<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 <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=98586" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Wegen Fachkräftemangel will Spahn die „Rente mit 63“ abschaffen – das ist Kokolores</a> <bq>Ein gesellschaftliches Problem kann jedoch ein Fachkräftemangel sein, bei dem flächendeckend für bestimmte Jobs zu wenig Arbeitskräfte zur Verfügung stehen. Auch hier tragen jedoch die <b>Unternehmen</b> einen großen Teil der Verantwortung, da sie in der Vergangenheit <b>zu wenig Fachkräfte ausgebildet haben und vorhandene Fachkräfte durch zu niedrige Löhne und schlechte Arbeitsbedingungen in Teilzeit oder gar ganz aus dem Job gedrängt haben.</b></bq> <bq>Auch der Arbeitsmarkt unterliegt schließlich den marktwirtschaftlichen Regeln von Angebot und Nachfrage. Ist die Nachfrage größer als das Angebot, reagiert ein Markt in der Regel durch steigende Preise. <b>Paradoxerweise klammern jedoch sowohl Arbeitgeberverbände als auch Politiker der Parteien, die sich sonst immer als die Gralshüter der freien Marktwirtschaft verkaufen, die Option aus, den Fachkräftemangel durch höhere Löhne und bessere Arbeitsbedingungen abzufedern.</b></bq> <bq>Ein Akademiker, der seinen Schreibtischjob vielleicht ohne größere Probleme auch noch im höheren Alter ausfüllen kann, kommt schließlich nur in den allerseltensten Fällen auf die 45 Beitragsjahre, die nötig sind, um sich früher ohne Abzüge verrenten zu lassen.</bq> <bq>Das würde ja Geld kosten, und <b>wenn es um höhere Arbeitskosten geht, vergessen selbst gestählte Anhänger des Marktes ja bekanntlich gerne die Grundlagen der Marktwirtschaft.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>gerade in der Pflege oder im Handwerk gibt es ja sehr gute Gründe, warum man diesem Job nicht mehr im höheren Alter nachgehen kann.</b> Daran dürfte sich auch nicht viel ändern, wenn man den faktischen Renteneintritt nach hinten verschiebt. Dann gehen die Menschen in diesen Jobs halt mit Abschlägen früher in Rente.</bq> <bq><b>Jens Spahn</b> hatte übrigens ein Jahr nach Abi und Ausbildung das Glück, mit 22 Jahren ein Bundestagsmandat zu erlangen. In die Rentenversicherung hat er damit höchstens drei Jahre eingezahlt. Für jedes Jahr im Bundestag erwarb er dafür jedoch einen Altersvorsorgeanspruch in Höhe von 250 Euro pro Monat. <b>Mit seinen 43 Jahren hat er also bereits einen Anspruch auf 5.250 Euro Altersversorgung, bezahlt vom Steuerzahler.</b> Da Spahn ja noch lange nicht am Ende seiner politischen Karriere ist, wird auch dieser Betrag noch steigen. <b>Wenn er also nun den Krankenschwestern und Dachdeckern, die ihn mit ihren Steuergeldern „aushalten“, ihre ohnehin schon magere Rente kürzen will, ist dies gleich doppelt schäbig.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/31/patrick-lawrence-deaf-but-not-blind-to-us-decline/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Deaf, but Not Blind to US Decline</a> <bq>By way of background, Hill is one of those revolving-door people who float on the froth of academic and think tank salaries when not in government. <b>A Russianist by training, she was an intelligence analyst for the Bush II and Obama administrations. She then served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council until she turned on Trump during his 2019 impeachment hearings and had a few moments under the Klieg lights.</b> Hill is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and will take up duties this summer as chancellor at Durham, the British university. Maybe Hill speaks with a looser tongue now that she will return to her native England.</bq> She's British, driving policy in the U.S. Wonderful. <bq>I conclude from Hill’s remarks that the technocrats, scholars, and political figures who think through and determine U.S. foreign policy, and by extension the Atlantic world’s, cannot hear those now bringing a new world order into being, and <b>they are in abject denial as to the right responses to this world-turning and profoundly promising undertaking.</b></bq> <bq>[...] detect in it the very faintest signs that those most intimately involved in shaping U.S. foreign policy will gradually come to understand that <b>pretending the U.S. remains the world’s unchallenged imperium is a game that they can play a little while longer but not forever.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://russiandissent.substack.com/p/stay-down-dont-get-up" source="Russian Dissent" author="Yuri Ugolnikov">"Stay Down, Don't Get Up"</a> <bq>I confess that the degree of passivity in our fellow citizens was unexpected even by me, but to simply declare that “the people are wrong” is at best naive. <b>The passivity of Russians is largely due to the extreme distrust of any figure involved in public affairs.</b> And this mistrust did not grow out of nowhere.</bq> Same as in the U.S., as always. <bq>It was Yeltsin's reforms that undermined the confidence of fellow citizens in mass politics almost completely. Having achieved power at first precisely thanks to left-wing rhetoric (Yeltsin, let me remind you, began as a critic of the nomenklatura and party leaders of the USSR), this politician immediately corrected himself, and forgot his previous indignation over social inequality; indeed, forgot so well that <b>the difference in the level of income between the poorest and richest sections of our long-suffering population - the real legacy of his “reforms” - has become, and still remains, obscene.</b></bq> The Russians and Americans should be singing the same song. The people should rise up together, against their oppressors. Instead, they are at war. <bq><b>The arrival of democracy and public politics in Russia turned out to be a huge swindle.</b> And this has for decades scared citizens away from participating in politics or from supporting any social and political movements.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/05/srgo-j05.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">Zelensky says “a large number of soldiers will die” in new offensive</a> <bq><b>The entry of Ukraine into NATO “right now” would mean the invocation of NATO Article 5, effectively meaning a declaration of war against Russia by the NATO powers.</b> In April, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared, “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO,” adding, “All NATO Allies have agreed that Ukraine will become a member.” Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said he supports a “path” for Ukraine to join the NATO military alliance. The coming together of these developments makes clear the extent to which the Ukraine war, deliberately inflamed and escalated by the NATO powers, is spiraling out of control, threatening devastating consequences for the entire world.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/05/a-man-without-a-strategy-how-netanyahu-is-provoking-armed-intifada-in-the-west-bank/" author="Ramzy Barzoud" source="CounterPunch">A Man Without a Strategy: How Netanyahu is Provoking Armed Intifada in the West Bank</a> <bq>For Netanyahu, the frequent deadly raids on Palestinian towns and refugee camps translate into political assets that allow him to keep his extremist supporters happy. But this is short-term thinking. <b>If Israel’s unchecked violence continues, the West Bank could soon find itself in an all-out military uprising against Israel and an open rebellion against the PA.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/05/china-places-country-dangerously-close-to-us-warship/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="">China Places Country Dangerously Close To US Warship</a> <bq><b>These are international waters after all, and the Chinese navy should therefore stay out of the way of US military vessels traveling through them</b>, just as the US navy would stay out of the way of Chinese military forces traveling a few miles off the coast of California or transiting between the islands of Hawaii. <b>The US is only asking for the same freedom of navigation it would afford anyone else.</b></bq> <bq><b>Obviously Chinese fighter jets have no business operating in that region, especially when their movements endanger the US spy planes who are flying their peaceful missions there.</b> But as with the Taiwan Strait, the imperialist aggressions of the Chinese Communist Party have been so expansionist in nature that the South China Sea now sits immediately adjacent to mainland China. <b>Here’s hoping that China stops with its brazen aggressions against the US military forces who are minding their own business in the Taiwan Strait</b> and the South China Sea, stops endangering poor defenseless warships and spy planes by moving through waters and airspace they have no business entering in the first place, and starts respecting the rules-based global sovereignty of the United States of America.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/de/articles/2023/06/05/scho-j05.html" author="Johannes Stern" source="WSWS">Scholz’ militaristischer Wutausbruch in Falkensee</a> <bq>Dann brüllte er ins Mikrofon:<bq>Er ist mit 200.000 Soldaten in die Ukraine einmarschiert. Er hat noch viele mehr mobilisiert. Er hat das Leben seiner eigenen Bürger riskiert, für einen imperialistischen Traum. Putin will die Ukraine zerstören, erobern, und er hat noch andere im Blick. Das werden wir als Freiheitsfreunde, als Demokraten, als Europäer nicht zulassen.</bq>Im Weiteren bezichtigte Scholz Putin nicht nur der Zerstörung von „Städten, Dörfern, Eisenbahnlinien und Autobahnen“. Er habe „unglaublich viele Bürgerinnen und Bürger, Kinder und Alte in der Ukraine getötet“. <b>Dies sei „Mord, um es klar zu sagen“. In „seinem imperialistischen Traum von Großmacht“ riskiere Putin zudem „das Leben seiner eigenen Bürgerinnen und Bürger“, fügte er hinzu. Das sei „unverantwortlich. Das ist Kriegstreiberei. Das ist Gewalt mit Waffen.</b>“</bq> If he truly believes all of that as unalloyed truth, then he is doing the right thing. But he just described Putin as a reincarnation of Hitler and the situation on the eastern front of Europe as a repeat of WWII. It is no such thing. Not even close. Scholz is terrified of something that is not happening the way he thinks it is. He is terrified of even talking about a ceasefire because he thinks he cannot negotiate with the devil. <hr> <a href="http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/2023/06/schmegegge.html" author="Morris Berman" source="Dark Ages America">Schmegegge</a> <bq>The whole country amounts to nothing more than baloney. The government is baloney; the MSM is baloney; and the American public is baloney. The Yiddish word for this is schmegegge. [...] (it's sort of like putz squared). <b>America is a schmegegge, a hopeless, pathetic collection of hot air.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/10/fuoz-j10.html" author="" source="WSWS">In the letter addressed to Biden and acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, Suzanne P. Clark, the CEO and president of the Chamber, wrote that the group was “very concerned by the premeditated and disruptive service actions that are slowing operations at several major ports along the West Coast.”</a> A couple of things: (1) The acting Secretary of Labor and CEO and president of the Chamber of Commerce are both women. Both of them are going to work hard to make sure that those workers get back to work, without any or with an insulting pay increase. They are going to move heaven and Earth to make sure that no worker gets a thing, if they can absolutely help it. They're going to order them back to work, on pain of fine or jail time. They're going to try to fire them. They're going to go after their families. But they are absolutely not going to pay them more or give in to any of their requests. To do so would be socialism, and Americans don't do socialism, no matter what plumbing you've got downstairs. Unless you're in the military, then you get socialism. But that's another story. No. The answer will always be no, no matter how reasonable the request, no matter how immoral it would be not to grant it. As <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=717">Frederick Douglass said</a>, <iq>Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.</iq> <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/06/roger-waters-berlin-antisemitism-accusations-media-disinformation/" source="Jacobin" author="Chip Gibbons">Roger Waters’s Critics Are Smearing Him as Antisemitic Because They Hate His Pro-Palestine Activism</a> <bq>That false claims are being made about Waters is not the only disturbing aspect of this episode. <b>What is especially troubling is how quickly these claims made it into mainstream media with little fact-checking.</b> Now even politicians and law enforcement are taking them up.</bq> <bq>Waters has performed the song over six hundred times in concert. As part of a performance Waters has been doing since 1980, during the song he adopts, in his own words, the persona of “an unhinged fascist demagogue.” Berlin was no different. During the song, Waters took to the stage in a long leather trench coat with the crossed-hammer insignia made famous by the 1982 film. At his side were two men in black military-like uniforms wearing helmets. Banners just like those featured in The Wall movie dropped from the ceiling, and an inflatable pig floated above the audience. <b>One side read “Steal from the Poor. Give to the Rich.”; the other side, “Fuck The Poor.” The slogans were clear caricatures of right-wing sentiment.</b></bq> <bq>Like everyone in a free society, critics of Waters’s political views are welcome to disagree with him. Repeatedly, however, they have sought to censor him; in order to achieve these ends, they have turned to a campaign of disinformation. <b>Although disinformation has been a continuous source of panic in the United States since the 2016 election, disinformation campaigns against critics of US policy seem to get a free pass.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/01/patrick-lawrence-the-war-were-finally-allowed-to-see/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">The War We're Finally Allowed to See</a> <bq>[...] correspondents from The New York Times, the other big dailies, the wire services, and the broadcast networks have accepted without protest the Kyiv regime’s refusal to allow them to see the war as it is. <b>Content these professional slovens have been to sit in Kyiv hotel rooms and file stories based on the regime’s transparently unreliable accounts of events, all the while pretending their stories are properly reported and factual.</b></bq> Like <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=4531">Waugh's Scoop</a>. <bq>Reporting and writing of this caliber makes Mogelson look the dazzling star next to the correspondent-reenactors in their Kyiv hotel rooms. But for my money he also keeps pace with a lot of standout names from the past. I see in his copy a little Dexter Filkins, a little Bernard Fall, a little Michael Herr, a little Martha Gellhorn, and I’ll go so far as to say a little Ernie Pyle. As for Dondyuk’s pictures, the way they leap off the page brings to mind Tim Page, Horst Faas, Robert Kapa, and some of the other great war fotogs of their day. <b>If this piece portends a turn or return (however you want to think of it) to reporting with some integrity to it, the project could not have got off to a better start.</b> But let us stay with “if” for now.</bq> <bq>In Mogelson’s writing we meet conscripts sent to the front after little or no training. He describes one man who was kidnapped on a city sidewalk and was under Russian fire three days later. Paralyzing fright, exhaustion, demoralization, desertions, a sort of Beetle Bailey incompetence—these are rampant among the green draftees that now make up the majority of the AFU’s infantry. <b>They fight with Vietnam-era vehicles shipped from the U.S., or muzzle-loaded mortars long out of production, or Soviet-era weapons left over from the pre–1991 days—and, withal, too little ammunition for this kind of matériel to make any difference at all.</b></bq> <bq>This is the war the propaganda machine has kept from us. And now we know that what correspondents reporting for independent media have been describing is by and large the war as it is. Among much else we can now see the obvious indifference the Kyiv regime and its Western backers display for <b>those doing the fighting—who, Mogelson tells us, are now working-class Ukrainians, the more privileged having dodged the draft or otherwise avoided service.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the larger picture suggests publication of this eye– and mind-opening piece reflects a creeping recognition in all sorts of places—among the policy cliques, at the Pentagon, in corporate media—that Ukraine is not going to win this war and the time has come to prepare for this eventuality. <b>The new drift on the vaunted counteroffensive is that it is not going to make much difference.</b></bq> <bq>NATO officials, per Steven Erlanger, The Times’s Brussels correspondent, are now thinking about doing in Ukraine what the allies did in postwar Germany: <b>Divide it such that the west joins the alliance and the east is left to the East, so to say.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>the start of an effort to get all those people with blue-and-yellow flags on their front porches ready for a dose of the reality from which they have been shielded all these months.</b> The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Business Insider, Forbes: They have all recently run pieces not nearly as good as Mogelson’s but in the let’s-get-real line.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/01/the-wars-we-dont-care-to-see/" source="Scheer Post" author="David Barsamian and Norman Solomon">The Wars We Don't (Care to) See</a> <bq>American Justice Robert Jackson was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. He made an opening statement to the Tribunal on November 21, 1945, because there was some concern at the time that it would be an example of victor’s justice. He said this: “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and <b>we are not prepared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.</b>”</bq> This is an oft-quoted and lovely sentiment but, even at the time, it wasn't true. The shocking and deliberate attacks on civilian centers in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki went wholly unpunished. Instead, they were then---and continue to be---glorified as justified and necessary. We never had any intention of allowing the same rules be applied to us as we apply to our subjects. <bq>Right now, we’re in a situation where, unfortunately, across a lot of the political spectrum, including some of the left, folks think that you have to choose between aligning yourself with U.S. foreign policy and its acts of aggression or Russian foreign policy and its acts of aggression. Personally, <b>I think it’s both appropriate and necessary to condemn war on Ukraine, and Washington’s hypocrisy doesn’t in any way let Russia off the hook. By the same token, Russia’s aggression shouldn’t let the United States off the hook for the tremendous carnage we’ve created in this century.</b></bq> <bq>I won’t say never, but in my experience, <b>it’s extremely rare for an NPR or PBS journalist to assertively question the underlying prerogatives of the U.S. government to attack other countries</b>, even if it’s said with a more erudite ambiance.</bq> <bq>[...] the underlying message is invariably that yes, we can (and should) at times argue over when, whether, and how to attack certain countries with the firepower of the Pentagon, but those decisions do need to be made and <b>the U.S. has the right to do so if that’s the best judgment of the wise people in the upper reaches of policy in Washington.</b></bq> <bq><b>President Biden, like his predecessors in the Oval Office, loves to speak about the glories of the free press and say that journalism is a wonderful aspect of our society — until the journalists do something he and the government he runs really don’t like.</b> A prime example is Julian Assange. He’s a journalist, a publisher, an editor, and he’s sitting in prison in Great Britain being hot-wired for transportation to the United States. I sat through the two-week trial in the federal district of northern Virginia of CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling and I can tell you it was a kangaroo court. That’s the court Julian Assange has a ticket to if his extradition continues.</bq> <bq>More than a century ago, William Dean Howells wrote a short story called “Editha.” Keep in mind that this was after the United States had been slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines. In it, a character says, <b>“What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-democratic-partys-crucifixion" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">The Democratic Party’s Crucifixion of Matt Taibbi</a> <bq>“The old school ACLU-like liberals, they’re just gone now,” he said. “<b>There’s this new movement that doesn’t believe in countering bad speech with better speech. They believe in closing it off and shutting it down.</b> That’s what the Twitter Files were about. That’s why there was so much hostility.”</bq> <bq>There are three steps to destroying a reporter who can’t be bought off or intimidated. The first is a campaign by the powerful, whose lies and crimes have been exposed, along with their obsequious courtiers in the press, to discredit the reporting. The second is a sustained campaign of character assassination. The third is <b>persecution carried out once the reporter’s credibility has been weakened, his or her ability to publish or broadcast is degraded and public support has eroded.</b></bq> <bq>A discredited ruling class, which has disemboweled the nation for its corporate masters and whose primary mission is the perpetuation of permanent war, has no intention of carrying out reform. It will not permit an exchange of ideas or allow its critics a platform. <b>It knows it is hated. It fears the rise of the neofascists its dysfunction and corruption have spawned. It seeks to perpetuate itself only through fear —— fear of what will replace it. That is all it has to offer a demoralized citizenry.</b> Constitutional guarantees of free speech and the right to privacy are noisome impediments to its tenuous grip on power.</bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-it-real-or-imagined-how-your-brain-tells-the-difference-20230524/" source="Quanta" author="Yasemin Saplakoglu">Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference.</a> <bq>In one follow-up study, Segal asked participants to imagine something, such as the New York City skyline, while he projected something else faintly onto the wall — such as a tomato. <b>What the participants saw was a mix of the imagined image and the real one, such as the New York City skyline at sunset.</b> Segal’s findings suggested that perception and imagination can sometimes “quite literally mix,” Nanay said.</bq> <bq>She eventually hopes to figure out if they can manipulate this system to make imagination feel more real. For example, virtual reality and neural implants are now being investigated for medical treatments, such as to help blind people see again. The ability to make experiences feel more or less real, she said, could be really important for such applications. It’s not outlandish, given that reality is a construct of the brain. “Underneath our skull, everything is made up,” Muckli said. <b>“We entirely construct the world, in its richness and detail and color and sound and content and excitement. … It is created by our neurons.”</b></bq> That is absolutely not the first application. The first application will be, as always, porn. Also, that statement at the end short-circuits millennia of philosophical thought. <hr> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01735-1" source="Nature" author="Mark Peplow">‘Almost magical’: chemists can now move single atoms in and out of a molecule’s core</a> <bq>At Stanford University in California, chemists Noah Burns and Sajan Patel have developed a carbon-to-nitrogen swap that is driven by blue light and oxygen (see ‘Nitrogen swap’). However, it also <b>involves a highly reactive compound called an azide that has a reputation for explosive instability.</b></bq> <bq>[...] some of the editing reactions have deep historical roots — several have enabled skeletal edits since the late nineteenth century. The Baeyer–Villiger oxidation, for example, inserts an oxygen atom; the <b>Beckmann rearrangement inserts nitrogen, a process that every year produces millions of tonnes of caprolactam, the feedstock for nylon.</b></bq> <bq>[...] these historical approaches have limited scope. They can only insert atoms next to a functional group known as a carbonyl, because they rely on its chemical reactivity to help prise open a molecule. <b>Other skeletal editing techniques developed decades ago are rarely used, because they chew up too many functional groups in molecules or produce messy mixtures that require laborious purification.</b></bq> <bq>Chemists imagine the universe of all possible organic molecules as a territory called chemical space. It includes up to 10 60 possible drug-like molecules, each a twinkling star of potential medicinal benefit. Ideally, pharmaceutical companies’ screening libraries should feature representatives from across the chemical cosmos. But, in reality, <b>molecular structures that are easier to make tend to be over-represented in these libraries, leaving large unilluminated voids in medicinal chemical space.</b></bq> <h><span id="art">Art & Literature</span></h> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/bad-romance-cugini" source="The Baffler" author="Elia Cugini">Bad Romance</a> <bq>(Many of the books I read are explicitly or implicitly based on the Persephone myth because <b>Persephone is Schrodinger’s kidnap victim: if the reader finds it hot that she’s the hostage of a dominating Hades, then she is, and if they don’t, then she isn’t.</b>) Dark romance has a veneer of abandon, but the sex is controlled, anxiously so. <b>Nobody is getting thrown or pushed. The punishments tap out after half-hearted orgasm denials.</b> All parties are quite comfortable, thank you.</bq> <bq>The book repeatedly offers its readers points of access into dark, titillating desires, <b>then promises safety by sublimating those desires into heterosexual romance and making us forget the original transgression.</b> What does that tell us about heterosexual romance?</bq> <bq>Going back through the series, this frustrating withdrawal shone through all of them: <b>the paternalistic internal censor that clamps down on unpalatable desire, explaining away every violent act.</b> It’s okay, that guy didn’t kidnap her, not really: it was for her own good! He was saving her! He didn’t want to do it! They are in love now, and all is forgiven.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enWq5UrwjDM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/enWq5UrwjDM" source="YouTube" width="560px" caption="Sci-Fi Short Film 'Regulation' | DUST | Starring Sunita Mani" author="DUST / Ryan Patch"> The author/director writes: <bq>Every child has the right to be happy. By law. In the near future, a young social worker (Sunita Mani, “Glow” & "Mr. Robot") travels to a small community to administer behavior-modifying "patches" that guarantee happiness for the wearers. She must decide what to do when a precocious girl (Audrey Bennett, “Frozen on Broadway”) refuses to accept the patch. Director's Statement: As someone with a close family member who struggles with severe mental health issues, the way that we understand and help people with these challenges is always on my mind. So, when I stumbled across <b>a Harvard bioethicist’s blog about the idea of always-on, perfectly-administered drip dosage of antidepressants</b>, an entire world began to form in my head where this technology was a part of everyday life. I started to think about what this could do for people in our country, but also what it would do for our country’s culture. Who would use it? How would we handle this as a society? And also, <b>how might the government address the disparity in privilege this technology would create between children who grew up with the wealth to be “happy” and those who did not?</b> This lead [sic] me to think about what the government’s responsibility is to “level the playing field” in health and where can human freedom be factored into these decisions? There are a number of contentious issues in our country that, at their core, are discussions that pit something that might make society “better” against a loss of individual freedoms. <b>We all agree it’s good the government removes citizens’ “freedom” to drive on the left side of the road in return for having safe roads. But where should the line be between giving up a freedom that makes “society” a better place, and allowing citizens to retain important autonomy?</b> Many of us disagree about where this line might be for different issues like guns, education, or medical care, but I hope that this film serves as a starting place to discuss these issues, and for each side to empathize with the values and motivations of the other.</bq> There are answers already, at least for the question of children who grow up with unequal chances of being happy. The answer is: the government will do far too little, and will complain the entire time about it. <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/bored-of-culture-william-deresiewicz" source="Tablet Magazine" author="William Deresiewicz">We’re All Bored of Culture</a> <bq>The commissars are enemies of beauty. I’m channeling Dave Hickey here: <b>Beauty incites desire, and desire is destabilizing. Desire is anarchic, and the commissars are control freaks.</b> They tell us what we ought to want.</bq> <bq>The point is not that corporations have degraded popular taste. It is the opposite. The culture industry, like the junk food industry, has gotten very good at satisfying it, at reflecting back our taste to us. And with the internet, the feedback loops have gotten ever more efficient. <b>Art is boring now, in other words, because we are boring.</b> Art is woke because we are woke. <b>Art is bland and unimaginative because we have landed ourselves in the lamentable position of getting exactly what we want.</b></bq> <bq><b>Wokeness can only exert its tyranny, in fact, because artists are operating on an economic knife edge. They do not have the luxury of alienating their audience, not even part of it or even for a little while.</b> Not of shocking it, not even of challenging it. And wokeness also acts to hide the deeply repetitive nature of contemporary culture. “Diversity” becomes a cloak for uniformity. The same old thing—the same kitsch pop songs, middlebrow fiction, wish-fulfillment streaming fare, agitprop gallery art—produced by a member of a “marginalized” “community,” convinces us that we have gotten somewhere new.</bq> <bq>All the weirdness that we’re missing now, the wild originality, can only come from the activity of singular spirits: contemptuous of imitation, courageous in the extreme, obedient to nothing but the effort to achieve their vision. They are out there, I know, they are doing their work, but only on the margins, in the cracks. <b>Expose them to the light, give them some mainstream attention, and instead of dragging us a little way in their direction, as they would have once, they just get homogenized, too.</b></bq> <bq>What I see is narcissism: a demand that art affirm us, never threaten us, never make us feel inadequate or ignorant or small, <b>echo back to us our precious little selves.</b></bq> <bq>Great audiences create great artists, she explained, by giving people the freedom to take chances: to be irresponsible, dangerous, difficult, strange. <b>When people compete to be sophisticated, artists win. Then we all win.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/my-own-private-energy-crisis" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">My Own Private Energy Crisis</a> <bq>[...] when I’m crammed into the security funnel of that awful limbo known as Charles de Gaulle, I often find myself thinking: <b>This can’t last. It’s going to collapse. All of it. It was always wrong. A sin. A disgrace. Yes, yes, my thought declares as it reaches its crescendo: Let ‘em crash.</b></bq> <bq>[...] how one ought to live, whether in accordance with one’s desires and comforts, or in pure devotion to the collective good— is simply to deny that the ideological phantasms that shape your desires, but that are incompatible with your expressed values, have any real purchase on you. I have never been very good at practicing such denial. <b>Growing up lower-middle class, with significant experience of economic precarity, will, I’ve learned, leave you with a chronic and incurable case of bourgeois aspiration, just as surely as childhood polio will leave you with a lifelong limp.</b></bq> <bq>Many of my colleagues who were by contrast to the manor born seem much more comfortable, even in the midst of their obvious bourgeois comforts, <b>flatly denying that the ideology of that world-historical class has any purchase on them whatsoever.</b></bq> <bq>(I am speaking anecdotally, of course, but I have lived on both sides of the divide, and <b>if my anecdotes count for nothing, then what even is the point of paying attention, of looking for patterns, as we go through our lives?</b>).</bq> <bq><b>I am sharply aware of the untenability of this country</b>, whose frontier seems to have been conquered largely as a result of (i) innovations in refrigerant technologies, and (ii) the invention of barbed-wire [...]</bq> <bq>Any complete explanation of this untenable country’s obesity epidemic would surely have something to do with a sort of energetic false consciousness — Americans do not see their eating as a matter of measurable inputs and outputs, but simply as <b>a matter of heeding the underlying message of every TV commercial for Chili’s signature Awesome Blossom or Long John Silver’s hush-puppies</b> or whatever, which is, namely, as Slavoj Žižek used to love to say: “You may”.</bq> <bq>[...] any machine that processes data will stop doing so if its battery runs down or it is unplugged, and this brute fact will always send us right back to the lithium mines and the hydroelectric dams, <b>however free of such gross materiality we might have imagined we were up until the moment we ran out of juice.</b></bq> <bq>Political side-taking is usually, perhaps almost always, for weak and needy joiners, and honesty probably requires of us most of the time that we be prepared to retreat into the forest and <b>wait out the spiraling madness that the side-taking imperative necessarily generates.</b></bq> <bq>[...] like Russia, the United States is the global power it is thanks to the alchemy of identification, where practically <b>innumerable ethnic groups are convinced to buy into, and blend into, the chauvinism of imperial belonging.</b></bq> <bq>From what I’ve seen of scholars working in this field, there is a tendency that almost approaches the common central African folk belief that no death is natural, that everyone who dies has been murdered by an enemy who has had recourse to the workings of a magician, and the best response to the loss of a loved one is to seek out a magician yourself to exact revenge on the supposed enemies of the deceased. <b>Scholars in disability studies, similarly, seem to conduct themselves on the presumption that any time anyone is prevented, because of the condition of their body, from taking part in any socially valued activity, a political injustice has occurred.</b></bq> <bq>There are complicated questions, beyond this stark truth, as to how much we may mitigate the disadvantages that come with physical decline, but they are going to come one way or another, and it is not for human justice to overcome this. There are all sorts of reasons why your comatose 98-year-old grandmother will not be able to participate in your session at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Some of these reasons might inspire you to declare: “It’s not fair!” But if I may play with a sort of contrapositive Rawlsianism here, unfairness, at least of this sort, is not injustice, and <b>working out exactly what may reasonably be asked of a society in order to lessen the disadvantages met by some of its members positively requires that we remain sober and honest about the limits of what may be done.</b></bq> <bq><b>Death and decline are not unjust</b> — it wouldn’t make any sense to describe any necessary feature of our existence in this way.</bq> <bq>[...] the most energy-efficient system is the one that does nothing at all. Beyond that, the only way to determine whether the energy burned by a given system is “wasted energy” or not is to determine whether the result of all this burning is something of value. So then, <b>here is my life, and there behind me are all the calories burned to bring this life to this point. Has it been worth it? Is there anything I can change, now, to be able more confidently to answer that same question with a “yes” in the future?</b></bq> <bq>For a while Ken had a page up where he listed the domain names he had registered and wished to sell for a profit. One of them was “fancyfree.com”, for which he wrote up a little description of the several virtues of this property and of its moneymaking potential, only soon enough to veer off into the arcana of a Mexican psychedelic pop group called Los Fancy Free . As I recall the lead singer was a descendant of Swedish Mennonites who had immigrated to Mexico, so <b>by the time Ken arrived at the end of what was supposed to be a sales pitch for the URL, he had completed a fairly thorough summary of that Protestant sect’s complicated diasporic history. I bring all this up only in the hope that it will help you understand at least something of the genetic baggage informing my writing style.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1449nf7/100_this/" author="Jon Stone" source="Reddit">100% this</a> <img src="{att_link}envkym3nss4b1.jpg" href="{att_link}envkym3nss4b1.jpg" align="none" scale="50%"> <bq>One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they're confident it won't work</bq> <hr> <a href="https://twitter.com/Grey_IsTrue/status/1666553762113273856" author="Linus Torvalds" source="Twitter">Tweet</a> <img src="{att_link}fydjzckagaepuz0.jpeg" href="{att_link}fydjzckagaepuz0.jpeg" align="none" caption="Linus Torvalds comes out as a woke communist" scale="75%"> <bq>Because your "woke communist propaganda" comment makes me think you're a moron of the first order. I strongly suspect I am one of those "woke communists" you worry about. But you probably couldn't actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you? I'm a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman's right to choose is very important, I think that "well regulated militia" means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn't care less if you decided to dress up in the "wrong" clothes or decided you'd rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me "woke", then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*king disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.</bq> <h><span id="technology">Technology</span></h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6rJA0z2Kag" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/L6rJA0z2Kag" source="YouTube" caption="NVIDIA'S HUGE AI Breakthroughs Just Changed Everything (Supercut)" width="560px"> This is madness. Everything is ray-traced, everything is virtual. A lot of it has been created with text prompts. They use image prompts to generate 3D images. The presentation at <b>22:00</b> shows a chip factory <iq>defined in the omniverse</iq>, which allows them to fine-tune defect-detection for their parts. They also showed a process whereby you build and refine that parts and algorithms for an autonomous robot (for a factory floor) all within the omniverse, which allows a tremendous amount of the iteration to happen virtually before you actually produce real-world hardware (which is far more costly). <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2023/05/29/favour-flat-code-file-folders/" source="Ploeh Blog" author="Mark Seemann">Favour flat code file folders</a> <bq>In the same paper, Parnas describes the danger of making hard-to-change decisions too early. Applied to directory structure, the lesson is that <b>you should postpone designing a file hierarchy until you know more about the problem.</b> Start with a flat directory structure and add folders later, if at all.</bq> <bq>I've never programmed in SmallTalk , but as I understand it, the language came with tooling that was both IDE and execution environment. <b>Programmers would write source code in the editor, but although the code was persisted to disk, it may not have been as text files.</b></bq> This is true. I programmed Java in the early 90s with an IBM IDE that worked similarly. It stored everything in a version-controlled database. <bq>My misgivings about code file directory hierarchies mostly stem from the impact they have on developers' minds. This may manifest as magical thinking or cargo-cult programming : <b>Erect elaborate directory structures to keep out the evil spirits of spaghetti code. It doesn't work that way.</b></bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J9EJrvqOiM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/3J9EJrvqOiM" caption="Complexity: Divide and Conquer!" author="Michel Weststrate" width="560px" source="YouTube" date="May 7, 2017"> <bq>Can we make our UI dumb enough to make our app usable without it?</bq> The video demonstrates navigating through a simple e-commerce site. Then, he shows how the app can be driven from the console by calling the APIs directly---upon which the URL and UI all update automatically. That is, the logic is not in the UI. He then demonstrates that he can drive the web site <i>without a UI</i> by deleting the rendering to React DOM entirely. He can still manipulate the console API to perform the same operations because the logic is all defined completely independent of the UI. Of course, this is the same command-line interface that can be used in the automated tests, which means that the entire product can be tested without a UI at all. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that neither React nor Angular is the way to go. Both React and Angular mix logic into the UI, putting the UI front and center. This is wrong. Additionally, Angular suffers from a complete inability to speed up the development lifecycle because it's so strongly tied to WebPack. I've used Redux before and the boilerplate becomes prodigious. I've used the React reducers as well, and it's a bit better, but still doesn't feel very natural. I've used <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/mobx/v/5.13.0">MobX</a> but long before its current incarnation where it really seems to "just work" as a store of state and reactive programming logic. The <c>when</c> construct (see <b>16:37</b> in the video), which takes a predicate and an action, is a very neat concept that allows you to define exactly how your application reacts to state changes without burying it all in the components. <bq>If the view is to be purely derived from the state, then routing should affect state, not the derived component tree.</bq> Therefore, a url-change is an action like any other, modifying the state and letting MobX handle notifying all interested parties. Once you've gotten that far, you don't even need a UI-specific routing library because you can just configure any router to direct URLs to the store API---which will automatically update the UI. The UI (e.g., React) doesn't have to have anything to do with routing. A route change triggers an action, which changes the state. The UI reacts. The UI does not do anything with the route---it just triggers actions. A reactive non-UI component ensures that the route stays in-sync with the state by <i>reacting</i> to changes in the state. In most cases, you can just create a value that calculates what the URL should be, based on the state. This could get complicated, of course, but it's also completely separate from the rest of the application logic and can be thoroughly tested. We can also use the <c>when</c> construct outlined above to simply listen for changes to the calculated URL and update the browser's location and history. This way, the management of the history and URL is not entwined with the rest of the application logic. It's just reacting to state changes, like everything else. Working like this results in automated tests that work naturally and look very much like Playwright tests---but completely without UI and using semantically meaningful constructs. The UI is an afterthought (as <a href="https://michel.codes/blogs/ui-as-an-afterthought">Michel himself wrote in 2019</a>). Playwright is nice, but it's a <i>last resort</i> when you've already botched the job of writing your code in a more testable manner. It's a nice check that the UI is properly wired to the logic of the application, but should not be used to verify application behavior---simply to verify UI behavior. This all goes very much in the direction of <a href="https://martinfowler.com/articles/images/humble-dialog-box/TheHumbleDialogBox.pdf" author="Martin Fowler" date="2002">The Humble Dialog Box</a>, which shows that we've known how to build software correctly for over 20 years---and we keep getting distracted by "the new shiny", thinking that we can somehow start with the UI and still get maintainable software.