence actually supports… that is something far harder to guard against, […]”

“Appeasement of a genuinely expansionist totalitarian power didn’t work, that was true. But the United States internalized that lesson so deeply, and so indiscriminately, that Munich became the universal template for every foreign policy decision made in the decades that followed.”

Whoops. You’ve applied your template too far. Not over-learning but overfitting. The U.S. does not compromise because it is afraid of appeasement; it does so because it is the evil empire, at least as expansionist as Germany was, if not in classic occupation of territory, then in de facto control of same. You don’t get to explain away avarice and terror on the part of empire by saying it was an overcorrection against an appeasement gone bad. That’s a spectacularly bad take, Freddie.

“The result was a foreign policy establishment constitutionally unable to distinguish between situations that actually resembled 1938 and situations that did not resemble 1938 at all. (Which is to say, almost all of them.) Vietnam was not Munich. Iraq was not Munich. Iran, in 2026, is not Munich.”

Oh my goodness, he’s doubling down. I’m going to generously call this a wildly ignorant, rather than mendacious, thing to write.

“[…] a blanket anti-intellectualism that dismisses education wholesale, throwing out the very concepts of higher learning and lifelong study and philosophy along with for-profit diploma mills. The correct observation that media institutions have demonstrated bias and made serious errors has, for many people, become a totalizing distrust of all reported information, leaving them not more discerning but simply more susceptible to whatever confirms what they already believe.”

“[…] a generation of parents absorbed the lesson that harshness and rigidity could be harmful. But the overlearned version of that insight was a reluctance to impose almost any boundaries at all, a fear that saying “no” might damage a child’s development. The original lesson, that children benefit from empathy and respect, was real; the extrapolation that structure and discipline are inherently suspect left many children without the stability those earlier reforms were meant to provide.”

“The correct observation that university diversity programs often involved box-ticking and bureaucratic bloat prompted a backlash so total that any institutional attention to structural inequality became suspect by definition.”

“[…] a remote-work absolutism that, in some industries, has made direct communication, mentorship, collaboration, and the informal transmission of institutional knowledge nearly impossible.”

“The trouble with overlearning is that it inoculates people against correction. Because the original observation was right, any challenge feels like an assault on hard-won clarity, like a regressive attack.”

“It requires the willingness to stop learning just short of the satisfying, total conclusion − to leave the lesson slightly open, slightly incomplete, slightly vulnerable to revision.”

Sinophobic Sinophilia by The Editors (n+1)

“People feel, in a word, cooked. According to a Gallup poll from November 2025, Americans’ “satisfaction with the way things are going in the US” stands at 23 percent. Corporate con men walk free while day laborers are terrorized; stock valuations soar while wages stagnate; private jets spew carbon high above a country of crumbling bridges, shuttered hospitals, and unaffordable homes. The symptoms are morbid; the mood is futureless. If the imagined terms of competition with China have begun to soften, this must be due in part to the sense that in the United States, we have few tools left with which to compete.”

“In the contemporary Chinese context, the idea that crucial parts of the central government could simply cease to operate for more than a month, as part of a procedural standoff between rival governing factions, would beggar belief. And in turn, to an American observer, the thought that miles of new high-speed rail lines could simply materialize by bureaucratic fiat, unencumbered by years of legislative horse-trading, environmental review, suburban backlash, and budgetary overshoot, is no less astonishing.”

We assume that there’s no environmental review because we cannot conceive of such a review happening efficiently.

“China, Wang says, should embrace US-style start-up dynamism in its tech sector, juice consumer spending, and relinquish capital controls; it should, in a few words, deregulate, stimulate, and financialize.”

Oh f@&king yawn. Of course he says that. People like him always say that. They are a one-trick pony. Whenever their dumb, simplistic, and elitism-friendly ideas are put into practice, they always fail to provide the promised miracles and instead mysteriously provide more real estate on Martha’s Vineyard for Wang and his ilk instead. The problem they see with China is that they don’t personally profit from it. You should be more like the U.S.! They’ve bent over and grabbed their ankles for capital for decades now! We’re incredibly rich now! We want to capitalize on your value too!

“[…] reindustrialization in the US is on offer only in a parodic, posthuman form: the rapid metastasis of hyperscale data centers across a two-thousand-mile belt of rural and suburban America. There, in place of assembly lines, acres of supercomputers roar into the void, employing few and producing nothing, save the imminent elimination of whole classes of existing jobs.”

“In the Breakneck parable, American infrastructure and industry are suffocated by the “lawyerly society”; but “bankerly society” is more like it. Even at the bleeding edge of innovation, financial logics commit the most China-envious US techno-capitalists to build their projects more expensively, riskily, and, often, shittily than their East Asian rivals. The pundits who pan China’s macroeconomic “imbalances” live in a country that now depends on AI spending for as much as half of its GDP growth. And guess whose share of the global AI market is rising faster.”

AI actually accounts for all—within a rounding error—of the growth for the last two quarters.

“The worst flaws of its political system belong in the accounting: undemocratic governance, stifling censorship, mass incarceration. For a nominally socialist nation, China’s welfare state is singularly stingy; unemployment, pensions, and other benefits are minimal, and under the hukou system of household registration, hundreds of millions of migrant laborers are ineligible for aid altogether.”

Why mention mass incarceration, when that’s such a touchy subject for U.S. authors to raise? China’s incarceration rate is 119 per 100K residents. The U.S.‘s incarceration rate is 541, which is 4.5x higher. China’s incarceration rate is lower than half of Europe (mostly the eastern half) and in line with most of western Europe: Spain is at 117, France is at 115, Italy at 105. Germany is much lower at 68, and is not alone there … but China’s incarceration rate is boring and average.

“Certainly the left doesn’t lack keen observers of modern China. The literary scholar Petrus Liu has creatively read Sinophone queer fiction and film from both the mainland and Taiwan as expressions of a heterodox Marxism;”

Of course the first one to mention. What are you even talking about?

“[…] unsettled question of “whether China is still (or has ever been) socialist.””

As we can question whether any capitalist nation is capable of the bare minimum of what it takes to claim to be a democracy.

“What lessons can be drawn from the so-called [why so-called?] Chongqing model, an experiment in social democracy in China’s largest municipality, which from 2007 to 2012 saw rapid economic growth paired with the shoring up of state-owned enterprises, massive investment in public housing, and a major expansion of the area’s welfare state, through a partial repeal of hukou limits on urban residency? It’s hard to know, because the project abruptly stalled after its mastermind, the provincial party secretary Bo Xilai, was removed from power in a corruption crackdown of the kind that has since become a signature of Xi’s premiership. Bo, as it happens, was one of Xi’s main rivals for CCP primacy — and in turn, aspects of Bo’s project, with its neo-Maoist rhetoric of “red culture,” have been embraced by Xi himself.”

“While craven photo-op junkets through Israel or Saudi Arabia are routine, no American politician of any prominence could afford to be seen touring an EV factory in Shenzhen, boarding a bullet train to Chongqing, or crossing a mountain bridge in Guizhou.”

“A megasize American military patrols the planet; the dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, and Wall Street its financial control center; US consumer and capital markets are vast and deep. These superlatives reassure no one, except those who stand to profit from them. With foreign aid gutted and all pretense of diplomatic goodwill torched, American hegemony today feels more threadbare, residual, and unearned than ever. US power at its softest is that of a high-tech huckster and monopoly financier; at its hardest, that of an arms trafficker and paramilitary thug.”

“Construction of new golf courses is banned in China; the government shuts down illegal links and redistributes the arable land to local farmers.”

Tech’s empiricism problem by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

“We see this a lot in the gaming industry: while I’m sure that a lot of things like microtransactions are just money-grubbing, I suspect that there’s a certain amount of this kind of rationalist bias involved. After all, “every time someone else has tried this it was a massive disaster that left them universally hated” or “live-service games are very difficult to get right and massive reputational risks” aren’t, in the rationalist mode, valid arguments, so a lot of the gaming industry simply can’t integrate the main things that would invalidate these ideas into how they actually think. This means that repeating the same stupid decisions over and over again is very easy to do, and importantly it can be done without ever having to actually reflect on mistakes. LLM companies do this to a similar extent: being unable to look at their industry from the outside, they’re largely blind to how disliked they are in the wider population, how useless the tools seem to most people and how they’re very quickly burning up whatever goodwill they had available. It seems, in general, that the rationalist bias in the industry is quite consistently going to lead to messy, expensive disasters.”

“Even when we don’t support those forms of bigotry, it’s basically impossible to eliminate them, because when someone like me says, for example, “we’ve debated this over and over, repeatedly proved it wrong, and every time this has been tried it’s a) lead to atrocities and b) lead to the institution trying it being crushed by less bigoted ones”, I am being irrational and not allowing people to discuss heterodox ideas. And so we find ourselves having to repeatedly discuss fascism, eugenics and any list of other horrific ideas as though they’re fundamentally legitimate and in an environment where any serious criticism of them is held to be invalid a priori because it relies on the wrong kinds of reasoning.”

“Arguments such as “LLM art is deeply dreary and says nothing of interest”, “these models were trained on the massive theft of work from others and are thus immoral”, “this technology is being used as an excuse to gut the labour market and immiserate workers” are all functioning in the empirical mode: people are saying that this is happening and that they dislike it.”

“They don’t see why their suggestions that LLMs will replace all art and writing and lots of workers is offensive to people and will make them angry and disgusted, and they cannot for the life of them see why the idea of getting an AI to make up a bedtime story for their children is not forward-thinking and innovative but grossly offensive to the vast bulk of parents. The insistence on airtight chains of reasoning has cooked their fucking brains that much.”

“The idea that certain behaviours and patterns might, if persistent, make other people not want to have much to do with you is one that is deeply alien to large parts of the tech world, and one can easily reason from there that anybody pointing out that someone’s behaviour is absolutely fucking godawful is themselves being irrational and should be excluded from the group. The industry thus becomes a place that includes some of the most awful people you know in positions of power and one that is more or less incapable of self-regulating. It’s important to stress that most places outside of say, DOGE, don’t go all the way there: they’re socialised well enough that people don’t have large-scale blow-outs like that. But the pattern colours enough tech spaces to a sufficient degree that it makes tech places uncomfortable, not only for women, people of colour and other minorities, but for anyone who tends to think empirically, or in fact, think at all. If you’re the kind of person who appreciates art or music, likes to read or maybe wants to talk about emotions: the kind of person who, in general, enjoys engaging with empiricism-critical fields, tech can feel anywhere between a bit sad and flat and outright hostile.”

“Now, personally, I think it’d be great if we got everyone to do a rigorous liberal arts program before they even touched a compiler professionally, but I reluctantly have to admit that I don’t think anybody’s going to go for that. We could, however, rework existing computer science programs considerably. Currently the bulk of people studying “tech” at university don’t study anything else: it’s a straight shot of nothing but computers, with maybe a couple of general education papers on the side.”

Those who ‘circle back’ and ‘synergize’ also tend to be crap at their jobs (The Register)

“Workers who believe “leveraging cross-functional synergies” sounds profound may want to rethink their career trajectory because a new study suggests people who fall for corporate word salad also tend to perform worse at their jobs.

“Researchers from Cornell University have developed what they call “the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale,” a tool designed to measure how impressed people are by business school-style jargon that sounds strategic but says very little.

“The findings, described in a recent study, suggest that employees who rate this sort of language as insightful are more likely to struggle with analytical thinking and workplace decision-making.”

“People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They also made poorer judgments in workplace decision-making scenarios designed to mimic common business problems.

“In other words, the employees most impressed by corporate jargon were also the ones least likely to think critically about it.”

why no one thinks anymore: how to become a person by Meditations for the anxious mind (YouTube)

“Silicon Valley is gentle-parenting us into ultimate submission by doing things for us that our bodies and minds used to do for themselves.

“We’ve become imprisoned by convenience.

“And the real punishment is that we don’t trust our minds anymore, retreating into learned helplessness to become predictable customers in a culture that stays stuck.

“The greatest bait-and-switch is that competence can only exist outside the self, attainable only through a premium monthly subscription service.

“When we outsource our thoughts and decisions to AI, we don’t have to connect anymore. We’re just the pretty faces in front of the machine, the screen that hides the code.

“We gained so much info but lost all our wisdom.

“When thinking has become optional, we’ve become the interface. Surfaces waiting for the next stimulus.”

Amdir, Estel, Peter Thiel by Iris Meredith (deadSimpleTech)

“[…] we find that a person with Amdir but lacking Estel tends to form beliefs and behaviour on the basis of what they think would be personally good for them or their group that they will then struggle to evaluate for long-term impacts or their effects on other people. Moreover, they believe that getting what they want is of essentially infinite importance: if they fail at it they will be forever miserable and there is no hope that they might find joy and good in the world even if what they want doesn’t pan out. Consequently, they allow themselves to do anything, no matter how loathsome, in pursuit of what they believe to be the good.

“A person acting in this way is one that we’d have little difficulty labelling as being deeply disordered in personality. Unfortunately, people expressing a great deal of Amdir but little Estel are also heavily in evidence in our current society, and many of our current ills can, I think, be laid at their feet. Amdir absent Estel is, after all, the personality of modern capitalism.”

“As much as these particular figures are hated, the behaviours that they exhibit are still very much rewarded in the world. Amdir absent Estel encourages zealotry, pathological overconfidence and an inability to let go of things that should be let go of: all things that are often rewarded in the workplace. A person wanting to advance in a company and who believes that the world will fall if they don’t and will consequently do anything to make it happen is going to be much more effective in advancing in said company than a person who believes that even if they don’t advance, things will be fundamentally OK. A person who believes that their political cause is the most important one and that the world will completely collapse if they don’t win does much more effectively on social media (designed by and for people with little Estel) than someone with a more measured approach.”

“Everything is permitted in the service of the great good because, after all, if failure means the failure of everything, it’s important that you do everything you possibly can, however bad, to achieve your goal. Meanwhile, those of us who still think that things could turn out well even if the things we want to happen fall through, and thus think that saying slurs or vibe coding are bad because they damage our ability to enjoy or bring about those good things in the future, are seen as being tedious moralists at best or devils who want everything to fall into perdition at worst. Estel, in the end, is held to be fundamentally undesirable in the society we’ve built.”

“[…] people who exhibit Estel, being more willing to work for long periods of time on things that offer little immediate reward, are often staggeringly better than people with a surfeit of Amdir at actually getting real things in the real world done.”

Open-source programmers. Bloggers.

“There are, however, solutions admissible through Amdir: the most innocuous are the denial-based one where we simply refuse to face facts about what one or more of the sides of the conflict actually are. The least innocuous ones are genocide: after all, if we remove one or another sides to the conflict, there will be no conflict. This is profoundly evil, polluting to the soul and can only lead to evil. But it’s also plausible (we know we can do a genocide) and feels like a solution. Estel, of course, would tell you that doing a genocide pollutes the entire world and makes it so much harder for further good things in the world to eventuate, but if you lack Estel, not only are all of the options you can perceive the shitty Amdir-ones, you will lack the judgement to work out that your goal, however noble, is simply not worth the cost. And so we see people at the worst extremes supporting genocide or ethnic cleansing (this often happens when people try very hard not to think about what their policy would entail) or at the very least turning a blind eye to it, turning a blind eye to slurs or defending their use, turning a blind eye to bombing synagogues or shooting up mosques in Australia or New Zealand… I imagine that it’s immediately gratifying: the feeling that there’s a simple, easy solution to a very difficult and upsetting problem that you can put all your energy behind and that doesn’t require you to be good.”

“Why, then, is Estel in retreat, if the moral degradation that you get from not having it is so obvious? Well, when in the last few decades have people cared about long-term degradation of any kind when ignoring it would let them earn a quick buck? For the last half-decade, and maybe more, we’ve been living in a society that prioritises, at every stage, immediate results over long-term good and personal reward over anything wider. From the very beginnings in school where we value number grades, achievement and being cool or popular over long-term understanding, mastery and social well-adjustment, to the workplaces where on every scale short-term flashy results are always, always rewarded over long-term consistency, reliability or anything that pays off in years or decades.”

At your business, ask yourself which achievements are celebrated. Likely those that someone did 2025 years ago and which led to long-term success. Ask yourself which processes are in place today to support and encourage similar innovation, from which we will benefit 20 years from now.

“Our politics are the same: we tend not to reward people who work humbly and thanklessly for long-term prosperity and stability, but those who charismatically and flashily promise immediate fixes (we can see how that worked out for the USA, certainly). Estel is valuable for precisely none of this: the value of it shows itself over decades or centuries, it’s slow and the payoff (in feeling good about yourself, broadly confident in your ability to face the world and the wider results of boring and unflashy but reliable things that make society work) is largely invisible to people who don’t have it. While the wiser parts of society will still see the value of Estel, for a new person looking to develop virtues, they will see society applaud frauds, grifters and warmongers. Whether they adopt the same habits (the high-Amdir case) or simply give up on trying anything at all (the low-Amdir case), very few people see much value in developing Estel and so, consequently the virtue never develops. This is, quite frankly, a concern if we wish to make a better world than the one we currently have.”

“I care a lot more about being the best version of myself that I can be and not causing damage, because I actually spend time around these people and they have to put up with me.”

“The more people who value patience, mastery, slow processes and acting rightly despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to be rewarding, the more the wider community adopts those traits and the more they begin to become rewarded, eventually. While doing that by yourself might be possible, it’s a lot easier and a lot more fun with other people.”

The Only Worthwhile Western Culture Is That Which Opposes The Western Empire by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“As Terence McKenna once said, “We have to create culture. Don’t watch TV. Don’t read magazines. Don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow… Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.””

Channeling Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen, Zohran proves he’s the greatest living politician in the US by Corey Robin

“Many years ago, the Marxist Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen made a sharp argument against liberal theorists who claim that freedom and capitalism are mutually constitutive, that there is a distinction between being free to do something, which is liberty, and being able to do something, which is personal capacity. Against that distinction, Cohen pointed out that not having money to pay for a train ticket is different from being too sick with the flu, say, to travel. While the latter is a matter of personal capacity, an accident of nature that can happen to all of us (though of course, in our age of vaccines and vaccine denial and lack of health care, that line can get fuzzy), the former is a more elemental abridgment of liberty, a violation of our freedom to move, which is not unlike a policeman’s or other state official’s prohibiting you from getting on a train to travel. It’s not that you’re not able to travel, in the way that being renders you unable to travel. It’s that you’re not permitted to travel. You can be stopped in the way the same way that a policeman or a judge might not allow you leave a city.”

You are being discriminated against for not having enough money. What is the bare minimum of society to which you should have access without money? Food? Water? Shelter? Travel? Information? See Grundrechte (Wikipedia).

When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without “Bad Kids” by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The mandate that all students have both a right and an obligation to attend K-12 schools has created a world where the least motivated students obstruct the most; charters replicate the same basic exclusivity advantage that private schools have leveraged throughout the history of public schooling. There are some kids who simply don’t want to learn, or so I’m told; teachers don’t want to deal with them and students don’t want to tolerate them. So of course charters cook the admissions books. That’s a feature, not a bug.”

“The common criticism leveled at Moskowitz and her schools is that they cherry-pick students, attracting bright children and shedding the poorly behaved and hardest to teach. This misses the mark entirely. Success Academy is cherry-picking parents. Parents who are not put off by uniforms, homework, reading logs and constant demands on their time, but who view those things as evidence that here, at last, is a school that has its act together.

“[…] If you don’t have the resources to get your child to school by 7:30 and pick her up at 3:45 — at 12:30 on Wednesdays — Success Academy is not for you. Literally.”

“I have more respect for the people who make an affirmative and unapologetic argument for charter selectivity than I do the people who deny that charter selectivity exists. A willingness to admit that this practice is in fact quite widespread and provide a justification for it is better than the shameless denial that it doesn’t exist.”

“What they almost never want to admit is the most obvious, inconvenient truth already known by anyone who’s ever taught: kids have to want to learn in order to learn. You can staff a school with the best teachers on earth, give them unlimited resources, and wrap the place in every evidence-based intervention imaginable, and it still won’t work if students are resistant, disengaged, or actively hostile to the enterprise. Education is not something that can be done to someone; it’s something that requires at least a minimal act of will from the learner, and no reform agenda can engineer that away.”

“The notion that we should help students learn by purging the worst-performing, most-disruptive students is appealing to anyone who has ever witnessed a classroom torpedoed by a student who has no interest in learning, but of course it’s also dangerous. There’s an inherent inflationary tendency, when we’re defining the worst, least-committed students. Charter school roster-pruning can be, in some instances, sufficiently aggressive to root out students who have an interest in learning but limited talent. And those less-talented kids, below a certain age, have to end up somewhere; this is, indeed, core to the complaints of public school teachers, that they run the schools of last resort and are then blamed when many of their kids fail. From a broader perspective, we could be adults and admit that many parents who send their kids to private schools just want to avoid the “bad kids,” and that whether they admit it to themselves or not, they’re really talking about Black kids or poor kids. We had to have a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation, followed by a massive desegregation effort that was never fully completed, because parents want their kids to be kept away from certain other kids. There is a more sympathetic version of this in the pro-charter-selectivity attitude, and as I’ve intimated, this version is very often made by Black parents who want their kids to escape their station. Whether we decide to give them what they want by engineering benevolent segregation or not, can we at least admit that that’s what we’re doing, and that the public schools who get their leftovers will inevitably look worse for that very reason?”

Technology & Engineering

The Institute Behind Taiwan’s Chip Dominance by Karthik Tadepalli (Asterisk Magazine)

“The more advanced computers of the era would have required 3-micron chips, representing the cutting edge of semiconductor technology. Producing these chips demanded specialized equipment, rigorous adherence to sophisticated manufacturing processes, and extremely clean environments, none of which Taiwan could reliably guarantee. Instead, ITRI started with electronic watches — a rapidly growing industry that used older 7.5-micron chips, making them easier to produce while still offering reasonable profit margins. This pragmatic approach allowed Taiwan to establish a foundation in semiconductor manufacturing without jumping too far ahead of its capabilities.”

“[…] a firm that receives the blueprints for a chip fab simply will not benefit from them unless it actually sets up that fab and starts producing chips. That is not a legal requirement that firms can lobby against: it is a fundamental difference between knowledge and money. In other words, R&D support incentivizes firms to actually invest in their own productivity.”

“It also helped that ITRI solicited incumbent firms for capital to invest in UMC and TSMC. This financing structure ensured that if an ITRI spinoff made profits, incumbent firms benefited rather than being displaced. ITRI was creating profitable subsidiaries for them, not competitors. This common interest was strengthened by the fact that all the firms and ITRI were co-located in Hsinchu Science Park. When firms form an industrial cluster, research shows that a new entrant benefits incumbents through agglomeration effects.”

“Taiwan was one of the few developing countries to become genuinely rich in the 20th century, and, in contrast to high-profile failures in Latin America, a genuine industrial policy success story. Its technological ascendance has prompted reams of theories about development policy. Yet the country’s success is difficult to disaggregate from regional trends mirrored in the other “Asian Tigers,” and even alone, the extent to which its growth can be attributed to ITRI is not immediately clear.”

You cannot ignore the fact that Taiwan was and still is under the empire’s umbrella. FFS how do you not mention that South and and Central America—as well as Vietnam and Kore—were f@&king bludgeoned by Empire whereas Taiwan has always been supported as a lever against communist China?

“When scholars and policymakers discuss models of successful science and technology policy, they invariably turn to the same American benchmarks: DARPA, Operation Warp Speed, the NSF, the NIH. Meanwhile, ITRI receives scant attention, even though it is a more relevant benchmark to most countries trying to develop in critical sectors.”

“Global tech policy would flourish if, for every ten people trying to build the next DARPA, there was one trying to build the next ITRI.”

Every layer of review makes you 10x slower by Avery Pennarun (apenwarr)

“[…] the AI Developer’s Descent Into Madness:”

1. Whoa, I produced this prototype so fast! I have super powers!
2. This prototype is getting buggy. I’ll tell the AI to fix the bugs.
3. Hmm, every change now causes as many new bugs as it fixes.
4. Aha! But if I have an AI agent also review the code, it can find its own bugs!
5. Wait, why am I personally passing data back and forth between agents?
6. I need an agent framework
7. I can have my agent write an agent framework!
8. Return to step 1

“It’s actually alarming how many friends and respected peers I’ve lost to this cycle already. Claude Code only got good maybe a few months ago, so this only recently started happening, so I assume they will emerge from the spiral eventually. I mean, I hope they will. We have no way of knowing.”

“The basis of the Japanese system that worked, and the missing part of the American system that didn’t, is trust. Trust among individuals that your boss Really Truly Actually wants to know about every defect, and wants you to stop the line when you find one. Trust among managers that executives were serious about quality. Trust among executives that individuals, given a system that can work and has the right incentives, will produce quality work and spot their own defects […]”

“I think we’re going to be stuck with these systems pipeline problems for a long time. Review pipelines — layers of QA — don’t work. Instead, they make you slower while hiding root causes. Hiding causes makes them harder to fix.”

Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager by Isaac Freund

“[…] frame perfection is only achievable if the windows are drawn by well-implemented programs. The compositor cannot delay rendering the new state forever while waiting for windows to submit new buffers, delaying too long makes things feel less responsive to the user rather than smoother. To solve this the compositor uses a short timeout. If windows are too slow, frame perfection is not possible.”

“[…] this state machine is a clarification and formalization of the internal architecture used by older river versions. It is the result of 6+ years of experience working on river and slowly refining the architecture over time.”

Why didn’t you just one-shot it with an LLM? Pfft.

“Wayland currently does not come close to the diversity of X11 window managers. I believe that separating the Wayland compositor and window manager will change this and I see the beginnings of this change with the 15 window managers already written for river!”

Do Not Turn Child Protection Into Internet Access Control by Jaromil (Dyne)

“The price is high and paid by everyone. More identity checks. More metadata. More logging. More vendors in the middle. More friction for people who lack the right device, the right papers, or the right digital skills. This is not a minor safety feature. It is a new control layer for the network.

“And once that layer exists, it rarely stays confined to age. Infrastructure built for one attribute is easily reused for others: location, citizenship, legal status, platform policy, or whatever the next panic demands. This is how a limited check becomes a general gate.”

“Most of the harms invoked in this debate do not come from the mere existence of content online. They come from recommendation systems, dark patterns, addictive metrics, and business models that reward amplification without responsibility. If the goal is to protect minors, that is where regulation should bite.”

It won’t, because we have no democratic control. The corporations are in charge and they have decided that they need to uniquely identify individuals at all times because then they can sell that information to the state. Barely anyone knows about this. No-one cares.

Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ Xbox One has been hacked by ‘Bliss’ — the 2013 console finally fell to voltage glitching, allowing the loading of unsigned code at every level by Mark Tyson (Tom's Hardware)

“As a hardware attack against the boot ROM in silicon, Gaasedelen says the attack in unpatchable. Thus it is a complete compromise of the console allowing for loading unsigned code at every level, including the Hypervisor and OS. Moreover, Bliss allows access to the security processor so games, firmware, and so on can be decrypted.

“What happens next with this technique remains to be seen. Digital archivists should enjoy new levels of access to Xbox One firmware, OS, games. There could be subsequent emulation breakthroughs thanks to this effort. We also now have a route to making a Bliss-a-like mod chip to automate the precise electrical glitching required.”

Why are these 3 letters on every other zipper? by Veritasium (YouTube)

As teens await sentencing for nudifying girls, parents aim to sue school by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

“The incident could have been caught early, after the school learned of the images following an anonymous report to a state-run tipline. But officials—who at the time weren’t legally required to act—failed to notify parents or police for six months, as the number of victims continued to grow. In total, the boys created at least 347 AI-generated sexualized images and videos before they were stopped.

“Although adults have gone to prison for similar AI crimes, the legal landscape for teens who increasingly target classmates by creating and sharing AI CSAM remains unclear. Since all but one victim was under 18, the teens face 59 felony counts of sexual abuse. They also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex abuse of children and possession of obscene material.”

Is that really what they did? Is this really how we’re going to handle horny young guys making naked photos of their classmates using readily available tools that will only become more powerful, ubiquitous, and easy-to-use? Because this is going to keep happening. Fantasizing about your classmates is de rigeur. In 2026, you don’t even have to imagine anything anymore. In 2026, you have have dozens of photos of your classmates in sexy poses that they posted themselves and now there are tools that will take their clothes off in a very realistic manner or will do so at least good enough for everyone in school to add those photos to their spank bank.

How in God’s name do you “stop” that? The article indicates that it’s been “stopped”? How? Did they collect all of the copies? How do you think that that’s feasible? Did you erase it from everyone’s phones remotely? Is that what you’re thinking? How do you plan to control this? Not let anyone store anything encrypted? Not let them store anything but in the cloud where the police, teachers, and parents can examine it at any time? What’s the plan here?

“For victims, the harms have been extensive […] These images disturbingly sexualized the girls’ social media photos, tainting cherished memories and raising fears that the AI-generated CSAM could continue spreading online.”

Given the massive negative downsides of any viable solution—no-one has any data-privacy at any time ever or you punish young boys so hard that they no longer act on their filthy, horny impulses—the only hope may be to either inculcate actual morals in people—good luck with that, as having morals isn’t fiscally valuable to any of the important players—or to convince society that fake nude pictures that are supposedly you but are not you are not important. Crazy as it is to think that such a vast societal change would be the easiest option, that is kind of where we are.

Are you still thinking that you could stop this all with enough control over technology? Are you going to ban all encrypted chat-clients from all app stores? Are you going to ban being able to download a local image-generation model? Forever? Do you understand how anything works? Do you think your ability to control every part of your environment is unlimited? Do you think your right to infringe on the rights of other people in order to feel safe is also unlimited?

The most tenable solution may be to slowly learn to distinguish what is real and what is not and not to hold stuff that never happened against people. You know the next step—probably already taken—is that students will start generating pornography starring their friends, classmates, and family members (those hot second cousins). This will not stop happening. You can’t arrest everyone. You can’t control everything. You can’t stop a market with endless demand. You can stop judging people. You can stop caring about stuff that never happened. You can stop caring what complete strangers think. You can stop caring about judgments made by people small-minded enough to be swayed by things that never happened. You can refuse to war the red-letter A.

Is redesigning our society to end witch hunts the only way out of this? We’ve never managed it before. I bet we’ll ban technologies and make sure that only criminals have them. I bet we’ll ruin many, many lives with false accusations and evidence-free social-media prosecutions instead.

USS Gerald Ford limps out of hot war and into embarrassment. Why? by Dan Grazier (Responsible Statecraft)

“The architects of the Ford-class abandoned steam-operated aircraft catapults and hydraulic elevators — technologies proven reliable in the Nimitz-class — with 21st Century electrical systems. The Ford’s catapults are called the Electromagnetic Launch System, or EMALS. The system stores an enormous amount of electricity, enough to power 13,000 homes, generated by the ship’s nuclear reactors. The electrical charge is released through a sudden burst in the system’s electromagnets, which pushes the magnets and the launching aircraft down the track.

“Specifications for the system said it could launch more than 4,000 aircraft before and between any critical failures. But, as with many modern electrical systems, EMALS has proven far less reliable than expected. The Navy and Department of Defense haven’t released specific figures for several years, but reporting in 2021 shows the Ford’s catapults failed after only 181 launch cycles. The latest report from the Pentagon’s testing office said the system’s performance hasn’t improved much and still requires “off-ship technical support.”

“The Ford has four catapults, so the crew can shift from one to another in case of a failure. But the catapult system includes a significant design flaw. Sailors do not have any way to electrically isolate each catapult. To work on one, the entire EMALS system has to be deenergized. That means the crew would have to stop launching aircraft to make repairs. Doing so would be clearly problematic if multiple catapults failed at the same time during combat operations.”

The AI Industry Is Lying To You by Ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

This is an interesting analysis, in that he says that much of the promised data-center capacity (60%) is not even under development, and, of the capacity that is under development, a significant portion of that does not have its power source secured. Not only that, but it’s taking 6 months to install a quarter’s worth of GPUs, which means that, extrapolated outward, data centers that are eventually built, will be equipped with old, if not expired GPUs that have already eaten up a good amount of their guarantee window.

“[…] it takes way longer to build a data center than anybody is letting on, as evidenced by the fact that we only added 3GW or so of actual capacity in America in 2025. NVIDIA is selling GPUs years into the future, and its ability to grow, or even just maintain its current revenues, depends wholly on its ability to convince people that this is somehow rational.”

“[…] this feels like a blatant coverup with the active participation of the press. CNBC reported in September 2025 that “the first data center in $500 billion Stargate project is open in Texas,” referring to a data center with an eighth of its IT load operational as “online” and “up and running,” with Crusoe adding two weeks later that it was “live,” “up and running” and “continuing to progress rapidly,” all so that readers and viewers would think “wow, Stargate Abilene is up and running” despite it being months if not years behind schedule.”

“The concept of a hundred-megawatt data center is barely a few years old, and I cannot actually find a built, in-service gigawatt data center of any kind, just vague promises about theoretical Stargate campuses built for OpenAI, a company that cannot afford to pay its bills.”

“Here’s what’s actually happening: data center deals are being funded by eager private credit gargoyles that don’t know shit about fuck. These deals are announced, usually by overly-eager reporters that don’t bother to check whether the previous data centers ever got built, as massive “multi-gigawatt deals,” and then nobody follows up to check whether anything actually happened.”

“We have 241GW of “planned” capacity in America, of which only 79.5GW of which is “under active development,” but when you dig deeper, only 5GW of capacity is actually under construction?

“The entire AI bubble is a god damn mirage. Every single “multi-gigawatt” data center you hear about is a pipedream, little more than a few contracts and some guys with their hands on their hips saying “brother we’re gonna be so fuckin’ rich!” as they siphon money from private credit — and, by extension, you, because where does private credit get its capital from? That’s right. A lot comes from pension funds and insurance companies.”

“Then there’s the very, very obvious scandal that NVIDIA, the largest company on the stock market, is making hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue on chips that aren’t being installed. It’s fucking strange, and I simply do not understand how it keeps beating and raising expectations every quarter given the fact that the majority of its customers are likely [not] going to be able to use their current purchases in the next decade.”

“[…] I find this story horrifying, and veering dangerously close to the actions of drug addicts and cult followers. Throughout this story in one of the world’s largest newspapers, Roose fails to find a single “tokenmaxxer” making something that they can actually describe, which has largely been my experience of evaluating anyone who talks nonstop about the power of “agentic coding.”

“These people are sick, and are participating in a vile, poisonous culture based on needless expenses and endless consumption.

“Companies incentivizing the amount of tokens you burn are actively creating a culture that trades excess for productivity, and incentivizing destructive tendencies built around constantly having to find stuff to do rather than do things with intention. They are guaranteeing that their software will be poorly-written and maintained, all in the pursuit of “doing more AI” for no reason other than that everybody else appears to be doing so.”

LLMs & AI

If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem − you have bigger problems by Andrew Murphy (Debugging Leadership)

“[…] here’s what just happened. Your VP looked at your entire software delivery organisation, identified the one thing that was already pretty fast, and decided to make it faster. They found a station on the assembly line that was not the bottleneck, and threw money at it. If you know anything about how systems work, you know this doesn’t just fail to help. It makes everything actively worse.”

“In 1984, Eli Goldratt wrote The Goal, a novel about manufacturing that has no business being as relevant to software as it is. […]

“The core idea is the Theory of Constraints, and it goes like this:

“Every system has exactly one constraint. One bottleneck. The throughput of your entire system is determined by the throughput of that bottleneck. Nothing else matters until you fix the bottleneck.

“That’s the part most people get. Here’s the part they don’t, and it’s the part that should scare you:”

“When you optimise a step that is not the bottleneck, you don’t get a faster system. You get a more broken one.”

“Think about it mechanically. If station A produces widgets faster but station B (the bottleneck) can still only process them at the same rate, all you’ve done is create a pile of unfinished widgets between A and B. Inventory goes up. Lead time goes up. The people at station B are now drowning. The pile creates confusion about what to work on next. Quality tanks because everyone’s triaging instead of thinking.”

“You didn’t speed anything up. You created a traffic jam and called it productivity.”

“You are producing more code and shipping less software. You have made your situation measurably, demonstrably worse, and you have a dashboard that says productivity is up 40%.”

“Congratulations. You’ve built a factory that’s world-class at producing inventory that sits on the floor and rots. Someone’s getting promoted for this.”

“I have seen this exact movie play out at three different companies. The dashboard goes up. The shipping goes down. And nobody connects the two because the dashboard is the thing they’re reporting to the board, and the board doesn’t know what cycle time is,”

“Walk the value stream. Follow a feature from “someone had an idea” to “a user got value from it.” I promise the bottleneck will jump out and wave at you − it might even flip you off because you’ve been ignoring it.”

“This is the one nobody wants to talk about because it’s embarrassing. Your PM hasn’t talked to a real user in two months. Your requirements arrive as a Jira ticket with three sentences and a Figma link to a design that was approved by someone who’s never used the product. Your engineers are making fifty micro-decisions a day about behaviour, edge cases, and error handling that nobody specified, because nobody thought about them.

“And they’re guessing.

“I once watched a team spend six weeks building a feature based on a Slack message from a sales rep who paraphrased what a prospect maybe said on a call. Six weeks. The prospect didn’t even end up buying. The feature got used by eleven people, and nine of them were internal QA. That’s not a delivery problem. That’s an “oh fuck, what are we even doing” problem.”

“And writing code faster just means you arrive at “oh fuck” sooner.”

“When you speed up code output in this environment, you are speeding up the rate at which you build the wrong thing. You have automated the guessing. You will build the wrong feature faster, ship it, watch it fail,”

The bottleneck is understanding the problem. No amount of faster typing fixes that.

“[…] and then do a retro where someone says “we need to talk to users more” and everyone nods solemnly and then absolutely nothing changes. The bottleneck is understanding the problem. No amount of faster typing fixes that.”

“If you’ve ever seen a “quick fix” take nine days to reach production and lost the will to live somewhere around day six… yeah, that. The code was done ages ago. Everything after it was the bottleneck.”

“If you want to ship faster, look at where things are waiting. Count the hours of actual work versus the hours of sitting in a queue. I guarantee the ratio will make you want to put your head through a wall.

“The deploy trust spiral

“I can’t count the number of teams I’ve worked with that were scared to deploy. Tests are flaky, observability is a mess, nobody trusts the canary process, and the last time someone deployed on a Thursday it ruined everyone’s weekend. So what do they do? They batch changes into bigger releases. Which are riskier. Which makes deploys scarier. Which makes everyone batch more.”

“Now add faster code output to this environment. More code, same terrified deploy culture. The batches get bigger. The risk gets higher. The releases get less frequent. You have given a team that was already scared of shipping even more reasons to not ship. Incredible work.”

“Map your value stream. Literally follow a feature from idea to production. Write down every step. Write down how long each step takes. Write down how long things sit between steps. The gap between steps is where your cycle time lives. This will be depressing. Do it anyway.”

“Every item in flight is context-switching tax, and context-switching is where good engineers go to slowly lose their minds and start writing manifestos on internal wikis that nobody reads.”

How coding agents work − Agentic Engineering Patterns by Simon Willison

“Many models today are multimodal, which means they can accept more than just text as input. Vision LLMs (vLLMs) can accept images as part of the input, which means you can feed them sketches or photos or screenshots. A common misconception is that these are run through a separate process for OCR or image analysis, but these inputs are actually turned into yet more token integers which are processed in the same way as text.”

“Since providers charge for both input and output tokens, this means that as a conversation gets longer, each prompt becomes more expensive since the number of input tokens grows every time.”

If they can just figure out how to properly charge per-token, this is a great business model. Except that conversational quality drops precipitously as conversations grow. This necessarily limits not only usage but also the size of the task that can be accomplished.

“Most model providers offset this somewhat through a cheaper rate for cached input tokens − common token prefixes that have been processed within a short time period can be charged at a lower rate as the underlying infrastructure can cache and then reuse many of the expensive calculations used to process that input.”

“The model harness software then extracts that function call request from the response − probably with a regular expression − and executes the tool.”

This system is just held together with spit and a coat hanger. The context can’t get too long or the accuracy goes down. Tools are matched by regular expression. Multi-agent harnesses appear as solutions to limited context windows. We used to do engineering, understanding systems—now we’re cobbling together black boxes that we barely understand.

Aware of All Internet Traditions: Large Language Models as Information Retrieval and Synthesis by Cosma Shalizi (3-Toed Sloth)

““What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it?””

• GenAI is not original, creative, problem-solving intelligence
• It is mechanized intellect, prosthetic access to the external formulas of many but not all traditions
• This is incredible, and perhaps a disaster

“It is no accident, comrades, that Barzun wrote “Intellect is the capitalized … form of live intelligence””

Cosma Shalizi Is Aware of All Internet Traditions by Ben Recht (arg min)

“By design, language models mechanistically reproduce the recurring regularities in their training data. That training data consists of all the text files on the internet and what is easily available in printed books. Hence, the regularities are the tropes, stereotypes, templates, conventions, and genres of language and code.”

“As Cosma put it, in the single sentence that summarizes the entire Cultural AI conference:”

“Following a tradition means not having to think for oneself.”

“Not having to think is often a good thing! Tradition lets us externalize certain processes so we can focus on other tasks. Formalities strengthen cultural connections. Traditions in communication help us understand each other better and come to consensus faster.”

“According to Barzun, intellect lets society share and externalize knowledge. It belongs to society, not any individual. It connects individual intelligences. It lives after any single intelligence dies.

“GenAI is the mechanization of this intellect. It is the mechanization of all of our traditions.”

“This frame helps us get away from the silly C-suite sci-fi navel-gazing about the personalities inside the data centers. Claude is not a person. It is a mechanized intellect. A Lore Laundering Machine.”

“Survey experiments are a woefully limited way to understand the social condition. They are completely mechanical. Of course, this sort of impoverished social science can be done by mechanical literary analysis. Silicon-sampled survey experiments enable us to mechanically generate stories from illusory correlations. These stories are interpreted traditionally as either informative or absurd, depending on the academic tradition in which you were raised. The recursion continues indefinitely. There are so many patterns and regularities in human behavior, and by simulating common text strings, we get text conforming to these regularities. To rephrase Nelson Goodman, regularities are where you find them, and in human tradition, you find them everywhere.”

Odio l’IA by Anthony Moser (moser's frame shop)

I only realized after I’d started reading it, that I’d already read the English version in September of 2025. I read and cited from it for some advanced practice in Italian comprehension.

“[…] di come in realtà non sia capace di ragionare perché i processi probabilistici e associativi non implicano l’intelligenza, di come si pensi che renda le persone più veloci quando invece le rallenta, di come sia intrinsecamente mediocre e di natura fondamentalmente conservativa, di come sia una tecnologia fascista radicata nell’ideologia della supremazia, di come non sia definibile come strumento tecnico ma come strumento politico.”

“Ma io non voglio limitarmi a criticare l’IA: perché io, l’IA, la odio. Non mi dilungherò in una dissertazione attenta e misurata, perché è stata già fatta da altri. E poi, se sei uno di quelli che pubblica o consuma sbobba, non la leggeresti mai. Chiederesti a un bot di farti un riassuntino, lo dimenticheresti rapidamente e continueresti a vivere la tua vita, impermeabile a parole che non hai mai letto e idee che non hai mai considerato.”

“Abbiamo davanti una macchina disgustosa che dobbiamo rompere, costruita da grigi cannibali che venerano l’ignoranza e che si nutrono di merda. Sono davvero convinto che sia un insulto alla vita.”

“Ho deciso che avrei odiato l’IA facendo esattamente quello che l’IA non è in grado di fare: ho letto testi scritti da esseri umani e li ho compresi; ho ragionato sulle mie idee e ponderato le mie parole in base al contesto del momento. Ho creato opere artistiche. Ho amato. Ho vissuto il mio corpo con tutti i suoi difetti fisici, i suoi umori, il suo spirito vitale. L’IA non può odiare: non prova niente, non sa niente, non vuole niente. Solo noi esseri umani siamo in grado di odiare. Rivendico la mia umanità.”

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down by Mario Zechner

“While all of this is anecdotal, it sure feels like software has become a brittle mess, with 98% uptime becoming the norm instead of the exception, including for big services. And user interfaces have the weirdest fucking bugs that you’d think a QA team would catch. I give you that that’s been the case for longer than agents exist. But we seem to be accelerating.”

“Through the grapevine you hear more and more people, from software companies small and large, saying they have agentically coded themselves into a corner. No code review, design decisions delegated to the agent, a gazillion features nobody asked for.”

Commit, push, and deploy.

“You’re building an orchestration layer to command an army of autonomous agents. You installed Beads, completely oblivious to the fact that it’s basically uninstallable malware. The internet told you to. That’s how you should work or you’re ngmi. You’re ralphing the loop. Look, Anthropic built a C compiler with an agent swarm. It’s kind of broken, but surely the next generation of LLMs can fix it. Oh my god, Cursor built a browser with a battalion of agents. Yes, of course, it’s not really working and it needed a human to spin the wheel a little bit every now and then. But surely the next generation of LLMs will fix it.”

“[…] at least among my circle of peers I have yet to find evidence that this kind of shit works. Maybe we all have skill issues.”

“But clankers aren’t humans. A human makes the same error a few times. Eventually they learn not to make it again. Either because someone starts screaming at them or because they’re on a genuine learning path.

“An agent has no such learning ability. At least not out of the box. It will continue making the same errors over and over again. Depending on the training data it might also come up with glorious new interpolations of different errors.”

“Then one day you turn around and want to add a new feature. But the architecture, which is largely booboos at this point, doesn’t allow your army of agents to make the change in a functioning way. Or your users are screaming at you because something in the latest release broke and deleted some user data.

“You realize you can no longer trust the codebase. Worse, you realize that the gazillions of unit, snapshot, and e2e tests you had your clankers write are equally untrustworthy. The only thing that’s still a reliable measure of “does this work” is manually testing the product. Congrats, you fucked yourself (and your company).”

This is a description of technical debt, which is also produced by humans (as the author notes) but LLMs accelerate the production of technical debt.

“There’s nothing wrong with delegating tasks to agents, obviously. Good agent tasks share a few properties: they can be scoped so the agent doesn’t need to understand the full system. The loop can be closed, that is, the agent has a way to evaluate its own work. The output isn’t mission critical, just some ad hoc tool or internal piece of software nobody’s life or revenue depends on. Or you just need a rubber duck to bounce ideas against, which basically means bouncing your idea against the compressed wisdom of the internet and synthetic training data. If any of that applies, you found the perfect task for the agent, provided that you as the human are the final quality gate.”

“[…] let the agent do the boring stuff, the stuff that won’t teach you anything new, or try out different things you’d otherwise not have time for. Then you evaluate what it came up with, take the ideas that are actually reasonable and correct, and finalize the implementation. Yes, sure, you can also use an agent for that final step.

“And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you’re actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don’t need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code.”

How Much Of The AI Bubble Is Real? by ed Zitron (Where's Your Ed At?)

“It’s almost as if everybody making these proclamations was instinctually printing whatever marketing copy had been imagined by the AI labs to promote compute-intensive vaporware, and absolutely nobody is going to apologize to the people working in the entertainment industry for scaring the fuck out of them with ghost stories! Every single person who blindly repeated that Sora existed and was changing everything should be forced to apologize to their readers!

“I cannot express the sheer amount of panic that spread through every single part of the entertainment industry as a result of these specious, poorly-founded mythologies spread by people that didn’t give enough of a shit to understand what was actually going on. Sora 2 was always an act of desperation — an attempt to create a marketing cycle to prop up a tool that burned as much as $15 million a day that most of the mainstream media bought into because they believe everything OpenAI says and are willing to extrapolate the destruction of an entire industry from a fucking facade.”

“[…] that, my friends, is the AI bubble. Five months can pass and an app can go from The End of Hollywood that apparently raised $1 billion to “discontinued via Twitter post that reads exactly like the collapse of a failed social network from 2013” and “didn’t actually raise anything.” It doesn’t matter if stuff actually exists, because it’ll be reported as if it does as long as a company says it’ll happen.”

“In reality, the AI industry is pumped full of theoretical deals, obfuscations of revenues, promises that never lead anywhere, and mysterious hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that never seem to appear.

“Beneath the surface, very little actual economic value is being created by AI, other than the single-most-annoying conversations in history pushed by people who will believe and repeat literally anything they are told by a startup or public company.

“No, really. The two largest consumers of AI compute have made — at most, and I have serious questions about OpenAI — a combined $25 billion since the beginning of the AI bubble, and beneath them lies a labyrinth of different companies trying to use annualized revenues to obfuscate their meager cashflow and brutal burn-rate.

“To make matters worse, almost every single data center announcement you’ve read for the last four years is effectively theoretical, their nigh-on-conceptual “AI buildouts” laundered through major media outlets to give the appearance of activity where little actually exists.”

Programming

Death of the IDE? by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“The implicit promise is that your attention is too valuable to spend watching a progress bar. That’s a significant departure from the IDE’s real-time, synchronous feedback loop.”

This is a sneaky way of saying that agents are fucking slow.

“Multi-file refactorings in large repositories remain among the toughest challenges for software engineering agents. These are exactly the situations where interactive code navigation and human judgment still matter most − where you need to hold a mental model of the system that the agent can’t”

“The failure mode that keeps developers anchored to IDE-level inspection is agents being almost right. When something is 90% correct and subtly broken, the cost of finding the issue often exceeds what it would have taken to write it yourself. For high-stakes changes, the IDE remains the best instrument for that kind of deep, precise inspection.”

A Trillion Transactions by Joran Dirk Greef (Tiger Beetle)

“[…] without survivability, the system becomes too big to fail, because it’s really too big to recover. And when you can’t recover a system, you no longer own the system. The system owns you. In other words, the maximum size of a database is dictated not by disk, but by architecture, and whether every algorithm is designed with explicit limits for scale, and, crucially, to recover that scale.”

“Let’s estimate that an average general-purpose (OLGP) database can sustain between: 10,000 and 100,000 transactions per second. With strict serializability. Depending on the rate, a trillion transactions would take us between 115 and 1,157 days. That’s 3 months to 3 years. If we’re going to design and demo an architecture through a trillion transactions, we don’t want to finish in 2029. In the last decade, India’s national payments system grew 10,000x, processing tens of billions of transactions per month. There’s almost no transaction database on Earth that can survive this kind of increase in scale.”

“This is Jevons’ Paradox: efficiency increases consumption. The faster your OLTP, the more transactions you’ll want to process, the faster you’ll need to recover. The need for more scalable transaction processing is not going away.”

“The Viewstamped Replication consensus protocol from MIT, pioneered this approach in 1988 (a year before Paxos, and inspiring Raft years later). VSR provides split-second recovery to a new primary if the old primary fails, with no durability loss during failover, and no consistency loss, not even temporarily. This is an improvement for availability. You can’t scale when you’re down. At this stage, with an RSM and VSR, we’re surviving most recovery problems, but if you lose one of the replica machines, you need to recover across the network, and as you scale to 128 TiB, so too MTTR approaches several hours.”

“Even if you subdivide your keys on the write path, to split your counters or balances, it’s a hack, because you have to join them on the read path if you want to be able to execute any meaningful business logic. You can’t shard your way around strict serializability.”

A sufficiently detailed spec is code by Gabriella Gonzalez (Haskell for all)

“Misconception 1: specification documents are simpler than the corresponding code They lean on this misconception when marketing agentic coding to believers who think of agentic coding as the next generation of outsourcing. They dream of engineers being turned into managers who author specification documents which they farm out to a team of agents to do the work, which only works if it’s cheaper to specify the work than to do the work.”

“Misconception 2: specification work must be more thoughtful than coding work They lean on this misconception when marketing agentic coding to skeptics concerned that agentic coding will produce unmaintainable slop. The argument is that filtering the work through a specification document will improve quality and promote better engineering practices.”

“Agentic coders are learning the hard way that you can’t escape the “narrow interfaces” (read: code) that engineering labor requires; you can only transmute that labor into something superficially different which still demands the same precision.”

“If the specification were to grow any further they would recapitulate Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” short story: …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”

“A specification document like this must necessarily be slop, even if it were authored by a human, because they’re optimizing for delivery time rather than coherence or clarity. In the current engineering climate we can no longer take for granted that specifications are the product of careful thought and deliberation.”

“People often tell me “you would get better results if you generated code in a more mainstream language rather than Haskell” to which I reply: if the agent has difficulty generating Haskell code then that suggests agents aren’t capable of reliably generalizing beyond their training data.”

A Decade of Slug by Eric Lengyel (Terathon)

“Dynamic dilation makes the optimal choice automatic, and it is recalculated in the vertex shader every time a glyph is rendered. The technique uses the current model-view-projection (MVP) matrix and viewport dimensions to determine how far a vertex needs to be moved outward along its normal direction in object space to effectively expand the bounding polygon by half a pixel in viewport space. This guarantees that the centers of any partially covered pixels are inside the bounding polygon so the rasterizer will pick them up. When text is viewed in perspective, the dilation distance can be different for each vertex.”

“To aid in implementations of the Slug algorithm, reference vertex and pixel shaders based on the actual code used in the Slug Library have been posted in a new GitHub repository and made available under the MIT license. The pixel shader is a significant upgrade compared to the code included with the JCGT paper, and the vertex shader includes dynamic dilation, which had not yet been implemented when the paper was published.”

MAUI Avalonia Preview 1 by Tim Miller (Avalonia)

“[…] this project was a great opportunity to introduce improvements to Avalonia itself. We wanted to close the gap between the control set available in .NET MAUI and Avalonia, to avoid needing to implement .NET MAUI-specific controls. One of the most obvious benefits of that work has been the creation of the new navigation APIs and controls we’re introducing with Avalonia 12. These, and countless other new features, are a direct result of our work supporting .NET MAUI.

“Anyone using Avalonia 12 gets the full benefits, and since these .NET MAUI handlers are built on Avalonia primitives, they can be fully customized through Avalonia APIs. And, thanks to Avalonia being entirely drawn, they’ll look the same on every platform you deploy to.”

“Running with both native and drawn controls is a good demonstration of what Avalonia offers .NET MAUI users. The native .NET MAUI version uses the operating system’s controls with its native tab bar and navigation pages, making it appear more unified with the host OS. Meanwhile, Avalonia.Controls.Maui has a consistent look and behavior across all platforms. There’s no right or wrong approach; both have their merits, but with Avalonia MAUI, you now have options, giving you more control and flexibility over how your app looks and performs.”

“What’s great about using the .NET MAUI Graphics code is the seamless integration when moving from the existing .NET MAUI platforms to Avalonia MAUI. If your application was already dependent on it, our handlers should work with no surprises; it’s just drawing to a new canvas.

“We’ve also wrapped SkiaSharp.Views.Maui to allow dependent libraries to interoperate with Avalonia MAUI. MapApp demonstrates this with a simple map view featuring overlaid controls that can run on Avalonia on desktop and WASM, or .NET MAUI Native. We were able to use the Mapsui.Maui library wholesale through our handler system, no changes needed.”

“We’re also planning to enable interoperability with WinUI to host Avalonia controls within it, completing the .NET MAUI native platform story. For control library authors targeting native platforms, we’re working on establishing simple patterns to allow you to extend your controls to drawn methods.”

The Avalonia WebView Is Going Open-Source by Steven Kirk (Avalonia)

“[…] uses native platform web rendering rather than bundling Chromium, which keeps your app lean and fast. It’s a control we’re genuinely proud of.

“But embedding web content into applications isn’t a niche requirement anymore. OAuth flows, documentation rendering, rich content display, it’s become table stakes. And when something becomes table stakes, gating it behind a commercial licence starts to feel like the wrong decision.

“So we’re making it FOSS.”

Inside SPy 🥸, part 2: Language semantics by Antonio Cuni

I last read about SPy in October 2025 and the author is back with an incredibly in-depth presentation of how the language and compiler work together to speed up (a subset of) Python.

“Type annotations of parameters and return type of @blue functions are optional. If they are specified, then they are checked. If they are omitted, they default to dynamic. So in the example above, if we try to call add(“hello”) we get a type error, but add can return an object of any type.

“This is just a pragmatic choice: when you use @blue function to do metaprogramming, the types become quickly very complex and writing the correct types become harder than just writing the code.

“If you have ever tried to write a non-trivial decorator in Python, you know the pain of spelling typing.Callable[…stuff stuff stuff…]. By defaulting to dynamic, SPy removes the need of that pain, without compromising on type safety: the signature of the function says dynamic, but since it’s blue, the concrete value returned by each single invocation is fully known to the compiler. This means that if you do e.g. add(int) + “hello”, you get the appropriate compile time TypeError because you cannot add a function and a string.

“This is very different to what happens with Python type checkers, which stop doing any type checking on values annotated as Any.”

“From the error message we see that the TypeError is raised by operator.ADD, which we know being a @blue function. This directly leads us to this important property: in SPy, compilation errors are errors which are raised from @blue functions.”

“It is important to underline that typechecking is fully aware of blue semantics, meaning that the SPy compiler can keep track of the precise type of add5 and add_world without any special support. By the time the typechecker runs, all the blue values are fully known. This is a big improvement over classical type checkers for Python which typically cannot understand metaprogramming patterns.

“Inside @blue functions we can use the full power of the language.”

“Another language which is much closer to SPy is Zig: Zig’s comptime is very similar to SPy’s @blue. The big difference in this case is in the implementation and in development experience: Zig is only compiled, and comptime evaluation happens at… well, compilation time. In SPy, @blue functions are evaluated by the interpreter, with all the usual advantages. For example, you can totally insert a breakpoint() in a @blue function to do step-by-step debugging.”

Ten Months with Copilot Coding Agent in dotnet/runtime by Stephen Toub (Microsoft Dev Blogs)

“I was at a birthday party with one of my kids, and while the youngins were off playing, I found myself scrolling through our backlog of dotnet/runtime issues on my phone.”

“The PR adds 306 lines of complicated IL opcode emission. CCA wrote it; I reviewed it from the ground after landing.”

The article itself is interesting but I found myself horrified at how broken even someone like Stephen Toub is, personally and socially. He’s always working. He stuffs work into every single crack in his life. He doesn’t talk to other adults at the kids’ birthday party; he scrolls on his phone.

“The practical upshot of this story? CCA changes where and when serious software engineering can happen. The constraint isn’t typing speed or screen real estate: it’s knowledge, judgment, and the ability to articulate what needs to be done. Waiting in an airport? Provide feedback on changes that should be made. Commuting on a train? Trigger a PR. The marginal cost of starting work drops significantly when “starting work” means typing or speaking a direction rather than switching contexts and setting up a development environment.”

I’m not even being unfair. He literally says that this software frees him up to be working all the time. No downtime. No reading a book or talking to people. Just stare into your phone and interact with machines.

“One person with good judgment and a phone can generate PRs faster than a team can review them. This creates asymmetric pressure: the person triggering CCA work feels productive (“nine PRs!!”), while reviewers feel overwhelmed (“nine PRs??”).”

“CCA runs on Linux only. This is a critical constraint for a codebase like ours. A huge portion of our native code is platform-specific, with separate implementations for Windows, Linux, and macOS, or for different hardware architectures (x64, ARM, WASM). CCA can write code that targets Windows, but it can’t compile or test it. This means Windows-specific changes require humans to verify locally or wait for CI, and when CI fails, someone has to manually relay that failure back to CCA. It considerably increases the back and forth, the number of iterations, the time for each iteration, and thus the overall cost/benefit equation for using CCA in the first place.”

Fun

Markets Surge After Trump Claims He Had Sex With An Angel (The Onion)

““I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS AN ANGEL HAS VISITED ME IN MY SLEEP AND I HAVE HAD VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE SEX WITH IT,” read the lengthy, all-caps post, which with its claims that a heavenly being had done “INCREDIBLE THINGS TO [the president’s] PENIS” immediately sent the S&P 500 soaring 2.1%. “DUE TO TO THE TENOR AND DEPTH OF THIS FEMALE ANGEL’S LOVE MAKING, I ORGASMED MULTIPLE TIMES BEFORE WAKING UP NUDE IN HEAVEN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! I DID NOT WEAR A CONDOM!””