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Links and Notes for August 14th, 2026

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 They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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

Horrific conditions aboard USS Abraham Lincoln: The ruling class’s contempt for the troops it sends to war by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“Five thousand sailors live and work on the nuclear-powered Lincoln in 12-hour shifts, beneath a flight deck that fills the ship with deafening noise day and night—sleeping in berthing compartments stacked three bunks high, eating in galleys that serve 15,000 meals a day, exercising in gyms often hotter than 100°F.”

“The Lincoln itself embodies this history. Launched in 1988, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the carrier has served American imperialism through the entire period of war that opened with the Gulf War of 1991. On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush landed on its flight deck and infamously declared beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished,” “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” That was a lie.

“Twenty-three years later the same ship—with dysfunctional air conditioning, moldy showers, broken toilets and malfunctioning laundry facilities—has been at sea 268 days, logged more than 10,000 sorties against Iran and is now involved in blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Family members, including a Navy-veteran father who told MS NOW his son had personally seen the damage, have reported holes worn through the Lincoln’s flight deck after months of heavy bombing missions.”

“The enlisted sailors aboard the Lincoln, like those across the Navy, are drawn overwhelmingly from working class and lower-middle-income families across the country. They enlist straight out of high school or community college for a steady income, health insurance and the chance at technical training and money for education. A sailor at the lowest enlisted rank, after four months’ service, draws base pay of $2,407.20 a month—for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, on a warship in a combat zone.”

Busifikatsiya by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The 100 Days)

“Although they are eager to feed more Ukrainians into the war, Europe’s leaders will do so as quietly as possible. At least for now, they won’t be dragging young men out of low-key jobs at cafes and construction sites and stuffing them into buses. They know this would be dangerously unpopular — in part because they’ve been watching the Zelensky government grow ever-more hated while doing that very thing to Ukraine’s citizens back home.”

“In past, inconvenient information about our proxy war in Ukraine has been scrubbed from the Internet. We know this courtesy of an investigation by U.S. Congressional staff, which found that the FBI — working in tandem with the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU — had flagged “thousands of accounts to remove” from Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.

“Early in the war, the Ukrainian spy agency arranged to have more than 5,000 American critics deleted from Facebook. It’s incredible that’s not a bigger story.

“So, why haven’t busifikatsiya videos — with their damning window into the fear and violence we’re supporting — also been more diligently scrubbed? Perhaps they soon will be. For now, however, it’s likely we can see them because American officials, like the European Union officials, have been demanding exactly this: They want more busifikatisya.”

The never-ending myth of a looming Ukrainian ‘breakthrough’ by Branko Marcetic (Repsonsible Statecraft)

“[…] the drone attacks have elicited the most severe Russian retaliation yet. Moscow has markedly stepped up its strikes on Ukraine, including one of the largest ballistic missile attacks of the entire war, at the precise time the United States and Europe are running low on interceptors to defend it. With Russia now attacking Ukraine’s port facilities and commercial vessels in the Black Sea, the country is being starved of billions of dollars of revenue, and its GDP could drop by as much as 1.5%.”

Russia and Ukraine bleed as NATO’s war threatens to engulf Europe by Thomas Scripps (WSWS)

“No figures can be entirely trusted, but it is clear the overall toll is horrific. In this brutal war of attrition, the intention is to put enough pressure on the other side’s society to force a collapse. Ukraine, a client state of NATO, is pursuing regime change in Russia to the advantage of the imperialist powers. Russia is trying to break the back of Ukraine to prevent this outcome.

“The strain is telling. Both sides are struggling to get enough soldiers into the army. The Ukrainian economy is shattered: a fifth smaller than before the war and requiring three times its GDP in reconstruction costs. It is utterly dependent on foreign loans and aid; the EU loaned $105 billion in April 2026 to cover the period up to 2027, leaving $52 billion still needed.

“Russia is maintaining its war economy at the cost of everything else. Andrei Klepach, chief economist at development bank VEB, the country’s second-largest, was fired this week after he warned, drawing attention to the fact that Russia is fighting NATO, not just Ukraine:”

“We’re falling behind. We’re losing both the technological and economic competition globally. And, as I’ve already said, we’re losing not only to China and the US, but in some ways, we’re losing to Ukraine.

“Ukraine’s economy, of course, is partially destroyed; it’s a demographic disaster. But, once again, the Ukrainian economy, despite everything, is surviving. Of course, there’s enormous financial assistance there… With this assistance for military spending and their own expenses, it’s roughly almost 50 percent of our budget…

“I believe Russia won’t collapse, but I’m almost certain we’ll reach a social crisis. We won’t collapse economically, but our lag will widen, with all the ensuing consequences.”

“With NATO foreclosing a peace deal with terms that would finish the Putin government and prepare a NATO-backed assault against Crimea, the pressure is on the Russian government to escalate its way out of the situation. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to develop its ability to strike at Russia.

“However, the intensification of the war and its costs mean strengthening opposition in the working class. Klepach warned, “No one expected the February Revolution, let me remind you. Lenin wrote in December 1916 that ‘we won’t live to see it,’ but he did just a few months later.”

“This is the deathly fear of the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchies both, driving their repression of anti-war sentiment.

“The most significant political prisoner of the war, because he represents what the ruling class most fears, is Bogdan Syrotiuk. Sentenced to 15 years by a Ukrainian court for six articles written for the World Socialist Web Site, he is a fighter for the united socialist struggle of Russian, Ukrainian and European workers against the war.”

Today In Dystopia: “We Have Cameras Everywhere In That Town” by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“It is absolutely chilling how the panopticon of surveillance is creating this “guilty until proven innocent by better surveillance” standard that is rapidly becoming the norm throughout our society. The state is being given massive, sweeping powers to monitor every aspect of civilian life to an increasingly intrusive extent, and it is already ruining people’s lives. This benefits nobody but the powerful, who live in constant vigilance and paranoia about the common folk growing fed up with their rulers and forcing the creation of a more equitable status quo.”
“People are making gods out of their AI toys and acting under the assumption that they are being given infallible information from on high, instead of just using their critical thinking faculties like normal human beings. And, today in dystopia, this trend is turning everybody into drooling idiots with a hyperinflated sense of their own correctness.”

How Finland Destroyed Itself For NATO by Nate Bear (¡Don't Panic!)

“Finland, often known as the happiest country in the world, now has the highest unemployment rate in Europe, demand for food aid has exploded by more than 70%, and homelessness, which had been declining for more than ten years, has increased 34% in just two years. Conditions in the country are so bad that almost 20% of Finland’s population is now considered at risk of poverty,”
“Finland is slashing its social state to the bone to meet NATO’s 5% GDP military spending target, a target which became necessary after the country abandoned neutrality and swapped the welfare state for the warfare state after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
“In 2021 Russia accounted for about 92% of Finland’s gas imports. Finland has replaced all of that with a mix of sources, including far more expensive LNG from the US, meaning that Finland, after having some of the lowest gas prices in Europe, now has the highest gas prices in Europe.”

“Finland is also spending €10 billion on US fighter jets, and a few billion euros on missiles and glide bombs to fire from those jets.

“It’s all utterly deranged, but completely unsurprising given the Russophobia which pervades all European halls of power and has become embedded on the continent.

“Finland has effectively taken a scythe to all the things that made it, in the eyes of many, the envy of the world. The country has trashed the model which delivered such a high standard of living, a model which included neutrality and good relations with Russia.”

Who Owns You in the Age of AI? by Jeffrey Wernick (ScheerPost)

“Define property rights in personal data. Title, not consent theater. A checkbox on a forty-page policy is not a conveyance, and behavioral data taken at a price of zero is taken, not traded.

“Repeal the third party doctrine. Handing data to an intermediary should not forfeit it. The doctrine was built for bank records and dialed phone numbers, and it now covers everything a person thinks out loud to a machine. Property that dissolves on deposit is not property.”

“Millions of small data holders cannot each negotiate with every counterparty. Markets solve this with intermediaries, standard terms, and class actions, once there is a right to aggregate. Copyright clears billions of micro-uses through collecting societies. Transaction costs are an engineering problem inside a rights regime.”

“Before deciding who may possess the technology, decide what the technology may do to you. Define what is yours. Define what may be taken. Define who is liable when you are harmed. Preserve those rights when your property passes through an intermediary. Then let courts discover the boundaries, markets price the rights, and machines compete inside them.

“The problem is not that we have failed to decide who should control AI.

“The problem is that we are deciding who should control AI before deciding what they have no right to control.”

How America Is Blowing Up Its Military (In Iran) and Can’t Replace It (Without China) by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“America cannot just drop its Soviet-era stock on poor people like they’re used to. They have to murder people from afar, expending smart missiles, and they have to defend themselves from even smarter missiles, expending interceptors at a many-to-1 ratio. This rapidly returns precious rare earths to the earth, where they cannot be recovered.”
“In its headless rush through its world domination bucket-list, America has A) fought Russia and Iran at the same time, massively depleting stocks and B) started a trade war with China, making replenishment impossible. Even Hitler got his sequencing better in World War II. Instead of Molotov-Ribbentrop, America has thrown a Molotov cocktail into its own supply chain. It’s World War III repeating as farce.”
“[…] the United States and Raytheon have agreed to increase production to over 1,000 per year but this is really just announcing corruption, not production. Even if they had the raw materials, which they don’t, they don’t have the manufacturing capacity anymore. As an example, General Dynamics took $533 million to build much more basic artillery shells and delivered none. And still got more contracts afterwards! These guys are just announcing fraud, not production. They’re going to remodel some kitchens in Bethesda and do nothing on the battlefield.”
“People still talk about the dollar cost of replacing this or that weapons system and it’s like talking about Monopoly money in the real world. It’s like trying to buy a Ferrari with Chuck E. Cheese tokens. The monopoly is over, the franchise is bankrupt. Either the US is sanctioning their own supplier or the supplier is sanctioning them. It doesn’t matter how much something costs if you’re not buying and the seller isn’t selling. What are we even talking about?”

What Fidel Castro Gave Us by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“As household debt reached catastrophic levels for ordinary people in the Global South, leaders in their bespoke suits muttered clichés. Fidel, in his military fatigues, was their antithesis. His bluntness and smile made the truth palatable and inspired people to join him in fighting for a dignified future. We stood to applaud Fidel not only because of what he said, but also because he spoke our language.”
“That is the fundamental lesson for the Third World. Yes, colonialism ravaged our countries. Yes, the neocolonial structure continues to leech resources and wealth from our countries. Yes, the structure of war and debt imposes an enormous tax on any country that tries to exercise its sovereignty. Yes, all of this is true, and these are difficulties. But difficulties will not keep us from moving forward.”
“[…] a society whose productive forces cannot generate sufficient surplus, and therefore sufficient leisure and cultural institutions, cannot by itself create the conditions for human emancipation. Liberal rights to property in a capitalist system, for instance, guarantee every person the freedom to own property, which had been restricted under pre-capitalist social formations. But they do not guarantee freedom from property – in other words, the freedom from the tyranny of being without property. Only ‘in a higher phase of communist society’, marked by abundance, can the social basis for freedom be established. ‘Only then’, Marx wrote, ‘can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’”
“Addressing the Durban conference, Fidel provided a master class on the stubborn realities. ‘Racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia’, he said, ‘are not naturally instinctive reactions of human beings – they are born directly from wars, military conquests, slavery, and the individual or collective exploitation of the weakest by the most powerful all through the history of human societies’. If we face that fact, then it is not enough to have seminars on better behaviour or to share best practices to undo racism. We must change the system that endows social hierarchies with such power. We must overthrow and transform the system of capitalism itself.”
“Watching Fidel explain his ideas with passion and certainty only made me feel more passionate and certain. It deepened my desire to emulate not him, as an individual person, but the way he participated in the struggle to save our humanity from brutality and to try honestly to build a socialist world.”

Journalism & Media

youtube after announcing these new rules by Man Carrying Thing (YouTube)

  • Monetization only after 8,000 watched hours.
  • 20M qualifying views of shorts in the last 90 days.
  • Views will be counted if any frame of the video has been viewed, even for long-form videos.

Number will go up for YouTube but it will be fake.

Labor

Yes Obviously the Senate Should Be Abolished by Hamilton Nolan (How Things Work)

“The state of Wyoming, with 590,000 residents, has two Senators, and the state of California, with 39 million residents, also has two Senators. Every citizen of Wyoming has, proportionally, 66 times more representation in the Senate than each citizen of California. If you believe in “one person, one vote”—this is the opposite of that.”

I’m sorry … have you completely forgotten about the house of representatives? What are we even talking about here?

I see the argument—a little—when you only consider “one person, one vote”, but would such a system lead to good outcomes? I think “people should decide what their environs look like and how their resources are used” is also pretty important. I don’t know that the Senate leads to that—I’ve not thought much about it—but having only California decide how to divvy up Wyoming’s resources isn’t going to end well for the handful of Wyoming residents. They’re just going to be along for the ride. Just because “tyranny of the majority” has been misused doesn’t mean that it isn’t a thing to be considered.

Is a system without a Sentae more or less likely to lead to environmentally useful outcomes? Who’s going to defend the land? I don’t know that Wyoming residents will do anything to protect their land rather than ruthlessly exploit it for personal profit but is it better for rich Californians to be able to ruthlessly exploit it for personal profit? Would that happen? Is there anyone to prevent it? We already have enough of a problem within a state like New York, where the gigantic city at the bottom sets the tempo for the whole entire state.

Leaning only on the House of Representatives isn’t the answer. Empowering local communities to act more autonomously is, though, I think. Perhaps anarchic enclaves loosely federalized. The U.S. is too large to rule equitably anyway, especially using the nearly unregulated, predatory, zero-sum form of capitalism that is so deeply exalted there. Don’t help the poor; they deserve their lot. Give more money and resources to the rich; they obviously know what they’re doing. It’s a shitshow that abolishing the Senate will do absolutely nothing to ameliorate.

Economy & Finance

When the Shortage is the Strategy (No One's Happy)

“When global supply chains broke down in 2020, the average markup over cost jumped from 56% to 72% in a single year — the fastest increase since 1955. [] Corporate profits have risen 50% since; real hourly wages, only 3%. [] As far as the general public knew, who was to say whether it was the pandemic creating shortages, or higher upstream commodity pricing. Few knew, and it certainly wasn’t a priority. Corporate profits drove more than a third of inflation from the start of the pandemic, and 53% of it by mid-2023 (after supply chains had recovered). In the forty years before, they drove 11%.”
“Since 2020, the same pattern has played out across at least eleven major consumer categories. Eggs, cars, rent, groceries, gasoline, auto insurance, lumber, shipping, building materials, pharmaceuticals, baby formula. Each with its own supply shock, each with the same result: prices went up, profits hit records, and when the constraint eased, the prices stayed.”
“Of 22 companies reviewed, half adjusted executive bonuses upward to exclude tariff costs from performance calculations. [] Meaning consumers paid the tariff through higher prices, the company got the money back, and the executives were scored as though the tariff had never happened.”

Nvidia ♥️ SEC Securitization Rules by Paul Kedrosky

“The investment-grade market is saturated, requiring either new sources or new ratings approaches”

That sounds ominous for everyone except those seeking to avoid the risk from which they seek to profit. The public is going to be left holding the bag. Again. And people will be ordered by public officials and the media to wring their hands and wonder how it happened, while those who caused it and who benefitted massively plan the next round.

Six Things: Hedge Fund Crowding, Insurance, Anomie, Iran, and Hyperdeflation by Paul Kedrosky

  • Apparent portfolio diversification is mostly the same capex cycle in differently colored wrappers.
  • When AI infrastructure turns, crowding will make clear that chips, power equipment, memory and cooling were one position all along.
  • We got a taste of this with the Situational Awareness mess

Science & Nature

i have to believe that the overlap between dinosaur comics readers and cannon owners is non-zero by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics)

This comic discusses Hail cannons (Wikipedia), for which,

“[…] there is no scientific evidence for their effectiveness.”

Despite this, though,

“Manufacturers claim that what would otherwise have fallen as hailstones then falls as slush or rain. It is said to be critical that the machine is running during the approach of the storm in order to affect the developing hailstones. One manufacturer claims that the radius of the effective area of their device is around 500 m (1,600 ft).”

The fog of hunger> A Hungry Woman is Easier to Dismiss than a Well-fed Woman by Sarah Berg (Aeon)

“[…] the physiologist Ancel Keys had studied its hidden cost. In 1944, he recruited 36 healthy men at the University of Minnesota and, during a six-month semi-starvation phase, reduced their average daily intake from about 3,470 calories to 1,570. The researchers documented not the collapse of thinking but something subtler and more revealing: the slow colonisation of thought by hunger. Cognitive ability remained technically intact. What diminished was the will to use it. The men’s attention migrated toward food in the middle of conversations, tasks, their own sentences. They collected cookbooks. They lingered over restaurant menus. The hunger noise occupied so much cognitive space that measurably less was available for everything else.”
“What we have called a beauty issue, a discipline issue, a personal issue, is also a cognitive one. The mental labour of managing a body in a culture that reads female thinness as evidence of seriousness runs beneath everything: the meeting, the manuscript, the idea that almost formed and did not, the patience that ran out an hour before it was needed. A mind partly occupied with monitoring itself cannot simultaneously give full attention to anything else. This is not moral commentary. It is a description of how attention works. Attention is finite. Hunger takes some of it. What it takes cannot at the same time be used for anything else.”
“A 2026 analysis in The Lancet of 48 studies found that people who stopped GLP-1s regained 60 per cent of their lost weight within the first year, and that 40 to 60 per cent of the weight lost on these drugs is lean muscle mass, not fat. The muscle loss compounds the metabolic problems the drugs were meant to address. The hunger returns. The cognitive management begins again.”

This is a good essay as far as information goes. It has a tinge of AI-assistance to it, though, which is a pity. For example, “it’s not this; it’s that,”

“The body was never the problem. But the bill for what the culture asked of it has been accruing interest in places no one was watching.”

Or this formulation, which LLMs love to use, because convolution is cleverness.

“The cognitive debt accumulates the same way, harder to measure because it exists in the negative space of things that did not happen.”

or this one,

“The hip fracture that shortens a woman’s life at 80 often has its invoice dated decades earlier, accumulated interest on a debt incurred when she was learning, at 11 or 22 or 35, that her body’s smallness was worth more than its strength.”

It’s fine, of course, and maybe she really wrote it herself, but this cadence is exactly the kind of sentence that an LLM will write for you, convincing you that you now sound clever and urbane.

Glimpses of the Deep Biosphere by Maciej Cegłowski (Mars for the Rest of Us)

“We have yet to drill a hole so deep that we don’t find a microbial population at the bottom of it. In terms of biomass, this hidden biosphere is equivalent in size to every plant, animal, insect and microbe on the surface and in the oceans of the Earth. But we know almost nothing about it. Most of our knowledge comes from opportunistic drilling in deep mines in South Africa and Canada, and from marine sediment cores brought up by the two scientific ships capable of doing such work, one of which is being scrapped”
“The rough procedure is this: as cores come up, they are bagged in inert gas and sliced into sections. Scientists on the scene go to work on these segments in a glove box, trimming off the ends and paring off the outer layers the way you might peel a leek. These trimmed hearts of core are rinsed with alcohol (sometimes flamed!), individually bagged, and put on ice. Within a few hours, they are shipped to secondary laboratories for analysis. There the core sections are often trimmed again, with the goal of giving a central chunk that has not come into contact with any foreign matter.”
“A more sophisticated family of tracers are chemicals called perfluorocarbons (PFCs), a cousin of the teflon on your frying pan. PFCs are some of the most chemically boring compounds ever discovered, reacting with nothing and no one. But because they light up electron capture detectors like a searchlight, they can be measured at the parts-per-trillion level even with the kind of rough-and-ready equipment that can be operated on an oil rig.”
“Together the combination of microspheres, PFC tracers, and ribosomal DNA fingerprinting of found organisms gives a good quantitative control of contamination. The techniques are precise enough that researchers have been able to identify patches of sterile rock, along with native cell counts as low as a few hundred cells per cubic centimeter while keeping intruders below one part in a few thousand.”
“Pressure also puts a limit on life. At pressures above about 2 GPa (about the weight of 80 km of rock), any liquid water present will freeze into a high-temperature form of ice. This exotic hot ice has been found as inclusions in natural diamonds coughed up from the deep mantle, suggesting that pockets of free water may exist at extraordinary depth, perhaps equal in volume to the Earth’s oceans. But water turning into rock places obvious stress on a cell, and we can consider this a hard limit for all known organisms.”
“[…] microbes that get buried in ocean floor sediment. How much of this sediment there is varies greatly with location. Close to land and at river mouths, there can be absolute mountains of the stuff. The bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, for example, sits under 18 kilometers of what used to be the Rocky Mountains, eroded and carried down over the aeons by the Mississippi river system.”

“Sediment by its nature is rich in biological matter, and for the first few centimeters there’s often oxygen to go with the food. The living is good. But when the oxygen runs out, the population balance in the sediment changes character. Anaerobes that had been holding their breath in seawater start to come into their own. Within the first few centimeters of seafloor muck there’s a transition from deep-sea like populations of microfauna to a fully anaerobic ecosystem of lucky colonizers.

“The good times continue until deeper in the sediment, when all the readily available food has been eaten. Microbes that once frolicked and played now begin to live in slow motion, expending the minimal amount of energy needed to keep entropy at bay and maintain their DNA and proteins in a viable state. Sex is rare—the cell division time for microbes in sediment goes into the thousands and tens of thousands of years, with evidence that it may extend to millions of years. Organisms expend astonishingly little energy, but still live.”

“The ocean floor conveyor sets a natural time limit to seafloor life, but some of the communities living in deep rock have now been out of contact with the rest of creation for the best part of two billion years, a sort of natural time capsule of slow-living immortals.”
“[…] it is common in nature for microbial communities to endure harsh conditions at population levels that render them undetectable, and then bloom when they reach a habitable niche, even if that process takes millennia. It’s something to keep in mind the next time we send a septic lander to go looking for analogues of the deep biosphere on Mars.”
“[…] what if life is fundamentally a geochemical process that arose underground? In that case, slow-living in deep rock is the normal state of nature, and the riot of biodiversity on the surface is the aberration unique to Earth. In this paradigm, life is more of an offshoot of geology, and its chief activity is remodeling and altering cubic kilometers of buried rock. All the wild stuff on the surface of our planet becomes almost incidental, like the mold on a cheese rind.”

Environment & Climate Change

Somewhere near the beginning of Spinnerville Road

Orbital data centers would export a surprising mass of metals to space by Scott K. Johnson (Ars Technica)

“Given the roughly five-year expected lifetime for data center GPUs, about 200,000 of the 1 million proposed SpaceX AI1 satellites would be decommissioned each year. Based on their May 29 FCC filing, about 40,000 would definitely deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. (Those materials would largely be dispersed throughout the atmosphere, turning a resource into a diffuse contaminant that slowly settles over the globe. One related issue: the aluminum would cause an unknown amount of ozone depletion over a period of decades.) Some or all of the remaining 160,000 satellites would be moved outward into a distant “disposal” orbit, instead. Either way, they’re lost from a “material life cycle” point of view.”

“Focusing on just the GPUs themselves—ignoring solar panels, cooling systems, and the rest of the server and networking devices—can at least provide a starting point.

“[…] using the extremely conservative assumption that each AI1 satellite was simply composed of 72 naked A100 GPUs taped together, we can estimate the material exported to space (or vaporized so thoroughly that it might as well have been) each year.

“That includes 1,000 tons of copper, 170 kilograms of gold, almost 2 tons of silver, over 20 tons each of bismuth and titanium, over 2 tons of palladium, and 76 kilograms of thallium.

“Some of these elements are, unsurprisingly, rounding errors compared to the amount we mine each year. But that’s around 1 percent of global annual palladium and thallium—a remarkable amount to eject into space.”

“Will there someday be an environmental review for space projects that includes an evaluation of the mass of materials it proposes to remove from the Earth system? The legal framework for extracting minerals from space has been much-discussed—but congested orbits full of junk (or junk reentering the atmosphere) may not be the only space disposal concern on the horizon if projects of this size are ever seriously pursued.”

This discussion reminded me of Bethselamin (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy),

“For years, the fabulously beautiful planet of Bethselamin increased its booming tourist industry without any worries at all. Alas, as is often the case, this was an act of utter stupidity, as it led to a colossal cumulative erosion problem. Of course, what else could one expect with ten billion tourists per annum? Thus today the net balance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave; so every time you go to the lavatory there, it is vitally important to get a receipt.”

The hidden rule behind all evolution | with biologist Anjali Goswami by The Royal Institution (YouTube)

“opefully you can see that those error bars really start to encompass mass extinctions. And so the fact that we’re only in like the low, you know, 1%ish range for extinct species over the last few hundred years uh should not give anybody any comfort because uh if we don’t change our uh interactions with the species, the other species on this planet, those threatened species will push us into mass extinction territory.”

Medicine & Disease

When wildfire smoke hits home by Matt Willis (Your Local Epidemiologist)

“Wear a well-fitting N95 mask when you’re outside anytime it’s smoky. An air quality index (AQI) of 150 is a good trigger point for masking up. People in sensitive groups should consider masking at an AQI of 100 or higher.”

“AQI is generally measured outdoors, but being inside doesn’t automatically protect you.

“Air moves through gaps, doors, windows, even walls. Researchers tracking indoor and outdoor air side by side during smoke events (the “infiltration ratio”) have found that, without indoor filtration, 60% of outdoor pollution can enter indoors within hours. If the AQI is 300 outside, it can approach 200 inside without filtration.

“With proper filtration, the indoor/outdoor ratio can drop below 20%. Your indoor AQI can be below 50 on the same day the outdoor AQI is 300.”

“Weatherstripping around doors and windows makes the house less leaky and improves the inside/outside ratio. For renters, removable weatherstripping, draft snakes, or even a towel under a leaky door can help.

“[…] A box fan paired with a MERV-13 filter taped to the intake side costs a fraction of a purifier and effectively captures fine particles. It’s also fully portable, which helps if you’re renting or moving between rooms.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

National Symphony Orchestra faces calamity in Washington D.C. by Fred Mazelis (WSWS)

“Jean Davidson, who recently left her position as executive director of the NSO, was quoted by the Post as warning that the crisis was so sharp that the orchestra could cease operations. “What an international embarrassment it would be for the National Symphony Orchestra of the United States to fold—and it’s very possible that could happen,” she said. “This is an orchestra that has never played as well as it’s playing now under Gianandrea Noseda, which just makes it even more tragic.””

“Orchestras that have closed include Honolulu, Syracuse, New Mexico, San Antonio, American Youth Symphony and Boston Philharmonic. The Philadelphia Orchestra declared bankruptcy in 2011. Detroit musicians struck for six months and took a 25 percent pay cut. Minnesota locked out its musicians for 16 months. As the ongoing crisis at New York’s Metropolitan Opera shows, the crisis and rot reaches to the very top of classical music in the US.

“This in turn reflects the overall trend in culture, that of crass commercialization and moral degeneration.”

“The fight for the NSO is a fight against the same oligarchy attacking autoworkers, teachers, health care workers and federal employees. The crisis of the NSO, the Kennedy Center, and the American orchestra is not a failure of management, a problem of audience demographics, or an accident of political circumstance. It is the logical product of a system that subordinates every human need to private accumulation. American capitalism—which has produced trillion-dollar fortunes while orchestras collapse, which can fund endless war while eliminating the NEA, which builds ballrooms for oligarchs while closing concert halls—is incompatible with culture.”

Male Desire and the S*xual Politics of Modern Cinema by Like Stories of Old | Tom van der Linden (YouTube)

0:00 Can the Male Still Gaze?
3:09 Quick Note on YT Censorship
3:48 On the Male Gaze
9:24 Women Looking Back
15:50 Men Gazing Inwards
22:55 The Enigma of Desire
30:43 This Flame in Us
39:53 Politits: the Politics of, well…

Madonna's Best Dance Breaks by PopCrush (YouTube)

This is an incredible compilation. She is 68 years old in 2026. That means she was already 43 years old in 2001. Her energy is incredible. The entire choreography is breathtaking.

Wet Leg: Tiny Desk Concert by NPRMusic (YouTube)

I like ‘em thick by Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History)

“[…] rewarding the careful reader often means repelling the casual one. And this is where I would like an apology in return from my English teachers, because while this might have been obvious to them, they never made it obvious to me.

“I was presented with art and literature as if was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. ”

“Humans are mortal, for now. This means all of our actions incur opportunity costs, and so the greater the cost paid to create a work of art, the thicker it can get. There’s no guarantee this will happen, of course, and that risk is part of the thrill.

“The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.”

“Guys who work in bike shops like to joke about bicycle-shaped objects—sure, that mass-produced hunk of metal and plastic has a seat, pedals, wheels, and handlebars, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bike. When the materials are so cheap and the construction is so slapdash, it deserves another name entirely.

“This terminology comes in handy, because it turns out there are also movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects, art-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects. Just because a series of pictures flickered across the screen and the credits followed, that doesn’t mean it was a movie. Just because it’s printed out and bound in cardboard, that doesn’t mean it’s a book. There is an additional essence that is necessary to turn something from the shape of a thing into the actual thing […]”

“If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs. “Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!”

“But look around. The snobs are in full retreat. We have swung the pendulum so far toward poptimism, toward the blinkered idea that all art is equal because all humans are equal, toward the ethos that guilty pleasures are simply pleasures, that I’m not sure if we can ever swing it back.

“Erasing the line between the thick and the thin has left us defenseless against slop at the exact moment of its onslaught. Everyone can sense there’s something amiss with the prose that comes out of the machines, but we lack the language to talk about it, and so we’ve converged on the idea that slop simply means using too many em dashes, bullet points, and line breaks.

“No, what separates substance from slop is thickness. Slop holds no secrets; it signifies nothing. Under scrutiny, it evaporates. All it can offer is bottomlessness—sure, there’s nothing on, but at least there are infinite channels!”

“The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?” Which of them will people fly across the world to see? Which of them will drive people so mad they’ll major in the humanities?”
“[…] why do we have to spend so much time reading old stuff? And the answer is: this is the only stuff that we can be sure is any good. Great works of art, like successful genes, convince humans to keep passing them on. If something has survived for centuries, then there’s probably something to it. We’re not still brewing Bronze Age beer and we’re not still sailing Bronze Age ships, but we are still telling Bronze Age stories, and this warrants our attention.”

“I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!

“But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway.”

Man in a Desert by Derek Neal (3QuarksDaily)

“After the scenes of the Legionnaires’ training exercises, Denis frequently cuts to the Africans who view them from a distance, reversing the colonial image of the white, civilized man staring at the savage—here the Legionnaires are the object of study, the group whose activities can only be explained through an anthropological context, from an outside observer, because they are so unfamiliar and exotic.

“And yet, as we watch the men perform their exercises, stretching their bodies this way and that, seemingly at one with the desert landscape around them, their torsos tanned to the colour of sand and dirt, we are taken in by them, captured in aesthetic contemplation, and we feel—or at least I feel—that I too would like to participate in these exercises, to take part in what seems to be a transcendental ritual. I’m reminded of high school soccer practices, lazing around on the grass doing halfhearted stretches with my teammates, existing both separate and together, like stars in a constellation. There is little better than this feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself […]”

“[…] and then she distances us, cutting to the African observers, as if to say, you must see yourself from the outside, you must remember the colonial context of the Legion, the harm they have wrought, and the ridiculousness of these men who play at war when the enemy has long since disappeared. Denis shows us the beauty inherent in Colin’s “losing our identity” but the danger too, and it’s notable how closely Colin’s words track Susan Sontag’s characterization of fascist aesthetics in cinema, with its focus on “the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community.””
“[…] it is easy to understand that the Legion, which is a special unit of the French army allowing foreigners to enlist, is a refuge for men who need a second chance at life. The group itself is diverse; in one early scene, two men chat in Italian while fishing; later, while two Legionnaires pull laundry off the line, one teaches the other, who is Russian, the names of pieces of clothing in French; as the men sit around a table, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, their different ethnicities are apparent. ”
“[…] brings to mind another portrayal of pride and envy, that of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, when Andrei is selected to paint icons in Moscow while his fellow painter Kirill is left behind. Andrei Rublev is a film about the struggle to be an artist, and this too provides a new lens through which to see Beau Travail: the art of the Legionnaire. When Galoup says that he was “a perfect Legionnaire,” what he means is that he has elevated his performance to an art, and like any artist, he hopes to be recognized.”
“Sontag notes that Riefenstahl’s early films, before she worked directly for the Nazis creating propagandistic documentaries, centered on “Alpinism” and on some variation of mountain climbing, which could serve as “a visually irresistible metaphor for unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying, which was later to become concrete in Führer-worship.” The mountain is also “that majestic force which invites the ultimate affirmation of and escape from the self—into the brotherhood of courage and into death.””

The mountain metaphor is very popular for reporting project progress. Now I find myself wondering how subliminally referential that is.

“Claire Denis is up to something more interesting, making a film about the ideas Sontag invokes—art, beauty, courage, community—but showing how they have lost currency in the modern world, resulting in something both tragic and camp. This is perhaps the true meaning of Galoup’s suffering, that he is a perfect Legionnaire in an indifferent world.”

Weird Al' Yankovic: Tiny Desk Concert by NPRMusic (YouTube)

““Skipper Dan”
“eBay”
“Now You Know”
“The Saga Begins””

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

WHY CONTAINMENT IS NOT ENOUGH by Slavoj Žižek (ŽIŽEK GOADS AND PRODS)

“The conclusion that imposes itself is that a pause in development is not enough, because it cannot be global; it would merely widen the gap between those who effectively obey it and those who continue with development. The only solution I see is to do two things at once: to continue development and to accompany it with thinking—thinking that is more than simply gathering all the data and then analysing them.

“Thinking means reflecting on the meaning of these data and also analysing the extent to which the way we approach them is already biased. Such thinking compels us not only to focus on how to contain the threats, but also to envisage how we could change the situation that gives birth to them.”

“[…] it is not enough to contain the deadly excesses that threaten our survival. We should think about how to change capitalism’s basic coordinates without triggering a catastrophe of no lesser magnitude than the Khmer Rouge reign in Kampuchea or the regime in North Korea. This task cannot but appear impossible within the coordinates of the existing global system, but that fact makes it no less necessary.”

Fabulous — On Jason Arday by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“Nor is it only or primarily that history’s “softies” who supposed that at least some significant portion of the good of philosophy was located in the experience of inquiry and reflection itself. It was also the very hardest of the hard-nosed rationalists who supposed that it is the doing of philosophy, and not the production of philosophy’s results, that could be hoped to contribute most to human thriving. G. W. Leibniz, for example, dreamed of a day when we might outsource many of the onerous operations of the mind to machines —long division, for example, or actuarial tables—, but only so that we human beings might have more time left over for the good stuff: meditation on the good, the true, and the beautiful.”
“It is this same economy of grant-seeking, data-mongering, industrial production of “research results” that explains the enormous popularity of neo-utiltarian effective altruism — an ethical theory so simplistic, so philistine, so detached from the grand tragedy of human existence (and so painfully and obviously Anglo-American!), that its arguments really would be best left to the machines.”
“I don’t like the state of academia, at all. I think it’s overrun with small-minded number-crunching managerial types —bourgeois “etiquette feminists”, “effective altruists”, and “race-realists” all being but variations on the same underlying mentality—, and that it is positively hostile to the life of the mind and the spirit.”
“Philosophy, and humanistic inquiry more generally, must aim for truth, but they must in part do so, as Friedrich Schiller among others understood, through the free play of the imagination, which expresses itself in part in storytelling — a human capacity far more noble, and far more fabulous, than any of these various subcurrents of the “managerial humanities” will ever be able to understand.”

Look, man, I don’t know much about this guy; even Justin admits that his doings were pretty shady, even though he seemed to be pretty fun about it. You know, kind of like George Santos, who was a U.S. Senator, unlike Arday’s mere professorship. In fact, we—and especially the media—seem to be deeply comfortable with levels of fabulation that is orders of magnitude more pronounced than Arday’s, as evidenced by pretty much everything that the U.S. executive has published for decades, but especially in the last two years.

Nearly nothing that this administration says, in either official or unofficial capacity, has anything to do with reality, and yet they not only continue to serve, they are lauded for their sagacity and foresight in the media. Ukraine has almost won “its” war against Russia; Israel isn’t doing anything untoward and is in fact the victim; the U.S. is the victim in Iran’s nefarious campaign against it; China is an ever-present threat on myriad fronts; Taiwan is not part of China; AI is definitely going to pay off; the list goes on and on.

Arday was a fabulist who had his position because of fabulation. Hounding Arday specifically for this is disingenuous, is possibly even racist, because fabulation doesn’t seem to be a problem anywhere else, where the outcomes were approved, and where the ramifications were orders of magnitude greater.

Is the U.S. a Post-Literate Society? by John Ambrosio (3QuarksDaily)

“[…] the issue here is less a question of how much time U.S. adults spend reading, than of what and how they read: does their reading time consist mostly of scrolling social media on their smartphones or reading complex text?”

That’s the point that a lot of responses to this discussion miss. They equate reading of all kinds.

“When the competencies are translated into grade level reading skills they indicate that 21 percent of U.S. adults, more than one in five, read below a fifth grade level and are classified as functionally illiterate, while 54 percent function below a sixth grade reading level. This is not primarily due to immigrants with low levels of literacy proficiency: two-thirds of functionally illiterate adults in the U.S. are native born.”

This is the reality. They are ripe for manipulation of all kinds, either from scammers or from the state.

“[…] many popular books today, including those for younger readers, do not necessarily require higher order thinking skills to comprehend, so the overall number of books sold is an imperfect measure of adult literacy proficiency.”
“I experienced this firsthand as a university teacher. Students entered my classroom with the ability to decode words, but usually without the cognitive skills needed to comprehend, analyze, and synthesize complex text. As a result, I had to re-conceptualize my role as a teacher, so that the course material became a means to a different end: teaching students how to think. That is, how to distinguish between personal opinion and evidence-based arguments, how to critically assess truth claims on the basis of credible sources, verifiable evidence, and logical and coherent reasoning.”
“Trump exploits the fact that many people have become easily distracted in the digital age, constantly changing his position, then claiming that he never said what he clearly did, even when there is unambiguous evidence that contradicts his claims. But in a society dominated by digital technologies, in which images can be easily produced and manipulated, especially with the widespread use of generative A.I., video evidence can be dismissed as a fabrication.”
“[…] the digital age is perfectly suited to the simplistic emotional appeals of authoritarian demagogues like Trump, to a society in which people read, but have not developed the habits of mind and cognitive skills needed to critically assess the veracity of what they see and hear. There is no need for literate people in a world in which thinking is no longer necessary, in which the appeal of candidates is largely based on their manufactured and curated images, celebrity status, and emotional resonance, in which truth is a function of “the identity of the speaker” rather than a correspondence with objective reality.”

People don’t believe in due process anymore. They cite evidence that isn’t evidence—blurry videos in which positivie identification is rounded up to support a hypothesis—and then wonder why we even need a court case.

“Has sustained exposure to electronic and digital technology, compounded over many decades, conditioned people to be passive consumers of information? Has it eroded their interest in, and capacity for, higher order thinking and made them more susceptible to uncritically absorbing authoritarian propaganda? Has the expectation that “all subject matter be presented as entertainment” made it more difficult for many U.S. adults to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality TV and real life?”

People tend not to question the veracity or reality of information that is very clearly being presented not for its truth but for its virality or profitability. They cite “sources” that have no clear dedication to honesty or lack of ideological focus.

“While people can develop these skills in noneducational settings and in a mostly oral culture, they are much less likely to do so. But when the lived experience and material reality of people is inconsistent with the narratives they uncritically absorb, it can lead them to think differently and make different political choices.”

”What Radicalized You?” by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet? Seriously, how is that possible? How have you successfully managed to avoid conversion to a radical political worldview despite everything you are seeing right in front of your eyes?”

“Because to the rest of us, that shit looks like a goddamn magic trick. It looks like a superhuman feat of willpower to continue believing everything’s basically okay and our leaders will sort this all out for us if we just vote for the correct plutocratic meat puppet in the next election. You’re just chilling out while everything burns, like that Buddhist monk sitting calmly in meditation after setting himself on fire. How are you even doing that?”

Technology & Engineering

How do submarines know where they are? (YouTube)

A “fiber-optic gyroscope” and an “accelerometer”.

As demand for Meta AI glasses explodes, it’s harder to avoid creepy recordings by Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)

This article reads more like a press release for Meta—it’s not clear that the word “explodes” is to be interpreted as intended—but the comments and information are pretty good. People are already recording all the time with phones; it’s unclear how much worse it is with glasses, or how prevalent the glasses actually are. I imagine that the numbers have gone up in San Fransisco but probably nowhere else.

LLMs & AI

Practical Loop Engineering by Addy Osmani (Elevate)

“And as we’ve tried to see what patterns, what aspects of loop engineering are now a little bit more baked, I think we have a clearer idea of how you babysit it. I can now largely rely on the output of the primitives in Claude Code and Codex. We’ve come a little way. But at the same time, you need to be very diligent, because loop engineering where you kind of leave it sitting alone, and you haven’t really thought about whether the end goal or the constraints have been well defined, can leave you in a problematic state. This is why there’s nuance when deciding to use it for an evergreen codebase without users or as much historical complexity vs. say a brownfield bank codebase.”

He meant to write “greenfield” not “evergreen”, which is a bizarre mistake to make for someone otherwise seemingly well-versed in the vernacular of software engineering.

But it’s the highlighted phrase that is interesting because of the impression that the author gives that it’s … revelatory. The loop only works when you have a precisely defined end goal, presumably defined in a form that can actually work with the agent. This is no different than when doing any other task. These poor fools seem to be unaware that they are speed-running the development of project management, long after generations of people had already learned the same lessons. They think it’s an amazing admission that perhaps the LLMs won’t work if you don’t give them an end-conditions. It’s like trying to run git bisect without a test suite.

The rest of the article continues to express a faith in prose instructions being interpreted in as ironclad a manner as deterministic instructions formulated in “programming languages”.

—
name: verify-frontend-change
description: Verify any UI change end-to-end before declaring it done.
—
# Verifying frontend changes
Never report a UI change as complete based on a successful edit alone.
Verify it the way a human reviewer would:
1. Start the dev server and open the edited page in the browser.
2. Interact with the change directly. For a new control (button, input,
   toggle): click it, confirm the expected state change, and screenshot
   before/after.
3. Check the browser console: zero new errors or warnings.
4. Use the Chrome Devtools MCP, run a performance trace and audit
   Core Web Vitals.
If any step fails, fix the issue and rerun from step 1 − do not hand
back partially verified work.

Look at how hopeful that is! And imagine the artifacts you can expect from it. A developer who worked like this would be chided for not producing any tests, for not working with the view model properly, right? The code will have a new control in it that an LLM “interacted” with as proof that it works. What artifacts do you have to prove the continued functioning of the button? Nothing. This is not the way you should be developing code. We stopped developing code like this decades ago. That’s why we developed MVVM and similar architectural patterns: so we could test the logic of UIs without actually manipulating the UIs.

But the instructions above, were they to be interpreted as written by an LLM—which is not certain, despite the faith of so many developers—don’t ask for any testing artifacts. They just ask for the new control and that the LLM opens the page in a browser and interacts with it. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

And just look at how else these people are working,

“[…] if you don’t have a clear idea of what the end-state/done/good means for your completion, it may not be the right pattern for your work. For example, a vague goal would be “keep going until this UI design is good”. What does that mean? Good to who? How is it being evaluated? Tasks that require human taste, subjective design, or open-ended creative exploration aren’t a good fit.”

In what world is it OK for a serious professional to think in terms like that? Shouldn’t the developer be designing to a style guide instead of talking about a “good” UI? Unless the person is developing a style guide, in which case using an LLM would be silly, since you’re just going to get the same style guides that already exist, so you might as well just use one of those. By style guide, I don’t just mean fonts, color swatches, paddings, and responsive breakpoints; I mean UX instructions that describe how to handle situations like presenting a lot of tabular data, or manipulating multiple entities.

Born on technology’s third base by Cory Doctorow (Pluralistic)

“By the same token, continuing to give trillions to AI companies because they experienced early success with theory-free inference at scale tells us nothing about how to solve the vast range of problems that theory-free inference at scale sucks at. Doubling down on AI to overcome its increasingly obvious limitations is like doubling down on building post-war suburbs to fix today’s housing market.”

Programming

Dumb macros by Austin Jones (Austin's Journey for Meaning)

“[…] we don’t even have any idea of a “macro” in the interpreter at this point. We only have delayed execution and homoiconicity.”
“[…] let’s define a function that will generate this nesting of ifs for us.”
(define else #t)
(define (cond pairs)
    (if (null? pairs)
      '()
      (list 'if (car (car pairs))
            (cadr (car pairs))
            (cond (cdr pairs)))))
“For as long is pairs has something in it, this function will nest it into an if. It is used thusly:”
(define (dig-word num)
    (eval (cond '(
        ((= 1 num) 'one)
        ((= 2 num) 'two)
        ((= 3 num) 'three)
        ((= 4 num) 'four)
        ((= 5 num) 'five)
        ((= 6 num) 'six)
        ((= 7 num) 'seven)
        ((= 8 num) 'eight)
        ((= 9 num) 'nine)
        ((= 0 num) 'zero)
        (else 'too-big)))))
“Again, with no idea of what a macro is, we are meta-programming. This is just the beginning: macros, DSLs, frameworks, etc. can be wrought with these simple tools.”
“With Lisps, macros are more than first class citizens. They are natural ways to make programs function. This level of naturalness means that meta-programming is always on the tool belt and not just for the wizards.”
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