|<<>>|1 of 301 Show listMobile Mode

Links and Notes for August 7th, 2026

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.↩
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.↩

Table of Contents

Public Policy & Politics

Iran Has Changed the Question by Vijay Prashad (CounterPunch)

“Since the end of the Cold War, US diplomacy in the Middle East has often begun with a conclusion: Washington defines the crisis, identifies the acceptable parties, and sets the boundaries of the eventual settlement. Negotiation then becomes less a discussion over the political order than a process through which weaker states are asked to accept it. The agreements produced under this system were not literally surrender documents. Yet they frequently carried the political logic of surrender: one side retained the power to decide what counted as compliance, while the other was required to prove its fitness for economic relief, political recognition or limited self-rule.”
“[…] the United States and the institutions it dominated, exercised a powerful privilege: they determined the question everyone else was required to answer.”
“US military action has repeatedly promised deterrence while producing escalation, displacement, and new grievances. Bombardment can destroy facilities and commanders, but it cannot create a legitimate regional order. Nor can a system be stable when one state (Israel) has undeclared nuclear weapons, continues to occupy a people and conduct a genocide against them (the Palestinians), and feels emboldened to attack its neighbours (Lebanon, Iran, Syria) whenever it wishes.”

Joe Biden Should Be Dying Of Cancer In The Hague by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The world is a mess because men like Joe Biden get to die peacefully in their homes of cancer.

“They live long lives free from consequences for their monstrous actions.

“They don’t spend their final days rotting in a cage for war crimes.

“Nobody makes them pay for what they did.

“The worst people on the planet are elevated by the capitalist empire to the highest echelons of power across every field, and they make life worse for everyone, and then they die comfortably of old age, surrounded by loved ones.”

“This is happening everywhere. We’re watching powerful people wage wars and genocides, destroy our ecosystem, shove AI down our throats and surround us with tyrannical surveillance technology, and they’re doing it right out in the open, and we’re all basically just going along with it.

“As Utah Phillips said, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”

“It’s not just that the revolution hasn’t materialized, it’s that it hasn’t come anywhere remotely close to materializing. We’re given just enough bread and circuses to mollify us, and then we sit there munching Doritos and watching Netflix while the world burns.”

How Does America Fall? by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The American military spread across the world in World War II and they never went home. They took over British and European bases and occupied those countries too. Japan and South Korea were brutalized and conquered and they almost got Vietnam. Today, every country on earth is either garrisoned or surrounded by White troops. If you’re not fighting the empire, you’re in it, and if you’re not sanctioned by them, you sanction their existence.

“We discuss these countries independently (UK said this, Australia thinks that) but it isn’t true. They’re only independent as long as they do exactly what they’re supposed to, if not they get corrupted, couped, or overthrown. And independence is an illusion when you’re physically occupied by foreign troops. In historical terms this arrangement isn’t even unusual, from the British Empire to the Roman Empire, they ruled through local princes and satraps that had a lot of decision-making power. But real power was, and is, behind the throne.”

“The Empire demonstrated the uselessness of its highest tech against Russia and then blunted the rest of their weapons against Iran. Now the Tomahawks have run low, the aircraft carriers have run away, the F-35s have been downed, and even nuclear weapons have been neutralized. Iran can threaten mutually assured economic destruction, which (inshallah) works good enough. So what do you say about an Empire whose military power is so visibly crumbling in front of us?”
“In lieu of a functioning economy, the late-stage Empire built a financialized one, culminating in a completely artificial one. The imperial economy is now a giant AI bubble, resisting all Chinese attempts to gently deflate it with more energy-efficient models. No, the waste is the point. Their Platonic ideal of an economy is one that just burns energy and money without doing anything useful at all.”

If We Could See Everything, It Would Radicalize Us All Instantly by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“The only thing keeping the heads of the oligarchs and empire managers attached to their necks is the limitations of human perception.

“Which of course is why they work so hard to maintain the present limitations of human perception. All the propaganda, internet censorship, AI shenanigans, algorithm manipulation and government secrecy we see from the capitalist empire is there to keep us from seeing too much, because unadulterated truth tends to have a radicalizing effect on the mind.

“That’s why they’re scrambling to roll out police drones, AI mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems while doing everything they can to slow down our access to information and insight: it’s a race to get us fully locked down in a capitalist dystopia policed by militarized robots before humanity’s unprecedented ability to share inconvenient facts and ideas lets us see enough to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist in our collective consciousness.”

This is eminently hopeful. Most people have seen horrors and they don’t care. They care more about stable gas prices than dying children. They would never demand that their vehicles guzzle less gas, nor that there be public-transportation alternatives in order to ameliorate rising gas prices, even if it were to stop the slaughter of children. They see horrors and demand nothing. They are people of the muck, like in Hard to Be a God.

Things Get Spicy by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)

Checking in with the fevered imaginings of a good writer whose brain has been poisoned through and through by excessive exposure to FOX News. I hesitate to call it right-wing media because it’s really just pro-Trump, pro-business, pro-billionaire media masquerading as pro-U.S. media.

“And so, all of a sudden, having failed to subvert or assassinate the president they abhor, and foil his attempt to repair our country, the combined forces of the Democratic Party, the seditious news media, and a traitorous government bureaucracy resort to communist jihad in their crusade to wreck the USA. That’s a great combo, all right: history’s worst system for managing human affairs paired with a cult of bloodthirsty conquest. They’d decapitate the Beach Boys singing Fun, Fun, Fun if they could time-travel back to 1964, and stuff anyone who objected into a gulag.”

You may be confused as to whom he’s describing because what he says could very well be applied to the administration he’s poorly attempting to extol.

He adds detail later, making it very clear that he has been ordered by his corporate-media lords and masters to hate all things Islam.

“As for Jihad, the first amendment prohibits religious persecution, of course, but under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, (8 U.S.C. § 1189) the State Department can designate political groups as “foreign terrorist organizations.” Nominees for that might be: the Muslim Brotherhood and any of its offshoots, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Muslim Students Association (MSA / MSA National), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and others, if their spokespeople have called for the establishment of Sharia law, or advocated jihad for the purpose of capturing territory here in the USA.”

Isn’t it neat how an ostensible libertarian can be so easily convinced that the power of the state should be used to persecute religious minorities who have been arbitrarily deemed enemies of the state? How he doesn’t care about due process or evidence? How he’s delighted to be able to use a bureaucratic measure—against which he would otherwise rail as communist, totalitarian overreach that’s bad for business—to target the groups he arbitrarily hates.

With Crocodile Moats for Palestinians, Zionism drops its Mask by Yoav Litvin (Scheer Post | The New Arab)

“The crocodile episode reflects the extent to which Israeli Zionist society has forsaken its humanity in service of theft, and how its ruling class suppresses empathy while appealing to primitive “reptilian” neural processes of fear and reward to service its greed.

“For nearly three years, the Zionist rampage has relentlessly destroyed any semblance of empathy toward the Palestinian people, replacing it with escalated dehumanisation, disgust at their culture, history and existence, and glee at their suffering. What remains is an endless descent into moral depravity and cruelty, where racism, colonial theft and capitalist individualism are celebrated as the very foundation of an identity, and escape from this construct is actively discouraged through threats of severe social and physical punishment.

“This is precisely what systems of domination depend upon: convincing people that what has been conditioned is “natural” and therefore cannot be undone, or else. Yet what has been conditioned can be unlearned, and what has been wired for domination can be rewired toward empathy, solidarity and co-resistance by restructuring the social hierarchies that sustain domination.”

Roaming Charges: Footprints Dressed in Red by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Trump’s race-fueled hatred of Somalians seems visceral, perhaps intensified by the mighty Ilhan Omar’s refusal to be intimidated by him. Trump takes out his hostility towards Ilhan’s beautiful impertinence by relentlessly attacking Somalia for no justifiable reason, battering one of the world’s poorest countries with 600 attacks in his 4.5 years in office–six times as many airstrikes as Bush, Obama and Biden combined during their 20 years in office.”
“France has enacted a new law banning unsolicited telemarketing calls. Someone could be elected president of the US if they ran solely on this issue and reelected if they actually succeeded in doing it.”
“The Trump crowd wants the fires to burn all summer, so that they can “salvage” log them without even pretending to adhere to environmental laws. That may be one reason MAGA ranchers in eastern Oregon and western Idaho have been harassing and threatening firefighters on the frontlines of big conflagrations in the Wallowa-Whitman and Boise National Forests.”
“Earth is now warming faster than at any point in recorded geological history – around 10 times faster than the extreme warming event 56 million years ago and 20 times faster than at the end of the last ice age. We are almost certainly in a new extinction event.”
“Last Thursday, Romania raced to sink four barges laden with rock into the Danube River in an attempt to redirect water downstream toward a nuclear power plant, to buy more time before its second reactor is likely forced offline due to record-low water levels.”

“Nuclear reactors currently under construction by country…

“China: 39
India: 8
Russia: 7
Egypt: 4
Turkey: 4
South Korea: 4
Bangladesh: 2
Japan: 2
Ukraine: 2
United Kingdom: 2
Argentina: 1
Brazil: 1
Iran: 1
Pakistan: 1
Slovakia: 1
Hungary: 1”

The U.S. is not building any nuclear reactors.

“The rivers are so low in Europe they’re dynamiting them to divert the flows. Puerto Rico is rationing water. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are running dry. These events should be freaking people out, but the press won’t give them the attention they deserve because they all involve climate change and the masters of the media have collectively decided that no one cares about climate change anymore…and, aside from the people whose houses are burning down, maybe they don’t…”

Journalism & Media

Labor

Corporate Power Approaches Escape Velocity by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“This strike was popular, well-resourced, and supported in principle by the government and by the larger Swedish labor movement in ways that would be impossible in America. Tesla, a $1.3 trillion company whose stock price has risen by two thirds in the past year, could easily afford these workers’ demands. Elon Musk, whose net worth has increased by hundreds of billions of dollars during the time of this strike, would not have been affected one bit. Yet Tesla and Musk decided to buck public opinion and give the cold shoulder to all of Sweden and appear rude, obstinate, and greedy, in order to ensure that this small number of employees did not win a union. And Tesla succeeded.”
“[…] the fact that this strike was lost, at the same time that ungodly sums of capital are flowing into an almost totally unregulated and severely concentrated set of tech and AI companies, should make us all very uneasy. Corporations are always going to fight for their own interests. How able our we and our governments to prevent them from rearranging our entire societies and national economies to their own benefit? How do you reckon the combined power of Apple, Google, Tesla, Space X, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta compare, today, to the total power of the United States government? How able are we, collectively, to tell these companies “no,” if we want to?”

Economy & Finance

Five Takeaways from the July Jobs Report by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“[…] an economy with near-zero job growth and negative real wage growth is not going to be driven by the growth in workers’ consumption. Insofar as we see consumption growth, it is going to come from high-income households spending based on stock gains and capital income. That is not a pretty picture, nor a well-balanced economy.”

US-Japan yen intervention unravelling by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“There is also the issue of the impact of rising rates on the financing of Japanese government debt. The relatively minor rise from around zero has already lifted the debt servicing cost to more than 30 trillion yen, around $200 billion, accounting for up to 30 percent of all government expenditure.

“Across the Pacific, the concern in the US is that the continued fall in the value of the yen will lead to a selloff of US dollar assets by Japan as it attempts to counter the inflationary effects of a sharply falling currency.

“Japan is now the largest foreign holder of US Treasury bonds with stocks of $1.1 trillion. With the rate on the 30-year Treasury bond at a 19-year high and the rate on the 10-year rising, the fear is that a major dollar selloff and a rise in interest rates will impact the AI-fueled stock market boom which is increasingly being financed by debt.”

“The FT’s foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman reported that he had recently spoken to an Asian money manager who said she “increasingly thought of Trump’s America as an emerging market.” When challenged, she pointed to arbitrary changes in policy, a fear that foreign investors may be discriminated against, the deep involvement of the president and his family in business, all of which might make foreign investors wary of holding US assets.

“While noting that money was continuing to flow into the US, Rachman pointed to warning signs, including that borrowing rates were now lower in Greece than in the US.

““The annual cost of servicing America’s federal debt exceeds the Pentagon’s budget and it is rising fast,” he wrote.

“However, the Trump administration had no serious plan to bring it under control and “at some point, there will surely be a reckoning.””

Roundup: Jobs, Grid Stability, GPUs, Unitree, Financialization, Nuclear Strikes, etc. by Paul Kedrosky

“This is vendor financing moved off Nvidia’s balance sheet and scaled through private credit. Nvidia keeps selling chips, customers avoid paying upfront, and Wall Street distributes the exposure to insurers and pension funds. Residual-value guarantees do not remove the risk, but send it back toward Nvidia precisely when any decline in chip values would already be damaging its core business.”
“Hyperscalers are using contracts to create leverage without calling it debt. These commitments reduce future flexibility and make the build-out increasingly self-reinforcing: revenue must grow because the spending has already been promised. If demand disappoints or prices fall faster than revenue rises, the obligations remain while the expected cash flows go pfft.”

This is the same analysis that Liz made in the latest TrueAnon episode.

“Workers’ accumulated knowledge is being extracted at low cost. It is the physical-world equivalent of scraping the internet, except the source material is a worker’s body and the intended product is the elimination of the work itself. And this development, of course, is being celebrated with the 8000x oversubscribed Unitree IPO.”

Science & Nature

Peer review is overwhelmed—can it survive in the AI era? by Saima Sidik (Ars Technica)

“Journal editors ask university professors to write reviews alongside a multitude of other professional responsibilities, and those requests often come at a quick clip. Lourido estimates he gets about 10 requests to review manuscripts each month, when realistically, he has time for only one or two. Mack receives a review request every day or two as part of his role as an immunogeneticist at the University of California, San Francisco (which he holds in addition to being a journal editor).”

This is all volunteer work, as I understand it,

“[…] researchers around the globe are devoting a collective 15,000 years of work to peer review every year—work that, if paid, would cost $1.5 billion for the share done in the US alone. Increasingly, researchers are finding it hard to donate that kind of time.”

“That cadence comes in part because more people are submitting studies to journals than ever before. But journals also proliferated between 1960 and 2020, and some regularly run “special issues,” for which researchers generate custom content. Many journals are also publishing more manuscripts because they’re now online-only, which frees editors from having to fit an issue onto a limited amount of paper.

“Research is also increasingly interdisciplinary, meaning many studies require more knowledge and time to review. And AI contributes to the overload by making it easier for researchers to write up their work and easier for people from around the globe to submit to English-language journals. Then there are paper mills, or services that charge desperate researchers a fee to put their names on fabricated (but often legitimate-looking) publications.

“All of this has made it difficult not only to maintain the quality of peer review but to ensure it happens at all. “Sometimes I think we need to start talking about the de-growth of publishing,” Irfanullah said. “It has grown like anything. It’s extremely unhealthy!””

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same by Lauren Leek (Substack)

“[…] an algorithm that is uncertain about you, and it is always at least a little uncertain, hedges toward the average. The more uncertain it is, the harder it pulls you toward the crowd. This is why more data doesn’t save us. Personalisation under a standard loss function is regression to the collective mean with extra steps. Variance, the technical word for the stuff that makes you you, is expensive to predict. Basically, diversity is variance, and optimisers are built to minimise variance.”

“The top one percent of films, about 380 titles, pull nearly forty percent of all attention; half of everything anyone watched sits in the top two percent; thirty-eight films, a tenth of one percent of the catalogue, account for more than an eighth of all activity on their own.

“That’s what “more choice than ever” looks like from the inside: a vast catalogue you can technically reach, and a near-vertical wall of sameness almost everyone actually climbs. We call ending up at the top of that wall “knowing your taste”, but it’s just the menu that narrowed.”

Environment & Climate Change

Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

“These gas-burning plants are increasingly lumped into data center projects. They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm public health—contributing to conditions like asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and strokes. Some communities are demanding more stringent environmental reviews, but the Trump administration favors fast-tracking that can include skipping the permitting process entirely.”

While correct, this is such an anodyne way of describing what is essentially a criminal act. There are laws against polluting and they are breaking them, and no-one has the power to make them care. The poor will just die sooner. And who cares when the poor die, as long as they’ve performed their gig labor? There are always going to be more people to use. The system guarantees it.

“Since Elon Musk’s xAI controversially began relying on gas turbines last spring to power its biggest AI data center, Colossus, there has been public backlash to off-the-grid data centers like the one Amazon is building.”

It’s not controversial; it’s illegal. They can only keep it in court because the world’s richest man demands attention to his needs and wants more than any of the community’s needs or wants. This is our system.

“Notably, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi sued xAI to get Musk’s gas turbines turned off in June. That spurred the Trump administration to join the fight, backing xAI and arguing that citizens have no power to enforce the Clean Air Act.”

Of course they don’t. Because the Trump administration cares less about the rule of law than even the debased, criminal administrations that preceded it.

“However, as xAI and Trump pushed to dismiss the lawsuit, reports show that other AI giants have largely ignored mounting public criticism since it was filed. They’ve increasingly invested in various ways to avoid permitting discussions and supply their own power—including Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle. Together with Amazon’s investments, these alternative power plant projects swiftly securing approvals have become a harbinger that, unlike other data center fights that have successfully blocked $130 billion in projects so far this year, resistance against gas-burning plants may be futile. A potential loss in the xAI fight could devastate momentum in communities hoping to keep up the fight for more transparency.”

Why shouldn’t they ignore public criticism? There is no downside to doing it because the media will eventually brainwash the public into loving them again, and the upside is a lot more short-term profit.

“Over time, Amazon expects its power plant will possibly add energy supply for local customers, which could eventually make the grid more reliable and affordable. That’s the vision for the future that Amazon and likely other AI firms want the public to focus on.”

We all decided that we don’t want to generate power with fossil fuels and made regulations against it, or strongly restricting it. But Amazon decided that that doesn’t fit their plans for taking all of the money, so they just don’t follow the regulations, handing a sop to the community at some point in the possible future, where they might get some additional power. The odds that that power shows up at an affordable price are almost certainly zero.

“However, it’s unclear if neighbors would ever see those future benefits. And any spike in emissions once the Texas power plant comes online seems to clash with Amazon’s voluntary commitments to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, critics suggested.

“Amazon told Ars that it remains committed to its Climate Pledge. But under Amazon’s current plan, the Texas power plant would be permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, which the NYT flagged as “more planet-warming gases than any other power plant in the country.”

“Amazon knows that its data center plans could obstruct its climate goals at a time when its emissions have already been steadily rising, the NYT reported.

“But Amazon’s bottom line might take precedence over that 2040 deadline.”

This is written in such a mealy-mouthed and deferential tone to the company that promises to pollute an incredible amount simply to boost its profits providing services that no-one really wants.

“Cleanview is concerned that Amazon’s rush to fulfill Amazon Web Services cloud orders will tempt the company to blast more and more emissions into more areas each year without adequately weighing public harms.”

It is incredible that people are still writing stuff like this, in a tone that expresses a fascinated curiosity about the likelihood that Amazon would give up profit because generating that profit would impinge on the public good. We’ve been watching largely unregulated or only mildly regulated corporations decide the exact opposite way for decades. While they’re going to do what they want, the least we can do is not perform their marketing for them. This article amounts to “lie back and think of England.”

Climate crisis: Western Europe experiences its hottest summer on record by Marianne Arens (WSWS)

“In Germany, they are taking just one concrete measure: the ban on trucks driving on Sundays is being lifted. Ten federal states have so far lifted the ban on trucks driving on Sundays and public holidays.

“This measure is telling: it demonstrates the utter failure of German politics, which has no answer to climate change. To replace a single large inland waterway vessel or pushed convoy on the Rhine, 150 to 175 trucks are required. If this measure were to be permanent, the motorway infrastructure would have to be expanded rapidly. This is because rail transport, too, has been systematically run into the ground by cost-cutting in recent years and is being further decimated. Since this spring, DB Cargo, Germany’s freight rail company, has been implementing a drastic “restructuring” programme, under which a further 14,000 full-time jobs are set to be cut by 2030.

“For years, those in power have focused on profit-driven economics and war at the expense of the genuinely important social issues. Climate change has been known about for 40 years, yet all warnings are being ignored. What is needed is the restoration of land cover, large-scale reforestation and consistent adherence to scientifically sound climate targets. Sustainable energy sources need to be promoted instead of coal, gas and nuclear power stations.

“Yet the opposite is happening. The eleven largest listed oil and gas companies—including Shell, BP, TotalEnergies and Equinor—plan to increase their production by an average of 14 per cent between 2024 and 2030. Six leading European oil companies generated profits of $21.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026—a 43 percent increase compared with the same period last year, fuelled further by the war in Iran.

“Instead of pulling the emergency brake, Europe’s capitalist governments are caught up in the frenzy of war preparations.”

Thatcher Warned In 1989 Of A Climate Crisis. She Did Nothing. Nor Will Her Successors by Jonathan Cook (Scheer Post)

“By 1982 an Exxon team had produced a chart predicting – though again confidentially – the increases in CO2 levels in the atmosphere over time. When the chart came to light in 2019, scientists realised that the team had, in fact, correctly plotted contemporary CO2 levels – at 415 parts per million – in what was then 37 years into the future. The Exxon team had also correctly predicted what effect this would have on global temperatures: a disastrous rise of just below 1ºC.”
“In 2026, after more than a century of evidence-based warnings, all those predictions have been fully and catastrophically borne out – with heat records being toppled almost daily across western Europe. Drought and wild fires are the result.”
“The Telegraph newspaper recently opined that we would just have to adapt to a hotter climate – a climate for which, science has long understood, larger mammals are not suited. There is a reason the only mammals scurrying around at the time of the dinosaurs were small rodent-like creatures that spent much of the day underground, out of the heat. They are our very distant ancestors.”

“The problem has never been that our leaders do not understand the terrible dangers posed by climate change, or that they do not believe the scientific evidence. Each government has been fully aware of what lies ahead. They did not act because the political costs of acting against the corporate sector were far too grave.

“Those costs have only risen since, as giant corporations, the largest in human history, have grown so powerful they now effectively own our politicians – and our “democracies”.”

“[…] most have now learnt that the system is so rigged in the interests of the super-rich that, like lemmings, we are going to continue charging towards the cliff edge […]”

Medicine & Disease

Why you can’t find a primary care doctor by Dr. Lucy McBride (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“Domino 1: Primary care doesn’t pay, so fewer doctors choose it. Other specialists earn 40–90% more than primary care physicians, with surgical fields paying nearly double. Why? Because our fee-for-service system pays for procedures. The average reimbursement for a primary care visit is $259, versus $1,092 for a gastroenterology visit.

“This doesn’t just impact the current physicians, but the pipeline of physicians. Class of 2025 graduates carried an average of $200,000–$250,000 in debt. Faced with that math, why would a med student pick a lower-paying field? The Bureau of Health Workforce projects a shortfall of over 87,000 primary care physicians by 2037.

“Domino 2: The doctors who stay get crushed. Most of us went into primary care to listen to, teach, and guide patients throughout their lives. But in order to keep the clinic alive, physicians have to see more patients. We aren’t given the time that is needed to spend with a patient. So that means only 15 minutes to see an 80-year-old who’s just been diagnosed with cancer, grieving a spouse, and now has new chest pain. The mission becomes impossible, and burnout follows fast.

“Domino 3: Burnout drives doctors out, deepening the shortage: 45% of primary care doctors report burnout, and 39% of those plan to stop seeing patients. This is turning into a workforce exodus.”

The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“[…] people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system’s defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.`”
“As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn’t a service delivery system at all – it’s a service denial system.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Wednesday Poem: Born by Wistawa Szymborska | Jim Culleny (3QuarksDaily | View With a Grain of Sand)

“So this is his mother.
This small woman.
The gray-eyed procreator.

“The boat in which, years ago,
he sailed to shore.

“The boat from which he stepped
into the world,
into un-eternity.”

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Disability is the Current Meta by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“The number of disability accommodations given for the LSAT is exploding and average scores are creeping ever higher; this is unsurprising given that, according to the LSAC itself, 99% of accommodation requests for the test are granted. Do you doubt that, in 30 seconds of searching, I could find anonymous admissions of getting diagnoses in order to juice LSAT performance? Go on Reddit, I said, look at what people who are talking about LSAT or MCAT or GRE strategy are saying. Or look at the parenting forums where the discussion of getting accommodations earlier in life are completely shameless. Once someone is approved of for such accommodations at one level of education, it’s essentially unheard of for them to be taken away at any future level. Look at Operation Varsity Blues and what they found. How could anyone doubt, at this point, that vast numbers of individuals and parents are abusing the disability accommodation system, or that our institutions are afraid to do anything to push back?”
“[…] without rules and evaluation and gatekeeping, without a willingness to say no, our medical system and legal system cannot actually accommodate the disabled. The “anything goes” era of disability, where doctors advertise on Twitter that they can guarantee you an ADHD diagnosis and a script for Vyvanse in a 30 minute Zoom call, where rich 19-year-olds purport to have debilitating psychiatric illnesses for social media clout until they get bored, where affluent parents insist that they have to get bullshit accommodations for their kids because every other parent is doing it, where people claim to have PTSD from being rejected by their dream MBA program…. The negative effects of this relentless casualization of medical conditions are immense, and they inevitably make life worse for the truly disabled.”
“I’m telling you this: every frivolous claim to disability made today, every cane brought to class by a woman who will be running marathons 18 months later, every SAT score secured with a bullshit ADHD diagnosis, every case of Jetway Jesus − every last one is mortaring another brick into the wall that some genuinely sick person will have to struggle to climb over five years from now, while trying to prove a disability status that the fakers have forced the system to view with suspicion.”
“[…] the cracks are already there; people can only watch the unscrupulous bullshit their way to skipping the line at the airport so many times before they get mad. And anyway, the system is straining in myriad ways, as I describe in the book. Things can’t go on like this. So, the question becomes, who’s gonna be around to clean up the mess? The end of this sad, grubby, unsustainable period of limitless disability claims won’t look like justice arriving but like the waitress dropping off the bill. And guess who we’re going to find has run out on the tab?”
“The herniated disc is on the MRI or it isn’t. The pancreas produces insulin or it doesn’t. Your kid actually needs the extra time on the exam, or your kid’s psychologist wrote a letter because you paid him to write a letter and you want him to go to Stanford. There are many human disorders that are much more difficult to confirm and which ultimately rely on self-reports by the afflicted patient, but there is still some baseline underlying reality even if deception is possible.”

The tactic of AOC and her allies to giggle away the ‘craziness’ of Woke-era abuses should not be tolerated by Glenn Greenwald (Substack)

“It is, I suppose, a net positive that those who imposed extremist woke dogma are now too embarrassed to defend it. When they hear what they were saying and demanding at the time, it now sounds to them as unhinged and insane as it did to many of us back when they were earnestly and angrily spouting it.

“But when AOC tries to giggle her way out of her behavior and the behavior of her allies, it actually is more offensive and cowardly than anything else. By invoking the lighthearted and playful terminology of the New York City Councilman whom she quotes — “Woke 1 was crazy!” — she seeks to depict this dark period as just a few oddball, zany moments that never really hurt anyone and thus need not be dwelled on or taken seriously.

“But the woke extremism that AOC and her friends imposed on everyone else was anything but playful or frivolous. It was deeply authoritarian, mob-driven, sinister, coercive, and bloodthirsty. It sought to destroy anyone and everyone who did not immediately submit to and recite all of its new jargon and dictates. As was true for the similar hive-mind excesses of the #MeToo movement, the woke warriors — without batting an eye — destroyed careers, reputations, and institutions upon even the slightest transgression of their new dictates.”

“But the climate that was created and imposed as a result of what AOC and her allies now want to laughingly wave away as “crazy” was no joke. Jobs, reputations, and careers were at stake. Many people unjustly had all of those things taken away from them — destroyed — based solely on the whims of mob justice. People were genuinely terrified of thought crimes, no matter how trivial or well-intentioned. I watched countless 45- to 55-year-old journalists and editors adopt a completely new way of speaking and thinking overnight, out of fear that they would attract the woke mob and lose their jobs with even one false step. People watched their every word, knowing – correctly – that a bloodthirsty mob was on the hunt for even the most unintentional deviations from the newly imposed norm.”

“I can hardly think of a worse trait in a political leader, or a human being of any kind, than a lack of internal fortitude or personal courage to resist moral panics and accompanying demands for full submission by a gathered mob.

“Just as was true when populist, anti-war sentiments seemed to emerge and find success on the right, I am happy to see those ideas once again being rediscovered by the left and finding success there. I vastly prefer both left- and right-wing populism and an anti-war ethos on the left and right if the alternative is the dreary, sociopathic, and self-serving bipartisan doctrines of the establishment wings of both parties.

“But it is nonetheless vital to recall and keep focused on the tyrannical and authoritarian tendencies of all these factions.”

Technology & Engineering

Google vergrössert den Stau by Marco Diener (Info Sperber)

“Viele Navigationssysteme greifen auf die Daten von Google zu. Und Google empfiehlt den schnellsten Weg. Wenn es also im Umfahrungstunnel nicht richtig vorwärts gehen will, dann schlägt Google die Dorfstrasse vor. Auch dann, wenn die Zeitersparnis minimal ist.

“Das Problem mit der Google-Empfehlung: Der Leissigen-Tunnel wurde vor gut 30 Jahren gebaut, damit der Durchgangsverkehr eben gerade nicht durchs Dorf fährt. Die öffentliche Hand liess sich das viel kosten: 173 Millionen Franken für den ursprünglichen Bau und in den letzten Jahren nochmals 42 Millionen für einen Sicherheitsstollen. Hinzu kommen ab 2031 die Kosten für die Sanierung. Viel Geld für einen Tunnel, der seinen Zweck wegen der Navigationssysteme nur halbbatzig erfüllt.”

“[…] das Astra ist machtlos. Es ist zwar auch schon bei Anbietern vorstellig geworden, musste aber feststellen: «Unsere Einflussmöglichkeiten sind beschränkt: Die Routenempfehlungen werden von privaten, häufig international tätigen Unternehmen eigenständig entwickelt. Das Astra kann weder die Berechnungsgrundlagen noch die empfohlenen Routen vorgeben.»”

Capital formation by Cory Doctorow (Scheer Post)

“[…] if you want to enable independent repair of powered wheelchairs, whose manufacture is controlled by a duopoly of private-equity backed companies that have all but abandoned spending on repair, leaving wheelchair users stuck in bed for months while they await service.

“This absurd situation is the same if you’re blind and want to make use of an exemption that lets you reverse-engineer ebook formats so that you can run your ebooks through a Braille printer, screen reader or other assistive device. Under the exemptions rules for the world’s anti-circumvention laws, every blind person is expected to personally reverse engineer the access control systems built into Adobe and Amazon’s ebook formats, write an exploit that lets them extract the text of these restricted ebooks and then repackage that text in a new, open format:”

LLMs & AI

Programming

There Is Still No Silver Bullet by Christian Ekrem

“The essence is the conceptual construct: the interlocking concepts, the data and their relationships, the decisions about what the system should mean and do and refuse to do. “I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct,” he writes, “not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.””
“Two men within the same decade, arriving at the same place from opposite ends; Naur from watching a compiler team hand their program over to fresh programmers — source and documentation included — and seeing the newcomers’ patches fight the original design anyway, Brooks from watching projects miss every estimate he’d ever seen. Both concluded that the hard part of programming is building that shared understanding, and that the artifact on disk holds far less of it than we’d like to think.”
“[…] the senior engineers reporting modest gains aren’t slow adopters or Luddites in denial. They’re telling you, with a number, what their week is made of: domain conversations, design decisions, naming, review, the slow work of figuring out what the system should refuse to represent. All essence, and none of it gets faster just because the typing does.”

Design

Sports

Fun

Everyone in ‘Idiocracy’ Wears Crocs Because They Were ‘Horrible’ and Cheap? by Alex Kasprak (Snopes)

True.

“The wardrobe had to be something that’s not around now. It had to be created for a lot of extras, and so you know our wardrobe person was looking for ways to make the budget work. And Crocs were not out in the world yet. They were just a small startup at the time. We shot in 2004, so no one was wearing Crocs. And she showed me these things, and I thought, ‘Oh those are great, just stupid plastic shoes.’

“And I said to her, ‘But you actually bought these, you can order these. What if by the time the movie comes out, these things are everywhere, and it doesn’t look like we’re set in the future?’ And she said, ‘Oh no, that’s never going to happen. And sure enough, by the time it comes out two years later, everyone is wearing Crocs. So it already started coming true even faster than we made the movie, really.”

The Campaign for North Africa (Wikipedia)

“The Campaign for North Africa (CNA), subtitled The Desert War, 1940–43, is a strategic board wargame published by Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) in 1978 that simulates the entire North African campaign of World War II. It is considered one of the most complex wargames ever published, with ten recommended players and an estimated total playtime of 1,500 hours.”
“Critic John Kula, writing twenty years after the game’s publication, noted that development of a game this size was solely driven by player feedback. “So why produce a game which is unplayable? Well apparently the feedback responses that governed Jim Dunnigan and SPI indicated that gamers wanted such monster games. And true to the old curse, gamers got what they asked for. This is likely the single biggest difficulty with reader feedback — everyone knows what they want, but few know what they need.””

Two years into the world’s most complicated board game, masochist gamers “still don’t understand what the camels do” by Matt Bassil (War Gamer)

“Like horror movie characters ignoring clear and obvious warnings, a pair of friends, Andy and James, have paid no heed to this suggestion. They are trying to complete The Campaign for North Africa all by themselves, documenting the process in podcast form. 20 months and 88 episodes after this folly began, they are finally done with the six-turn practice scenario, and are ready for the entire 111-turn war.”
“[…] describes The Campaign For North Africa as a “beautiful simulation of the uncaringly mundane slog of war command” but concludes that “unless you thoroughly enjoy the granular detail of breakdown of vehicles, consumption of fuel, updating of cohesion levels and CPA constantly, you’ll likely not enjoy playing this game for very long.””

Video Games

Copyright (c) 1999-2026 earthli.com. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by