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Links and Notes for Marco 17th, 2023

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<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft>Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/03/the-next-bomb-to-go-off-in-the-banking-crisis-will-be-derivatives/" source="Wall Street on Parade" author="Pam and Russ Martens">The Next Bomb to Go Off in the Banking Crisis Will Be Derivatives</a> <bq>If the U.S. Treasury Secretary and her staff at F-SOC were just yesterday getting around to finding out which U.S. banks had counterparty exposure to Credit Suisse’s derivatives, we are all in very big trouble. The serious problems at Credit Suisse have been making headlines for two years,</bq> <bq>The U.S. has a largely ineffective regulatory framework with gaping loopholes that fail to include some of even the most basic safety and soundness requirements, which incentivizes regulatory arbitrage. As a result, the U.S. financial system and economy are needlessly threatened.</bq> <bq>“For banks headquartered outside the United States, dollar debt from these instruments is estimated at $39 trillion, more than double their on-balance sheet dollar debt and more than 10 times their capital.” Their on-balance sheet dollar debt is $15 trillion.</bq> <bq>The total notional amount for all banks was $195 trillion. JPMorgan Chase held $54.3 trillion of that; Goldman Sachs held $50.97 trillion; Citigroup’s Citibank held $46 trillion; and Bank of America held $21.6 trillion. Even though the Dodd-Frank legislation required that most of these derivative trades move to central clearing, as of September 30, 2022 the OCC report found that 58.3 percent of these derivatives were not being centrally-cleared, meaning they were over-the-counter (OTC) private contracts between counterparties, thus adding another layer of opacity to an unaccountable system.</bq> <bq>Credit Suisse’s share price plunged 28% in the biggest one-day selloff on record, leaving it down more than 75% over the past year. Its bonds fell to levels that signal deep financial distress, with securities due in 2026 dropping 17.75 cents to 70 cents on the dollar in New York. That puts their yield at about 20 percentage points above US Treasuries,</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-15/silicon-valley-bank-is-for-sale" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Silicon Valley Bank Is For Sale</a> <bq>Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government in 2008, they are still under government control, and I delight in pointing out periodically that that is never ever going to change because no one wants it to. What if SVB ends up like that?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-14/svb-took-the-wrong-risks" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">SVB Took the Wrong Risks</a> <bq>“in late 2020, the firm’s asset-liability committee received an internal recommendation to buy shorter-term bonds as more deposits flowed in,” to reduce its duration risk, but that would have reduced earnings, and so “executives balked” and “continued to plow cash into higher-yielding assets.” They took imprudent duration risk, ignored objections, and it blew them up.</bq> <bq>A more complicated answer would be that they took duration risk, as banks generally do, but their real sin was having a concentrated set of depositors who were uninsured, quick-moving, well-informed, herd-like and very rates-sensitive in their own businesses: If all of your money is demand deposits from tech startups who will withdraw it at the slightest sign of trouble and/or higher rates, you should not be investing it in long-term bonds.</bq> <bq>But I think the modern bank-regulatory view is that the point of a bank deposit is that you shouldn’t have to worry about it, and that it is a failure of bank regulation if depositors of any size have “to actually give a moment’s thought to the riskiness” of a bank. (Bank deposits are meant to be “ information insensitive.”)</bq> Then why the the fuck is there even an FDIC limit? Oh, it's for the poors, or non-elite millionaires. <bq>The government says to banks “look, we all understand that you are effectively making bets with government money, so we are going to keep a close eye on the bets you are making to prevent you from losing our money.”</bq> <bq>The modern view that bank deposits should be safe and information-insensitive kind of goes along with a modern view that banks are public-private partnerships, that a bank is sort of a business partner with the government in taking deposits and providing credit, and that the way the partnership works is that the bank’s executives make the day-to-day decisions but the government has a lot of input into and oversight over those decisions.</bq> And the upside is ever and always private, of course. <bq>But I wonder if future banking supervision will be more sensitive to things like industry diversification among depositors, or the volatility of depositors’ industries. If all of your depositors are in the same line of business, and if they are sometimes flush with cash and sometimes broke, then your bank is riskier.</bq> <bq>I guess that is the tension now. Bank regulators want depositors to feel like they are not taking a risk by keeping their money in the bank. They want the banks and their shareholders not to take risks with those depositors’ money. But they do still want shareholders to take the risk of owning bank stock.</bq> Yeah, no idea why this is a necessary part of the system anymore. Fuck the profit motive. We are bending over backwards to preserve it here, but it only gets in the way and increases risks. <bq>SVB’s executives are out of their jobs and their shares are zeroed, which is a good warning to other risk-loving bank executives. But several of them sold stock just before the failure, so they are not really zeroed, and you can see how that would rub people the wrong way. My own impression is that this is unlikely to be insider trading: SVB’s balance-sheet problems were disclosed and known weeks ago, and I gather that SVB’s executives were as surprised as anyone else by the run last week. But, still, it doesn’t look great.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-16/credit-suisse-puts-on-a-brave-face" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Credit Suisse Puts On a Brave Face</a> <bq>Credit Suisse posted a net loss of CHF 7.3 billion last year. If its short-term debt rallies enough that it is no longer able to buy back its one-month bonds at a 19% yield, that means that its one-month debt is no longer trading at a 19% yield. That’s way better than saving $70 million! Global banks live or die by their access to credit markets, and they don’t live all that long if their debt trades at distressed levels.</bq> <bq>[...] basically this stock is trading at pretty depressed prices because of worries about the bank going under. If they raise two yards of capital, those fears will be allayed, and the stock might rip back up. You could multiply your investment in a week. If they don’t get a deal done, I am sorry, but the very highly publicized recent precedent is that the stock goes to zero in a day.</bq> These are banks we're talking about. There's something generally rotten when there's this much volatility in this core space. <bq>For all its problems, Credit Suisse does not have those problems. “Credit Suisse has plenty of capital, no looming losses from bad assets and more than enough liquidity to meet withdrawals,” notes my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Paul Davies. Any panic about Credit Suisse does seem to be contagion from the US rather than something fundamental to the bank itself.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=95102" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Credit-Suisse-Turbulenzen – die Bankenkrise erreicht Europa</a> <bq>[...] werden es die Eidgenossen nicht kommen lassen. Wie hoch die Rechnung für die Schweizer Steuerzahler ausfallen wird, ist ungewiss. Vielleicht sind die goldenen Zeiten der reichen Alpenrepublik bald vorbei.</bq> Jesus. Slow your roll buddy. <bq>Es ist fraglich, ob der Finanzplatz Zürich mit dem Verschwinden der Großbank Credit Suisse seine Rolle wird behalten können und was es für die Schweiz bedeutet, wenn die stetigen Finanzströme zum Stillstand kommen. Nur mit Emmentaler, Schoggi und Rolex wird die Schweiz ihren extrem hohen Lebensstandard jedenfalls nicht halten können.</bq> He's almost fucking gleeful. I'm a bit surprised at this venom from the normally balanced Jens Berger. Jealousy is rarely attractive. Schadenfreude indeed. <bq>Ein heißer Tipp wäre ja die zweite Skandalnudel im europäischen Finanzwesen – die Deutsche Bank. Auch hier haben sich über Jahrzehnte Zockermentalität, mangelndes Risikomanagement und fehlende Kontrolle durch die Politik zu einer gefährlichen Melange vereint. Christian Lindner sollte sich schon mal anschnallen.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/15/why-the-bank-crisis-isnt-over/" source="CounterPunch" author="Michale Hudson">Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over</a> <bq>The problem at that time was crooked banks making bad mortgage loans. Debtors were unable to pay and were defaulting, and it turned out that the real estate that they had pledged as collateral was fraudulently overvalued, “mark-to-fantasy” junk mortgages made by false valuations of the property’s actual market price and the borrower’s income.</bq> <bq>The problem is the financial system itself, or rather, the corner into which the post-Obama Fed has painted the banking system. It cannot escape from its 13 years of Quantitative Easing without reversing the asset-price inflation and causing bonds, stocks and real estate to lower their market value.</bq> <bq>The interest yield on bonds and mortgages bought a few years ago is much lower than is available on new mortgages and new Treasury notes and bonds. When interest rates rise, these “old securities” fall in price so as to bring their yield to new buyers in line with the Fed’s rising interest rates.</bq> <bq>The public has just discovered that the statistical picture that banks report about their assets and liabilities does not reflect market reality. Bank accountants are allowed to price their assets at “book value” based on the price that was paid to acquire them – without regard for what these investments are worth today.</bq> <bq>When interest rates rise and bond prices fall, stock prices tend to follow. But banks don’t have to mark down the market price of their assets to reflect this decline if they simply hold on to their bonds or packaged mortgages. They only have to reveal the loss in market value if depositors on balance withdraw their money and the bank actually has to sell these assets to raise the cash to pay their depositors.</bq> <bq>Mr. Powell announced that not enough American workers were unemployed to hold down their wage gains, so he planned to raise interest rates even more than he had expected. He said that a serious recession was needed to keep wages low enough to keep U.S. corporate profits high, and hence their stock price.</bq> <bq>This was not a “run on the banks” resulting from fears of insolvency. It was because banks were strong enough monopolies to avoid sharing their rising earnings with their depositors. They were making soaring profits on the rates they charge borrowers and the rates yielded by their investments. But they continued to pay depositors only about 0.2%.</bq> <bq>on March 14, Moody’s rating agency cut the outlook for the U.S. banking system from stable to negative, citing the “rapidly changing operating environment.” What they are referring to is the plunge in the ability of bank reserves to cover what they owed to their depositors, who were withdrawing their money and forcing the banks to sell securities at a loss.</bq> <bq>It does not involve money creation or a budget deficit, any more than the Fed’s $9 trillion in Quantitative Easing for the banks since 2008 has been money creation or increased the budget deficit. It is a balance-sheet exercise – technically a kind of “swap” with offsets of good Federal Reserve credit for “bad” bank securities pledged as collateral – way above current market pricing, to be sure. That is precisely what “rescued” the banks after 2009. Federal credit was created without taxation.</bq> What happens to those bad assets? <bq>SVB’s business is not home-mortgage lending. It is lending to high-tech private equity entities being prepared for IPOs – to be issued at high prices, talked up, and then often left to fall in a pump and dump game. Bank officials or examiners who recognize this problem are disqualified from employment by being “over-qualified.”</bq> <bq>During the meetings between the Fed, the FDIC and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, venture capitalists, who formed much of the client base of SVB, intervened heavily and played the military card. One anonymous source involved in the lobbying campaign, cited by the Financial Times (FT), said the theme of their pitch was “this is not a bank.” “This is the innovation economy. This is the US versus China. You can’t kill these innovative companies.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/15/rvnl-m15.html" source="WSWS" author="Nick Beams">SVB collapse exposes deep problems in US financial system</a> <bq>According to research undertaken by economists from five major universities and reported on by the FT under the headline “The US bank system is more fragile than you’d think,” the problems that hit SVB are present on a wide scale. The study found that with the rise in interest rates, “the US banking system’s market value of assets is $2 trillion lower than suggested by their book value of assets.”</bq> Echoes of Michael Hudson. <bq>“If market participants are wringing their hands over the potential fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, just wait until they look at the banking industry’s exposure to the rapidly weakening commercial real estate sector,” he wrote.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/15/infl-m15.html" source="WSWS" author="Tom Hall">February marks 23rd straight month of real wages decline for US workers</a> <bq>[...] the United Auto Workers rammed through a contract containing a measly 19 percent pay increase over six years at heavy equipment manufacture Caterpillar. With inflation at 6 percent, workers could experience a cut in real pay of up to 20 percent by 2029.</bq> Six years to negotiate. Retroactive pay? Shouldn't there just be an automatic cost-of-living pay increase, to avoid wasteful renegotiations? This system is basically non-functional. They have a union, but it barely works. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/14/svb-was-donald-trumps-bailout/" source="CounterPunch" author="Dean Baker">SVB Was Donald Trump's Bailout</a> <bq>[...] the people who held large uninsured deposits at SVB apparently decided that it was better, for whatever reason, to expose themselves to the risk by keeping these deposits at SVB, than adjusting their finances in a way that would have kept their money better protected. This would have meant either parking their deposits at a larger bank, that was subject to more careful scrutiny by regulators, or adjusting their assets so that they were not so exposed to a single bank. They also could have taken ten minutes to examine SVB’s financial situation, which was mostly a matter of public record</bq> <bq>[...] the bank’s large depositors chose to expose themselves to serious risk. When their bet turned out badly, in effect they wanted the government to provide the insurance that they did not pay for.</bq> <bq>What happened in 2018 was effectively allowing SVB to still benefit from insurance without having to pay for it. It is comparable to telling drivers that they don’t have to buy auto insurance, but will still be covered if they are in an accident. Or, perhaps a better example would be telling a restaurant that it is covered by fire insurance, but it doesn’t have to adhere to safety standards. It is dishonest to describe this as “deregulation.” It is the government giving a subsidy to the banks in question. It is understandable that the banks prefer to describe their subsidy as deregulation, but it is not accurate.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=95001" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Die US-Bankenkrise ist eine direkte Folge der Leitzinserhöhungen und auch Deutschlands Finanzsystem ist alles andere als sicher</a> <bq>Heißt es nicht, Staatsanleihen großer Industriestaaten wie der USA und auch Deutschlands seien eine der sichersten Anlageformen überhaupt? Das sind sie auch. Voraussetzung ist jedoch, dass man sie bis zum Ende der Laufzeit hält. Dann bekommt man den Nennwert sehr sicher ausgezahlt und während der Laufzeit wird man auch mit sehr großer Sicherheit die Zinsen (Kupon) ausgezahlt bekommen. Was – wie wir an diesem Beispiel sehen – jedoch alles andere als sicher ist, ist der Kurswert der entsprechenden Anleihen. Dummerweise haben viele Anleger, vor allem Banken, dies offenbar nicht verstanden.</bq> <bq>Papiere, die bis zum Auslaufen gehalten werden, müssen nicht zu Marktpreisen bilanziert werden. Das ist für bestimmte Anleger, wie beispielsweise Lebensversicherungen oder Pensionsfonds ja auch sinnvoll – ansonsten wäre heute jeder Pensionsfonds bankrott, da er die niedrigeren Kurswerte der gehaltenen Anleihen als Verluste ausweisen müsste.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-10/startup-bank-had-a-startup-bank-run" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Startup Bank Had a Startup Bank Run</a> <bq>When interest rates are low everywhere, a dollar in 20 years is about as good as a dollar today, so a startup whose business model is “we will lose money for a decade building artificial intelligence, and then rake in lots of money in the far future” sounds pretty good. When interest rates are higher, a dollar today is better than a dollar tomorrow, so investors want cash flows. When interest rates were low for a long time, and suddenly become high, all the money that was rushing to your customers is suddenly cut off. Your clients who were “obtaining liquidity through liquidity events, such as IPOs, secondary offerings, SPAC fundraising, venture capital investments, acquisitions and other fundraising activities” stop doing that. Your customers keep taking money out of the bank to pay rent and salaries, but they stop depositing new money.</bq> Also they get better rates in short-term government bonds than from a bank account. The free ride continues, but in another form. <bq>Both crypto and venture capital booms were children of the ultra-low rates of the past decade and a half. Now, rising rates and the shrinking of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet have burst those industry bubbles and increased the competition among banks for funding.</bq> <bq>Your customers were flush with cash, so they gave you all that cash, but they didn’t need loans so you invested all that cash in longer-dated fixed-income securities, which lost value when rates went up. But also, when rates went up, your customers all got smoked, because it turned out that they were creatures of low interest rates, and in a higher-interest-rate environment they didn’t have money anymore. So they withdrew their deposits, so you had to sell those securities at a loss to pay them back. Now you have lost money and look financially shaky, so customers get spooked and withdraw more money, so you sell more securities, so you book more losses, oops oops oops.</bq> <bq>[...] if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/13/why-the-banking-system-is-breaking-up/" source="CounterPunch" author="Michael Hudson">Why the Banking System is Breaking Up</a> <bq>The popular impression was that crypto provided an alternative to commercial banks and “fiat currency.” But what could crypto funds invest in to back their coin purchases, if not bank deposits and government securities or private stocks and bonds? What is crypto, ultimately, if not simply a mutual fund with secrecy of ownership to protect money launderers?</bq> <bq>There is an even larger elephant in the room: derivatives. Volatility increased last Thursday and Friday. The turmoil has reached vast magnitudes beyond what characterized the 2008 crash of AIG and other speculators. Today, JP Morgan Chase and other New York banks have tens of trillions of dollar valuations of derivatives – casino bets on which way interest rates, bond prices, stock prices and other measures will change.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-13/svb-couldn-t-ignore-its-losses-but-the-fed-can" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">SVB Couldn’t Ignore Its Losses, But the Fed Can</a> <bq>This is not, however, the biggest problem with borrowing short to lend long. The biggest problem is that your depositors might all ask for their money back tomorrow, and you might not be able to get the money back from your borrowers for years.</bq> <bq>[...] you can borrow against your assets: You can go to a bigger bank, or to a lender of last resort like the Federal Reserve, or a “ lender of next-to-last resort ” like the Federal Home Loan Banks, and borrow the cash to pay out depositors. And as collateral for that loan to you, you post your assets, the bonds you own or the loans you made to your customers. This is the most classic way to deal with bank runs, and is famous from Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street.</bq> <bq>The crude intuitive math is that a new market-rate loan would pay $5 of interest per year for 5 years ($25 total), while your loan pays $2 of interest for 5 years ($10 total), so it is worth about $15 less, so people would pay you about $85 for it, though you’d get fired at a bank for doing bond math like that. (Really they’d pay you about $87.)</bq> <bq>If you are a bank that borrowed short to lend long, and rates go up, your portfolio of long-dated assets represents an opportunity cost over time: Instead of earning 5% on your loans, you’re stuck earning 2%. But if you have to sell those assets, you turn that opportunity cost into a cash loss today. You pull the losses forward in time and take them all now.</bq> <bq>[...] banks do like accounting for assets at cost, and so they are allowed to designate bonds as “held to maturity” — meaning that they have no plans to sell them — and account for them at cost. (But then if they sell any of their held-to-maturity bonds, they need to reclassify all of them as “available for sale” and account for them at fair market value, which could mean taking a huge loss all at once.)</bq> <bq>[...] the Fed is a lender of last resort, and its main job is to lend you money so that you don’t have to sell your assets too hastily. Lending against the market value is kind of the same thing as making you sell your assets: You can only borrow what you’d get by selling them today, not what they’ll eventually pay out. It speeds things up just like selling them would, and the Fed’s job is to give you more time.</bq> <bq>One way to think of this is that US banks — especially SVB, but not only SVB — have had huge mark-to-market losses on their bond portfolios as interest rates go up, but it is traditional for banks to ignore those losses. In traditional banking, rising interest rates are a matter of opportunity costs and net interest margin, not of large mark-to-market losses.</bq> <bq>The service that the Fed is providing to the banking system here is ignoring that rates went up when it values banks’ bonds. That service is incredibly valuable. Historically banks’ retail depositors provided it, but now only the Fed can.</bq> <bq>BTFP is not a perpetual program to let banks ignore mark-to-market accounting forever: It is a way for banks to roll off their existing portfolios of Treasuries that have lost value in the current rate-hiking cycle, to transition to a steady state where (you hope!) banks are less at risk from interest-rate increases.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/17/obwo-m17.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Wall Street banks organise a bailout operation as financial crisis deepens</a> <bq>The FDIC’s action in guaranteeing the deposits of businesses and wealthy individuals at SVB and Signature, those holding more than $250,000, has drawn the anger of financial regulators elsewhere, particularly in Europe. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that European financial regulators were “furious” over the handling of SVB, stating US authorities had torn up the rule book, which they had helped to write. “One senior eurozone official described their shock as the ‘total and utter incompetence’ of US authorities, particularly after a decade and a half of ‘long and boring meetings’ with Americans advocating an end to bailouts,” the FT reported. Another European regulator, cited by the FT, said at the end of the day the SVB was “a bailout paid for by ordinary people and it’s a bailout of the rich venture capitalists which is really wrong.” One example is the case of Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who had $50 million deposited at SVB when it went under.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/17/this-is-fascism-svb-bailout-edition/" author="Rob Urie" source="CounterPunch">This is Fascism, SVB Bailout Edition</a> <bq>[...] without a bailout, the insured depositors in SVB would have gotten all of their money back and uninsured depositors would have received about 90 cents / dollar. This seems like a small price to pay to instill basic due diligence in financial dealings. But those who would have paid the small price are 1) connected through the power of Big Tech and 2) the future ‘innovators’ and ‘disruptors’ that the American state is counting on to surveil and control the rest of the world.</bq> <bq>The point is being made by defenders of the recent bailouts that SVB rendered itself insolvent while putting bank assets into ‘safe’ investments. In fact, the long-dated treasury bonds it reportedly held rise or fall in value inversely to changes in interest rates. While this may seem technical to readers, managing interest rate risk is one of the most basic functions of managing a bank. Was SVB management gambling on the direction of interest rates with a ‘bet’ large enough to sink the bank, this is evidence of both gross incompetence and regulatory failure.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/11u7jer/sums_it_up/" author="justapexclips" source="Reddit">Sums it up</a> <img src="{att_link}y8i999zocfoa1.jpg" href="{att_link}y8i999zocfoa1.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/21/qmph-m21.html" author="Peter Schwarz" source="WSWS">Credit Suisse and the power of money</a> <bq>The takeover of its competitor promises to be a lucrative business for UBS. It paid 3 billion francs in shares for the bank with a balance sheet total of 531 billion francs, which was still worth 7.4 billion francs at the time of the deal. 22.5 CS shares were exchanged for 1 UBS share. Nevertheless, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the Federal Government covered the risks of the merger with more than CHF 200 billion in public funds. By way of comparison, the Swiss federal budget will amount to around 80 billion Swiss francs in 2023. The SNB provided extraordinary liquidity assistance totalling CHF 200 billion, of which CHF 100 billion is secured by the Confederation. An additional CHF 9 billion in guarantees to UBS for any losses resulting from the acquisition of certain business units of CS have also been provided.</bq> <bq>There was not a word about how this devastating crisis came about. Not a word about who is responsible. Not a word why, 15 years after the 2008 financial crisis, after politicians vowed to regulate the financial sector and curtail banks that are “too big to fail,” the exact opposite is happening. Indeed, the Credit Suisse crisis is the initial culmination of a development in which the financial elites have shamelessly enriched themselves at the expense of the majority and governments and central banks have pumped huge sums into the financial markets. The rise in key interest rates by central banks is now causing the financial bubble to burst. The crisis is an expression of the impasse of the capitalist system, which subordinates all areas of society to the accumulation of profit.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/21/fxhr-m21.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Pressure grows on another US bank amid controversy over Credit Suisse takeover</a> <bq>[...] in the takeover of Credit Suisse, the Swiss National Bank declared that holders of $17 billion worth of so-called additional tier ones (AT1s) would get zero. The AT1s are a variant of contingent convertible bonds, known as cocos, which were introduced after the 2008 crisis in which debt could be converted into equity. The pecking order in the event of liquidation was that shareholders would be wiped out first, followed by cocos and then senior creditors. In return for increased risks, the holders of the coco bonds were paid a higher rate of interest. However, in the takeover of Credit Suisse these rules were overturned. While equity holders may get something, AT1 holders will get nothing.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/22/regulation-is-not-a-mantra/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Regulation is Not a Mantra</a> <bq>How could a stress test not consider interest rate risk? I recalled the stress tests that the Fed and Treasury performed very publicly in March of 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis. These tests did not consider interest rate risk for the simple reason that, at that point in time, soaring interest rates seemed about as likely as a Martian invasion.</bq> <bq>[...] the bank had well over 90 percent of its liabilities in uninsured deposits. That has to be a red flag to any bank regulator. These are the deposits that are more likely to run in a crisis since insured deposits have no reason to flee. Also, most banks have more of their liabilities in the form of bonds or other fixed-term debt that cannot run.</bq> <bq>The fact that the bank’s customers were highly concentrated in a single industry, the tech sector, also should have been a red flag. This is especially the case because tech has a long history of being a boom-bust industry. Third, the bank’s assets had nearly tripled in size from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2021. Again, any regulator with some clear eyes should have been asking if SVB was doing anything risky to bring about such extraordinary growth. As an old line goes, they should use their University of Chicago common sense: “if what we’re doing is not risky, why is the good lord being so nice to us?”</bq> <bq>To my view, while we need government regulators in many circumstances, the most important part of the story is to structure the market to get the incentives right. That is why I have argued for a system where the Fed gives everyone an account which they can use for getting their paychecks, paying their bills, and other transactions.</bq> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012348306" source="Antiwar.com" author="Michael Klare">Is a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Imminent?</a> <bq>In such a take-it-slow approach surely lies a recognition that military action against Taiwan could prove a disaster for China. But whatever the reasoning behind such planning, it appears that Chinese leaders are prepared to invest massive resources in persuading the Taiwanese that reunification is in their best interests.</bq> <bq>It’s certainly possible, in other words, that Xi and his top lieutenants are prepared to invade at the earliest sign of a drive towards independence by Taiwan’s leaders, as many U.S. officials claim. But there’s no evidence in the public realm to sustain such an assessment and all practical military analysis suggests that such an endeavor would prove suicidal. In other words — though you’d never know it in today’s frenzied Washington environment — concluding that an invasion is not likely under current circumstances is all too reasonable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012348292" source="Antiwar.com" author="Ted Snider">China Brokers Agreement Between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Sidelining the US</a> <bq>Both the Iranian and Saudi statements following their new agreement acknowledged those talks and thanked Iraq and Oman for their efforts and for hosting them. But it was China that brought them to the table, enabled the breakthrough and accomplished the agreement. "The two sides," the Saudi statement said, "expressed their appreciation and gratitude to the leadership and government of the People’s Republic of China for hosting and sponsoring the talks, and the efforts it placed towards its success." Iran’s statement expressed similar gratitude.</bq> <bq>The Chinese brokered agreement represents a seismic realignment in the Middle East. At the core of much of the conflict and strife in the Middle East has been the enmity and rivalry between Sunni and Shiite camps. And at the head of those camps are Saudi Arabia and Iran. A peace agreement between them could have massive implications for peace, trade and realignments in the region.</bq> <bq>Whatever the complex motives may be, the Saudi signing of a peace agreement with Iran is a significant realignment of the region that could have significant consequences for peace and stability. That it was China that brokered the agreement is a significant shuffling of major power roles that could have significant consequences globally.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/14/patrick-lawrence-chinas-great-leap-in-the-middle-east/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">China's Great Leap in the Middle East</a> <bq>The intent shared by all three signatories to this accord is not revenge or spite, or ridicule. It is remedy. It reflects a shared judgment that the disorder of the rules-based order has got out of hand and must be superseded with mounting urgency.</bq> <bq>I hear the sound of one hand clapping as the Biden regime pretends to applaud this new entente. And as could easily be anticipated, Washington officials and think tank inhabitants have it that Beijing’s diplomatic triumph is something just north of a shrug. This is what they do when they cannot bear looking at what the 21st century has in store. They flinch. They haven’t, after all, got any noninterference or respect for sovereignty to sell in the Middle East. Only their opposites, and the market for these just took a precipitous drop.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/14/saudi-iran-deal-a-possible-us-suez-moment/" source="Scheer Post" author="As`ad AbuKhalil">Saudi-Iran Deal a Possible US ‘Suez Moment’</a> <bq>The U.S. stood up to Britain, France and Israel who combined to attack Egypt after its leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The event is seen as the final act of the British Empire before joining the more powerful U.S. imperium.</bq> And people today still deny that the U.S. is an empire. "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he doesn't exist." <hr> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/12/academic-journal-maidan-massacre/" source="The Grayzone" author="Kit Klarenberg">'Rigorous' Maidan massacre exposé suppressed by top academic journal</a> <bq>The open source evidence collected by Katchanovski persuasively supports his conclusion that the Maidan massacre “was a successful false flag operation organized and conducted by elements of the Maidan leadership and concealed groups of snipers in order to overthrow the government and seize power in Ukraine.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/ukraines-death-by-proxy" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Ukraine’s Death by Proxy</a> <bq>This is an old and predictable game. It leaves in its wake nations in ruins and millions of people dead and displaced. It fuels the hubris and self-delusion of the mandarins in Washington who refuse to accept the emergence of a multipolar world. If left unchecked, this “game of nations” may get us all killed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/24/macrons-denial-of-democracy/" author="Philippe Marlière" source="CounterPunch">Macron’s Denial of Democracy</a> <bq>The idea of retirement as a real ‘third age’ is deeply ingrained across social classes and generations, irrespective of people’s political leanings. The French received wisdom is that for pension age to be a real ‘third age’, workers should retire when they are still in good health to at least enjoy a decade of meaningful activities. Surveys have shown that retirement tends to lead to better health, less depression, and a decrease in healthcare consumption.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/womens-equality-when-zakaria" source="The Baffler" author="Rafia Zakaria">Women’s Equality—When?</a> <bq>Women had to turn to the court of public opinion at that time because the men in question had inveigled themselves so deeply into the power machinery that removing them by following procedures was not a realistic option.</bq> Sure, sure. Vigilantism is ok for thee but not for me. We don't need evidence because we know he did it. That's going to blow back, of course. <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/03/the-divided-dial-examines-how-right-wing-radio-spreads-misinformation.html" author="Azra Raza" source="3 Quarks Daily">‘The Divided Dial’ Examines How Right-Wing Radio Spreads Misinformation</a> <bq>From NPR: A recent podcast series digs into the beginnings of conservative talk radio and tracks its rise. NPR’s Steve Inskeep talks to Katie Thornton, the host of “The Divided Dial.”</bq> <iq>From NPR</iq> ... 'nuff said. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/congress-calls-tiktok-ceos-security-and-privacy-assurances-worthless/" author="Ashley Belanger" source="Ars Technica">TikTok CEO fails to convince Congress that the app is not a “weapon” for China</a> You might as well have written, <iq>TikTok CEO fails to convince Congress not to roll around on a dead squirrel.</iq> There is no "convincing" Congress when the whole purpose is to justify their upcoming decision to ban TikTok. <bq>Things got personal for Chew—who lives in Singapore, not China—when Congress members pressured him to disclose his own connections to the CCP, which he repeatedly evaded. He reminded the committee that his testimony was exclusively about TikTok. He also consistently resisted responding to several committee members asking if he condemned Chinese human rights abuses against a Turkish ethnic minority in China, the Uyghurs. “You have absolutely tied yourself in knots to avoid criticizing CCP’s treatment of Uyghurs,” Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) told Chew.</bq> A typical, bullshit, kangaroo-court affair. He's there to discuss TikTok's impact on U.S. security, but has to first deliver loyalty oaths to U.S. elites' bizarre palette of conspiracy theories and their hobby horses du jour. I'm surprised they didn't ask him to sign a paper attesting that he doesn't believe the 2020 election had been stolen. <bq>During the hearing, Congress members referenced various bills that could force TikTok to change how it operates. Some members asked Chew if TikTok would commit to meeting their bills' requirements before laws were passed. For the most part, Chew evaded these requests.</bq> "Hey, here's a pile of paper from the empire with a bunch of rules that we might make. Will you just sign here to swear that you'll abide by whatever rules we end up eventually passing? 'K? Thanks." <bq>“It is vital for Congress to establish a process to review and mitigate the harms posed by foreign technology products that come from places like China and Russia,” their joint statement said. “We are encouraged by the quick momentum and strong bipartisan support for our legislation and expect that it will only grow following today’s testimony.”</bq> Were any other country to do that about U.S. technology, the U.S. would be of completely different mind. Witness how upset the U.S. was when other countries dared to suggest that Uber consider their employees to be employees rather than so-called independent contractors. Or witness the shitstorm whenever Europe tries to enforce any form of data privacy for its citizens---and that conflicts, of course, with most of Silicon Valley's business model and with the U.S. efforts to collect data on every citizen on the planet. <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/friedmans-universal-key" source="Hinternet" author="Justin E.H. Smith">Friedman’s Universal Key</a> <bq>if you are like most readers, it is to the Internet that you will turn to find these sources: to that great engine underlain by Boolean algebra, built up by American military-industrial power, and eventually polluted almost to the point of unusability by disinformation.</bq> <bq>Our new global information economy, Curtis thinks, is at once the source of the disinformation that pervades our environment like a waste product. His interest in Ethel, while dutifully mentioning her later-life identity as a Voynich, is primarily an interest in her life as a Boole, and in the irony of her descent from the man who effectively worked out the mathematics behind the technology that would give rise to our current emerging system of global algorithmic authoritarianism.</bq> <bq>I suspect that Friedman continued throughout his life to see the Voynich Manuscript as a sort of universal key, which would teach us not only this or that trivium about mineral-bath cures in the Renaissance, but would serve, if deciphered, as a sort of cryptographic doomsday weapon and as a final realization of the full potential expressed in the Baconian dictum, Scientia est potentia.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/03/why-johnny-cant-read-now-an-elegy.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="Deanna Kreisel">Why Johnny Can’t Read Now; An Elegy</a> <bq>[]... what I (and everyone I know) is talking about now is a seismic shift in the preparedness, study skills, attention spans, and reading comprehension of the average college student, across the board. While most students who make it to college still possess the technical capability to decipher written words and understand their meaning, their ability to process and comprehend longer, complex, dense, and challenging material has severely eroded. Every single humanities and social sciences professor I know—those teaching in disciplines requiring lots of reading—has drastically curtailed the amount of text they ask their students to read over the course of the past decade or so.</bq> <bq>Of course the problem is the internet, social media, and smart phones. But there seems to be very little that we can (or want) to do, as a culture, about those vaunted conveniences. As we Gen Xers—the last generation to grow up without Instagram and texting—age into our 40s, 50s, and beyond, we will eventually be the only ones left to sound the ever-fainter warnings in the unlistening void.</bq> <bq>The problem with being a middle-aged person with a generational complaint is that your grievance, no matter how justified or carefully framed, will always exude a faint whiff of Get Off My Lawn. There is no way to register concerns about the way things are headed without sounding uncool at best or like a bitter crank at worst.</bq> <bq>Maybe they can’t get through a whole chapter of Jane Eyre in a sitting and struggle to understand what Brontë is even saying—but they can build whole worlds together on-line and carry on entire conversations in memes and emojis. They don’t have some of the skills I have, but neither do I have theirs.</bq> Stop sucking up and pretending that being able to comprehend complex things is the same as texting, for fuck's sake. That shit's not going to build a safe bridge. Have we created a generation incapable of innovation? Of even comprehension? Asia will win not with a bang, but a whimper. <bq>And once we cane-shakers are gone, what will it even matter? Maybe no one will read long Victorian novels any more, but no one reads Greek epic any more either and that probably seemed like a huge crisis to the elbow-patched set a couple generations ago.</bq> <bq>Who will be left to care about the books? Who will be left to appreciate all the writing? What will happen to all the stories? What kind of people will the new people be, who haven’t read Pride and Prejudice or Beloved or Never Let Me Go or even the Hunger Games series? I cannot shake the feeling that the decline of reading is an enormous loss, and while I feel sad for us middle-aged folks witnessing the painful passing of entire worlds, I mostly feel sorry for those who will never know what they have missed.</bq> The people you're looking for are in the rest of the world, reading translations or originals in their second languages. It's the U.S. that is headed for ignorant doom. A lot of the people I know still read---but there are a lot who don't even read the barest modicum of the news, to say nothing of reading an entire book. <bq>To you belongs the future, or at least part of the future—the good part. The part with big deep thoughts and daydreaming and wonderments and terror and hope. The part with the books.</bq> <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://dot.la/openai-elon-musk-2659434979.html" source="Dot.LA" author="Lon Harris">Is OpenAI as 'Open' as Its Name Suggests?</a> <bq>It has yet to publish, for example, any of the technology behind apps like ChatGPT in a publicly-available peer-reviewed journal. The company has also declined to make the GPT-2 or GPT-3 language models open source, instead granting exclusive licensing rights to Microsoft.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/03/ai-artificial-intelligence-art-chatgpt-jobs-capitalism/" author="Nathan J. Robinson" source="Jacobin">The Problem With AI Is the Problem With Capitalism</a> <bq>Workers’ fear of new artificial intelligence technology makes sense: that technology has the potential to eliminate their jobs. But if we didn’t live under capitalism, AI could be used to liberate us from drudgery rather than hurl us into poverty.</bq> <bq>Artists, for example, are mostly not afraid of AI because they fear having a machine be better at art. Chess players didn’t stop playing chess when the computer program Deep Blue beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov. And if art is made for pleasure and self-expression, it doesn’t matter what anyone else can do. The problem is that, in our world, artists have to make a living through their art by selling it, and so they have to think about its market value. We’re introducing a technology that can utterly wreck people’s livelihoods, and in a free-market economic system, if your skills decline in value, you’re screwed. It’s interesting that we talk about jobs being “at risk” of being automated. Under a socialist economic system, automating many jobs would be a good thing: another step down the road to a world in which robots do the hard work and everyone enjoys abundance. We should be able to be excited if legal documents can be written by a computer. Who wants to spend all day writing legal documents? But we can’t be excited about it, because we live under capitalism, and we know that if paralegal work is automated, that’s over three hundred thousand people who face the prospect of trying to find work knowing their years of experience and training are economically useless.</bq> We're introducing a new technology that will eliminate jobs. We already did this once, but with people who were unable to express themselves with as far a reach. They were the true working class. Their jobs were easy to eliminate because no-one heard them scream. <hr> <a href="https://twitter.com/sama/status/1638635717462200320?s=12&t=GArJOEJ41SKT7sLfzFsugQ" author="Sam Altman" source="Twitter">ChatGPT Prompt History Became Public</a> <bq>we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating. a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history. we feel awful about this.</bq> Very cool. The insanely wealthy, serial-entrepreneur douche-bag CEO of a $40B company blames an open-source developer for his company's lack of validation and data security. Translation: "Our only mistake was in trusting others not to make mistakes. Really, it's their fault everyone got to see each other's prompts." Like, literally, you had one fucking job. And you couldn't even jump over that extremely low hurdle. And then you passive-aggressively blame someone else for it. You blame the people whose code your $40B company used for free, likely without attribution. <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/how-async-await-really-works/" author="Stephen Toub" source="Microsoft DevBlogs">How Async/Await Really Works in C#</a> This is a brilliant and very-deep dive into <c>async</c> code in .NET. I doff my hat at Toub, who manages to produce completely error- and typo-free 60-page blog posts. He doesn't use enough commas, but almost no-one does. A big takeaway is how much time the designers of .NET have been fighting with supporting safe, fast asynchronous operations. .NET is just ludicrously better than .NET Framework for <c>async</c> code. <bq>And all of that complication meant that very few folks even attempted this, and for those who did, well, bugs were rampant. To be fair, this isn’t really a criticism of the APM pattern. Rather, it’s a critique of callback-based asynchrony in general. We’re all so used to the power and simplicity that control flow constructs in modern languages provide us with, and callback-based approaches typically run afoul of such constructs once any reasonable amount of complexity is introduced. No other mainstream language had a better alternative available, either.</bq> <bq>Something around 95% of the logic in support of iterators and async/await in the C# compiler is shared. Different syntax, different types involved, but fundamentally the same transform. Squint at the yield returns, and you can almost see awaits in their stead.</bq> <bq>If we make an asynchronous method call and logic inside that asynchronous method wants to access that ambient data, how would it do so? If the data were stored in regular statics, the asynchronous method would be able to access it, but you could only ever have one such method in flight at a time, as multiple callers could end up overwriting each others’ state when they write to those shared static fields. If the data were stored in thread statics, the asynchronous method would be able to access it, but only up until the point where it stopped running synchronously on the calling thread; if it hooked up a continuation to some operation it initiated and that continuation ended up running on some other thread, it would no longer have access to the thread static information. Even if it did happen to run on the same thread, either by chance or because the scheduler forced it to, by the time it did it’s likely the data would have been removed and/or overwritten by some other operation initiated by that thread. For asynchrony, what we need is a mechanism that would allow arbitrary ambient data to flow across these asynchronous points, such that throughout an async method’s logic, wherever and whenever that logic might run, it would have access to that same data. Enter <c>ExecutionContext</c>.</bq> <bq>Threading-related methods that begin with Unsafe behave exactly the same as the corresponding method that lacks the <c>Unsafe</c> prefix except that they don’t capture <c>ExecutionContext</c>, e.g. <c>Thread.Start</c> and <c>Thread.UnsafeStart</c> do identical work, but whereas <c>Start</c> captures <c>ExecutionContext</c>, <c>UnsafeStart</c> does not.</bq> <bq>“Impersonation” is the act of changing ambient information about the current user to instead be that of someone else; this lets code act on behalf of someone else, using their privileges and access. In .NET, such impersonation flows across asynchronous operations, which means it’s part of <c>ExecutionContext</c>.</bq> <bq>It would be limiting if the only thing you could await in C# was a <c>System.Threading.Tasks.Task</c>. Similarly, it would be limiting if the C# compiler had to know about every possible type that could be awaited. Instead, C# does what it typically does in cases like this: it employs a pattern of APIs. Code can <c>await</c> anything that exposes that appropriate pattern, the “awaiter” pattern (just as you can <c>foreach</c> anything that provides the proper “enumerable” pattern).</bq> <bq>[...] two variants of <c>OnCompleted</c> were created, with the compiler preferring to use <c>UnsafeOnCompleted</c> if provided, but with the <c>OnCompleted</c> variant always provided on its own in case an awaiter needed to support partial trust. From an <c>async</c> method perspective, however, the builder always flows <c>ExecutionContext</c> across <c>await</c> points, so an awaiter that also does so is unnecessary and duplicative work.</bq> <bq>That’s a lot more logic than we want the compiler to emit… we instead want it encapsulated in a helper, for several reasons. First, it’s a lot of complicated code to be emitted into each user’s assembly. Second, we want to allow customization of that logic as part of implementing the builder pattern (we’ll see an example of why later when talking about pooling). And third, we want to be able to evolve and improve that logic and have existing previously-compiled binaries just get better.</bq> <bq>For this sample on .NET Framework, there were more than 5 million allocations totaling ~145MB of allocated memory. For that same sample on .NET Core, there were instead only ~1000 allocations totaling only ~109KB. </bq> This improvement is incredible. In the article, he then uses a <c>ValueTask</c>-based solution, then a <c>PoolingAsyncValueTaskMethodBuilder</c> to completely eliminate allocations in a specific case. The native implementations are supported in a more-optimized manner than non-native extensions. <bq>The awaiter pattern followed by the C# language requires an awaiter to have an <c>AwaitOnCompleted</c> or <c>AwaitUnsafeOnCompleted</c> method, both of which take the continuation as an <c>Action</c>, and that means the infrastructure needs to be able to create an <c>Action</c> to represent the continuation, in order to work with arbitrary awaiters the infrastructure knows nothing about. But if the infrastructure encounters an awaiter it does know about, it’s under no obligation to take the same code path. For all of the core awaiters defined in <c>System.Private.CoreLib</c>, then, the infrastructure has a leaner path it can follow, one that doesn’t require an <c>Action</c> at all.</bq> <bq>For very small objects, though, pooling them can be a net negative. Pools are just memory allocators, as is the GC, so when you pool, you’re trading off the costs associated with one allocator for the costs associated with another, and the GC is very efficient at handling lots of tiny, short-lived objects. If you do a lot of work in an object’s constructor, avoiding that work can dwarf the costs of the allocator itself, making pooling valuable. But if you do little to no work in an object’s constructor, and you pool it, you’re betting that your allocator (your pool) is more efficient for the access patterns employed than is the GC, and that is frequently a bad bet.</bq> <bq>[...]while this might seem like a relatively small pool, it’s also quite effective at significantly reducing steady state allocation, given that the pool is only responsible for storing objects not currently in use; you could have a million async methods all in flight at any given time, and even though the pool is only able to store up to one object per thread and per core, it can still avoid dropping lots of objects, since it only needs to store an object long enough to transfer it from one operation to another, not while it’s in use by that operation.</bq> <bq>If you find yourself wanting to optimize the size associated with an async state machine, one thing you can look at is whether you can consolidate the kinds of things being awaited and thereby consolidate these awaiter fields.</bq> <bq>The compiler thus needs to ensure that the temporary result from that first expression is available to add to the result of the <c>await</c>, which means it needs to spill the result of the expression into a temporary, which it does with this <c><>7__wrap1</c> field. If you ever find yourself hyper-optimizing async method implementations to drive down the amount of memory allocated, you can look for such fields and see if small tweaks to the source could avoid the need for spilling and thus avoid the need for such temporaries.</bq> <bq>[...] those pieces are actually relatively simple: a universal representation for any asynchronous operation, a language and compiler capable of rewriting normal control flow into a state machine implementation of coroutines, and patterns that bind them all together. Everything else is optimization gravy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2023/03/20/on-trust-in-software-development/" author="Mark Seemann" source="Ploeh Blog">On trust in software development</a> <bq>[...] another fundamental human characteristic is fallibility. We make mistakes in all sorts of way [sic], and we don't make them from malign intent. We make them because we're human. Do we trust our colleagues to make no mistakes? Do we trust that our colleagues have perfect knowledge of requirement [sic], goals, architecture, coding standards, and so on? I don't, just as I don't trust myself to have those qualities. This interpretation of trust is, I believe, better aligned with software engineering. If we institute formal sign-offs, code reviews, and other guardrails, it's not that we suspect co-workers of ill intent. Rather, we're trying to prevent mistakes.</bq> <bq>I agree with the likes of Martin Fowler and Dave Farley that feature branching is a bad idea, and that you should adopt Continuous Delivery. Accelerate strongly suggests that. I also agree that pull requests and formal reviews with sign-offs, as they're usually practised, is at odds with even Continuous Integration. Again, be aware of common pitfalls in logic. Just because one way to do reviews is counter-productive, it doesn't follow that all reviews are bad.</bq> Reviews are good. Continuous Integration is good. Continuous Deployment is good. That doesn't mean you're deploying to production necessarily, but to a similar environment, where you can see whether what you've currently got could run in production. This is, of course, if it's relatively cheap to do so. If your continuous integration is constantly breaking everyone's ability to work, then you need to back it off until you've figured out why that is. <bq>Does that trust mean that everyone is free to do whatever they want? Of course not. Even with the best of intentions, we make mistakes, there are misunderstandings, or we have incomplete information. This is one among several reasons I practice test-driven development (TDD). Writing a test before implementation code catches many mistakes early in the process. In this context, the point is that I don't trust myself to be perfect. Even with TDD and the best of intentions, there are other reasons to look at other people's work. Last year, I did some freelance programming for a customer, and sometimes I would receive feedback that a function I'd included in a pull request already existed in the code base. I didn't have that knowledge, but the review caught it.</bq> <h>Fun</h> <a href="https://twitter.com/Schneider_CM/status/1591554120799985666" author="Christian Schneider" source="Twitter">The B-52's on SNL, January 26, 1980. Incredible.</a> I've watched some awful, awful, awful musical guests on SNL over the last year or two. Scratch that: I've scrubbed forward after listening, appalled, to a few seconds of many musical guests. The B52s brings life and fun that none of the more-modern "musicians" can. <h>Video Games</h> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/you-cant-have-a-proper-insurrection" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">You can't have a proper insurrection without normies</a> <bq>And while Khalil doesn’t ever go fully anticapitalist in the video, I’m more than happy to: All of the difficulties displayed in the video above are, in my opinion, exactly what happens when art is completely and totally controlled by large corporations. Now there’s a real reason for gamers to rise up, if you ask me.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnaKyc3mQVk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/pnaKyc3mQVk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="IGN" caption="MetaHuman - Real-Time Facial Model Animation Demo | State of Unreal 2023"> The mouth is a bit too expressive---it opens too wide and enunciates too hard---so it's a bit "uncanny valley", but it's impressive. Placing the capture onto other characters actually looked much better. Also, remember, they used a cell-phone camera for the capture. <bq></bq>