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Links and Notes for June 9th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#covid">COVID-19</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> </ul> <h>COVID-19</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/12/owning-up-to-mistakes-and-pandemic-deaths/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Owning Up to Mistakes and Pandemic Deaths</a> <bq>[...] we are seeing the fallout from the embargo spread to vaccines that potentially could have saved millions of lives in developing countries. Our political leaders would apparently rather see people die than allow Cuba to get some of the credit for saving them.</bq> <bq>It would be a huge step forward for both public health and U.S. foreign policy if we could begin down the road of freely sharing healthcare technology rather than trying to bottle it up so that a small number of people can get very rich. The whole world shares an interest in preventing the spread of pandemics. This is an area where we should be able to work together for the benefit of humanity.</bq> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://archive.is/ZRFkh" source="Wall Street Journal" author="Yuliva Chernova">More Startups Throw in the Towel, Unable to Raise Money for Their Ideas</a> <bq>“It is hitting now,” said Elizabeth Yin, co-founder and general partner of pre-seed investment firm Hustle Fund. Of her firm’s first fund, only about 60 of the original 101 portfolio companies are around. There were roughly 90 active startups a year ago.</bq> A sentence that makes you want to say "die in a fire." <bq>she believes the frothy market boosted survival rates before the current downturn.</bq> "Frothy market" means free money for the rich. That's her business model. <bq>The venture-capital boom in 2021, as well as pandemic-era government funding to small businesses, likely kept businesses alive for longer than they would have otherwise, some observers believe. Now that those funding sources have dried up, the failures are coming in.</bq> <bq>Failure rates may increase during downturns, Lee said. “If startups don’t have money then they cannot operate,” he said.</bq> This kind of wisdom is why you read the WSJ. <bq>the experience also showed him how macro trends out of control of the startup can make an idea unfeasible. “The fundamentals of what you were going to build are not true anymore,” he said.</bq> Translation: not enough morons-with-too-much-money around anymore. <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-06-08/don-t-squeeze-the-shorts" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Don't Squeeze the Shorts</a> <bq>The way to deal with short sellers is to run a good business that makes a lot of money; this will make your stock go up, and the shorts will take care of themselves. Short sellers don’t matter! They can’t hurt you! At most, they can make your stock go down a bit, but your business does not depend on your stock price; your business depends on your business. Just do your business! Ignore the shorts.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://apenwarr.ca/log/20230605" source="" author="Apen Warr">Tech debt metaphor maximalism</a> <bq>A family that takes on high-interest credit card debt for a visit to Disneyland is wasting money. If you think you can pay it off in a year, you'll pay 20%-ish interest for that year for no reason. You can instead save up for a year and get the same gratification next year without the 20% surcharge.</bq> Unless someone in the family is terminally ill. <bq>Some people argue that you should almost never plan to pay off your mortgage: typical mortgage interest rates are lower than the rates you'd get long-term from investing in the S&P. The advice that you should "always buy the biggest home you can afford" is often perversely accurate, especially if you believe property values will keep going up. And subject to your risk tolerance and lock-in preferences.</bq> Of course you consider only your own needs, not whether it's a good idea from society's point of view. <bq>There are many imperfect rules of thumb for how much debt is healthy. (Remember, some debt is very often healthy, and only people who don't understand debt rush to pay it all off as fast as they can.)</bq> This once again assumes that you're optimizing your usage pattern to maximize stuff and wealth for yourself only. If being as wealthy as possible is your number-one priority, then, sure, go ahead and play by whatever rules society tells you to. You want to win, after all. And, of course, make sure someone else loses. <bq>[...] you could buy a $200k house: a $100k down payment and a $100k mortgage at, say, 3% (fairly common back in 2021), which means $3k/year in interest. But your $200k house goes up by 5% = $10k/year. Now you have an annual gain of $10k - $3k = $7k, much more than the $5k you were making before, with the same money. Sweet!</bq> Yeah, but you can't use that money. Unless you borrow more. It's equity, not liquid. <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/09/brawling-on-the-brink/" source="CounterPunch" author="Victor Grossman">Brawling on the Brink</a> <bq>Starting June 12th, 250 war planes from 20 countries, including F-35 jet fighters manned by 10,000 soldiers from the USA will be roaring and zooming over East German fields and forests. The largest air maneuvers in NATO history will be to “test how quickly American war planes can be deployed to Europe and to practice “the defense of NATO air space.” That explains why the maneuver is named “Air Defender 2023”. Can any sane person read this item without foreboding – and fear of where such a “defense exercise” can be leading?</bq> Citing Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: <bq>[...] it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us. I know that the American men and women in uniform are always prepared to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.</bq> All said with a straight face. My God, the indoctrination. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/06/as-us-considers-reoccupying-haiti-history-shows-occupation-is-the-root-problem/" source="Scheer Post" author="Danny Shaw">As US Considers Reoccupying Haiti, History Shows Occupation Is the Root Problem</a> <bq>Inflation is over 50 percent. There is no gasoline in the pumps and the cost on the black market is $15 per gallon. Food is scarce. According to the World Food Program, a total of 4.9 million Haitians — nearly half the population – do not have enough to eat, and 1.8 million are facing emergency levels of food insecurity.</bq> <bq>Haiti’s challenge has been the opposite, the over-involvement, or complete domination, by foreign powers of Haitian geopolitics. Only forces as arrogant as the G7 heads of government would self-anoint themselves as “the international community.” Haitians know them as the Core Group. Author Cécile Accilien explains the Core Group as largely made up of white ambassadors from the U.S., Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and the European Union who are viewed by many people inside and outside of Haiti as a secretive colonial and imperialist alliance meddling in Haitian political affairs.</bq> <bq>The Core Group has always been an anti-nation building global gang. Their “responsibility and compulsion” never had anything to do with noble, selfless motives as their corporate mouthpieces claim. They are motivated by power and profits. It is well documented that for over a century now the U.S. has coordinated the repression of Indigenous leftists across Haiti and the Americas to then parachute down crumbs on the populations in the form of charity programs led by missionaries and nongovernmental organizations.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=98946" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Annalena Zero Points</a> <bq>Unsere von den Medien so enthusiastisch gefeierte Außenministerin Annalena Baerbock hat im Ausland einfach keine Fortune. In China tapste sie in bester Kolonialdamen-Manier gänzlich undiplomatisch von einem Fettnäpfchen ins nächste und wurde dafür von asiatischen Kommentatoren belächelt . Verständlich. „Bigmouth strikes again“. Wer die Chinesen dafür kritisiert, „Russlands Krieg zu unterstützen“ und zeitgleich den Beschluss fasst, schwere Kampfpanzer in die Ukraine zu liefern, ist nicht gerade glaubwürdig.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/06/communist-party-the-confession-film-artur-london-soviet-history/" source="Jacobin" author="Chris Maisano">The Party Was Not Always Right</a> <bq>London’s arrest and persecution was a terrible trauma for him, shattering the party’s identification with all that was good and true. Nevertheless, he continued to insist, “I never confused the Inquisition of Torquemada with Christianity, and I won’t confuse Stalin, Beria, and that whole group with Socialism . . . it didn’t make me lose faith in authentic Socialism.”</bq> <bq>Historian S. A. Smith, who is sympathetic to the motivations that drove the October Revolution, concludes in Russia in Revolution :<bq>Lenin was the architect of the party’s monopoly on power; it was he who subordinated the soviets and trade unions to the party; he who would not tolerate those who thought differently; he who dismantled many civil and political freedoms; he who crushed the socialist opposition.</bq></bq> <bq>Socialists looking to the Communist movement for a usable past would do well to heed C. Wright Mills’s advice to the young radicals of his day: “Read Lenin again (be careful).” Watch The Confession, too.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/06/patrick-lawrence-first-there-were-neo-nazis-then-there-were-no-nazis-then-there-were/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">First There Were Neo-Nazis, Then There Were No Nazis, Then There Were</a> <bq>Think about that. The presence of Nazi elements in the AFU is not a worry. The worry is merely whether clear signs of Nazi sympathies might cause some members of the Western alliance to decide they no longer want to support Nazi elements in the AFU. I am reminded of that Public Broadcasting news segment last year, wherein a provincial governor is featured with a portrait of Bandera behind him. PBS simply blurred the photograph and ran the interview with another of the courageous, admirable Ukrainians to which we are regularly treated.</bq> <bq>Then came the Russian intervention, and Poof! There are no more neo–Nazis in Ukraine. There are only these errant images that are of no special account. And to assert there are neo–Nazis in Ukraine—to have some semblance of memory and a capacity to judge what is before one’s eyes—“plays into Russian propaganda,”</bq> <bq>But of course. SS insignia, Wehrmacht iconography: Seen it everywhere people admire super-effective war machines. Remember this logic next time some liberal flamer proposes to persecute a MAGA supporter who partakes of this “subculture.”</bq> Even if we grant these media the luxury of not being outright manipulative liars, they are at least terrible reporters, subject to every confabulating instinct, subconscious foible, and psychological dead-end or möbius strip simultaneously. <bq>Forget about bombs, missiles, gore, the fog of war, courageous sergeants, trench stench, grenades, or any of the other horrors of battle. Gibbons–Neff’s big problems as he pretends to cover the Ukraine war are maintaining access, getting the Kyiv gatekeepers’ permission to go someplace, and avoiding annoying the regime’s authorities.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/dr-cornel-west-announces-he-is-running" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Dr. Cornel West Announces He is Running for President</a> <bq>I never want to downplay the least vulnerable in our society — our gay brothers, lesbian sisters, trans, Black poor, brown poor, Indigenous poor. They are more viciously attacked by the neofascists than the neoliberals. But the neoliberals capitulate to the attack. I would never say they’re identical, but I would say poor and working people are still getting crushed over and over again.”</bq> They are not the same, but the effect of their policies is the same. For the people on the ground, there is no salient difference. Believing that their espoused policies---enthusiastic support vs. verbal resistance followed by continuous capitulation---amount to a difference is what has kept these idiots in power for too long. They're just two different ways of getting the same thing. You're either going to get ridden rough and told you deserve it because you're lazy and stupid and worthless ... or you get a drink first, then get ridden rough, then gaslighted into thinking it's your own fault, followed by reminders that you've got it better than with the obviously abusive guy. What a world. <bq>[...] the same is true now in apartheid-like conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. We can do that without in any way falling prey to one of the more vicious ideologies of the last two thousand years, which is the hatred of Jews. We don’t have a minute to engage in any kind of anti-Jewish hatred or anti-Jewish sentiment, but at the same time we don’t have a minute to turn our backs to the suffering of Palestinians tied to U.S. foreign policy that always looks away from their suffering, looks away from their social misery, looks away from the murders taking place, looks away from the houses that are crushed, looks away from the land that is taken, and so forth.</bq> <bq>He quoted the sociologist Max Weber:<bq>What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.</bq></bq> <bq>[...] as Nelson Mandela said,<bq>And then when you achieve the impossible, everyone said 'Oh well that was inevitable.'</bq></bq> <bq>We on the left are concerned about working people even when they themselves are xenophobic. We can steal some of the thunder from the neofascists. We’re not in any way putting up with the xenophobia. No way! Not one minute! The anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim — I have no patience with that whatsoever! But I’ll go straight into Trump country and tell all those white working brothers and sisters that I am deeply concerned about their wounds and their inability to gain access to the resources that they ought to have as citizens. We cannot defeat fascism with glib milquetoast neoliberalism. We’ve got to get at the roots of it.”</bq> <bq>Cornel, like the Biblical prophets, is driven by an unshakeable belief that our brief sojourn on the planet is validated by what we do for those the world has cast aside. His is not only a political campaign, but a calling.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/does-anyone-believe-american-propaganda" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">Does Anyone Believe American Propaganda Anymore?</a> <bq>The new piece this week by Shane Harris and Souad Mekhennet cites a “European intelligence report” obtained from one of the “online friends” of Teixeira. How’s that for source management? Get a guy turned in, smear him as a dangerous gun-toting lunatic, then use his information.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/04/15-reasons-why-mass-media-employees-act-like-propagandists/" source="" author="Caitlin Johnstone">15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists</a> <bq>The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan</bq> <bq>The uniformity is so complete and so consistent that when people first begin noticing these patterns it’s common for them to assume the media must be controlled by a small, centralized authority much like the state media of more openly authoritarian governments. But if you actually dig into the reasons why the media act the way they act, that isn’t really what you find. Instead, what you find is a much larger, much less centralized network of factors which tips the scales of media coverage to the advantage of the US empire and the forces which benefit from it. Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret, but most of it is essentially out in the open.</bq> <bq>“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” In a 1997 essay , Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.”</bq> <bq>[...] if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”</bq> <bq>“No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.”</bq> <bq>Depriving challenging interlocutors of access funnels all the prized news media material to the most obsequious brown-nosers in the press, because if you’ve got too much dignity to pitch softball questions and not follow up on ridiculous politician-speak word salad non-answers there’s always someone else who will. This creates a dynamic where power-serving bootlickers are elevated to the top of the mainstream media, while actual journalists who try to hold power to account go unrewarded.</bq> <bq>In Totalitarian Dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In Free Democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.</bq> <bq>[...] just so happens to make the government look good and/or make its enemies look bad and/or manufacture consent for this or that agenda. This of course amounts to simply publishing press releases for the White House, the Pentagon or the US intelligence cartel, since you’re just uncritically repeating some unverified thing that an official handed you and disguising it as news reporting.</bq> <bq>Another twist on the intelligence cartel “scoop” dynamic is the way government officials will feed information to a reporter from one outlet, and then reporters from another outlet will contact those very same officials and ask them if the information is true, and then all outlets involved will have a public parade on Twitter proclaiming that the report has been “confirmed” [...]</bq> <bq>Class interests dance with the behavior of journalists in multiple ways because, as both Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have noted, journalists in the mass media are increasingly coming not from working-class backgrounds but from wealthy families, and have degrees from expensive elite universities.</bq> <bq>The Quincy Institute has a new study out which found that a staggering 85 percent of the think tanks cited by the news media in their reporting on US military support for Ukraine have been paid by literal Pentagon contractors.</bq> <bq>Western journalists cite empire-funded think tanks because they generally align with the empire-approved lines that a mass media stenographer knows they can advance their career by pushing, and they do it because doing so gives them an official-looking “expert” “source” to cite while proclaiming more expensive war machinery needs to be sent to this or that part of the world [...]</bq> <bq>The fact that war profiteers are allowed to actively influence media, politics and government bodies through think tanks, advertising and corporate lobbying is one of the most insane things happening in our society today. And not only is it allowed, it’s seldom even questioned.</bq> <bq>There were no conditions which gave rise to Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s which aren’t also with us today. Cold war? That’s happening today. Hot war? That’s happening today. Dissident groups? Happening today. A mad scramble to secure US domination and capital on the world stage? Happening today. The CIA wasn’t dismantled and nobody went to prison. All that’s changed is that news media now have more things for government operatives to toy with, like online media and social media.</bq> <bq>The mass media also commonly bring in “experts” to provide opinions on war and weapons who are direct employees of the military-industrial complex, without ever explaining that massive conflict of interest to their audience.</bq> <h>Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/05/plastics-recycling-failure-microplastics-pollution-study/" source="Mother Jones" author="Matt Simon">Plastics Recycling Is Far Worse Than We Thought</a> <bq>“The recycling centers are potentially making things worse by actually creating microplastics faster and discharging them into both water and air,” says Deonie Allen, a coauthor of the paper and a microplastics researcher at the University of Birmingham. “I’m not sure we can technologically engineer our way out of that problem.”</bq> <bq>[...] as plastic products have gotten more complex—multilayered pouches for baby food, for instance—they’ve gotten harder to recycle. The industry’s literal dirty secret is that mountains of plastic waste are being shipped to economically developing countries, where the stuff is often burned in open pits, poisoning surrounding communities and sending still more microplastics and chemicals into the atmosphere. If recycling was actually effective in its current form, the industry wouldn’t have to keep producing exponentially more plastic —it’s now churning out a trillion pounds a year.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/06/patriarchy-traditional-multigenerational-wealth-privilege-feminism/" source="Jacobin" author="Kristen R. Ghodsee">To Smash the Patriarchy, We Need to Get Specific About What It Means</a> <bq>In the United States, the 1907 Expatriation Act meant that American women who married immigrant husbands in cities like New York and Boston automatically lost their citizenship and had to apply for naturalization when their foreign husbands became eligible. The provisions of this act weren’t fully repealed until 1940.</bq> I'm speechless. <bq>In Canada as a whole, where white settlers once imposed patrilineal naming conventions on matrilineal indigenous peoples to help “regulate [the] division of property among heirs in a way that conformed with European, not Indigenous, property laws,” the 2008 to 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission allowed for the free restoration of indigenous names, including mononyms (the ability not to have a surname at all).</bq> <bq>Of those parents who did not work outside of the home in the United States in 2016, 78 percent of mothers reported they didn’t work because they were taking care of their home and family. For women, who generally earn less than men and who societies expect to provide more unpaid care work, it makes rational sense in economies with few social safety nets to embrace what social scientists call “hypergamy,” or the desire to marry up and find a partner who can and will support them.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/complexity-is-good-actually" source="SubStack" author="Freddie de Boer">Complexity is Good, Actually</a> <bq>You can wash your hands of nuance all you like; you live in a world that will always defy your clumsy, reductive efforts. Life’s complexity is irreducible.</bq> <bq>Complexity is what makes life interesting, and complexity is what makes art enjoyable. We have brains that have developed an exquisite ability to parse complicated, multivariate information - the fact that you are reading these words right now and understanding them is a miracle of raw processing - and we crave the opportunity to exercise them.</bq> Complexity and effort are what makes art art. It's why when an AI can churn out a million beautiful things per hour, they cease to be beautiful or interesting. It's why cookie-cutter beauty, which is getting easier and easier to achieve---at least digitally---means it matters less and less. <bq>We inject our art with symbolism and reference in order to connect with it on a deeper and more satisfying level.</bq> <bq>The modern American cult of therapy takes a useful and necessary medical practice, meant for specific contexts and purposes, and generalizes its habits to the entirety of human life. Its folklore exists to justify what insecure people can’t justify for themselves. Narcissistic personality disorder is thought to occur in less than 1% of adults, and yet every ex-boyfriend in this country suffers from it. Curious! But not actually curious, given that an army of opportunists have built careers out of telling people just that kind of story - everyone you don’t like is a sociopath; every time you don’t get everything you want, you’re experiencing trauma; every conflict you get into, about anything, ever, is evidence of a toxic personality in the other person. Are you sure your boss is just another human being with legitimate pressures and needs, and your disagreements the product of the inevitable friction that results from a universe where friction is inevitable? Or could they be operating under the influence of the Dark Triad??? Sure. Why the fuck not. This is what therapeutic rhetoric has become, in this culture, an excuse architecture for every spare selfish impulse you ever have.</bq> <bq>The notion that human relationships fall simplistically and reliably onto a linear spectrum of “positive” and “negative” is so fundamentally contrary to my lived experience that I don’t really know how to begin here. We have multivariate, inscrutable, often unknowable personalities; these personalities are shaped by innumerable Byzantine internal forces and by a relentless stream of formative experiences. The notion that any two personalities are going to interact with each other in some kindergarten polarity of positivity and negativity seems farcical, just mathematically.</bq> <bq>I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but we are a mortal species with finite lives that evolved by chance on an indifferent rock in a universe devoid of transcendent meaning, cursed to watch those we love die around us until we die in turn. We exist on a planet where our genetic endowment compels us to be selfish in pursuit of food, sex, and status, and there are 7 billion of us, all competing for limited resources and jockeying for status in competitions that are often inherently zero-sum. I’m going to go ahead and suggest that never having a single ambivalent interaction is perhaps an unrealistic expectation for anyone.</bq> <bq>Why are mixed feelings unhealthy? In a world this complicated, with relationships that are so full of interlocking and unconscious dynamics, aren’t mixed feelings unavoidable and ultimately benign? And why are we assuming that our “frenemies” are the ones who have to change? Is there really no chance at all that we’re the ones who should change?</bq> <bq>What breaks the tie? Why? What are the rules here? This whole world of pop psychology insists that the individual is sacrosanct, that anyone who deals with insecurity or anxiety or self-doubt is the victim of injustice, and they are entitled to do whatever they want to self-actualize. But what do we do when two people are trying to self-actualize in ways that conflict with each other?</bq> <bq>He was, like me, a love-it-or-hate-it kind of guy, one who inspired intense feelings and could be very difficult at times. But that’s my favorite sort of person, the kind who isn’t blandly likable and safe to know, but rather extracts a cost to be close to and then repays that cost with rare and complicated gifts of personality.</bq> <bq>[...] the purpose of human life is not to feel comfortable all the time, bad and dark feelings are an essential part of being a person, and while you are entitled to having your physical self protected, your material needs met, and your basic autonomy respected, you aren’t entitled to never feel pain, sadness, insecurity, anxiety, self-doubt, or that you’re “invalid.” Society could never accommodate such an entitlement, and it’s a bad goal anyway.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-reckoning-of-time" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The Reckoning of Time</a> <bq>One might also say, rather more boldly, that seventeenth-century clockworks amounted to an early anticipation of another well-known revolution two hundred years later, as they was [sic] effectively the first machine of the industrial era, whose products were the hours and minutes and seconds that would make all the rest possible. You can’t get canned for showing up at the factory five minutes late if the owners don’t have a “minute machine” on hand to inform them of your tardiness. We tend to think today that clocks don’t so much “make” minutes as they do [sic] mark them out. But where then were all the minutes before precision timekeeping became a ubiquitous feature of human society? The ancients did not speak of them any more than they spoke of fuel, data, ADHD, or queerness.</bq> <bq>The girls did not know what Facebook was. It came up in conversation that I was from Canada (which was true enough at the time, I guess). The girls did not know what Canada was. I had the distinct impression that, if we had pressed further, they would not have known what the United States were, what an airplane was, what century we were in. When we left I was upset. It’s a duty to keep informed about the world! I said to my beloved. What if a war were to break out (which already at the time seemed a looming possibility in these parts)? What would they do, if they had no real knowledge of what the relevant issues are, of who the various parties are to the conflict? “They would pray,” my beloved said. That’s absurd! I replied.</bq> No more absurd than anything else we do. Especially when confronted with helplessness. Once you let go of the notion of self-preservation at all costs, many decisions become easier. <bq>It would be a mistake to suppose that Sigbert had taken a stand on the particular merits on each side of the conflict between the Mercians and the Angles, or even that he had any views on war as such. He had simply removed himself from the form of life that concerns itself with war and other mundane affairs. This is a move we can barely recognize today.</bq> <bq>Yet another way we might understand modernity is as the period in which our conception of duty becomes both universalized and uniformized. The human good is rendered into a one-size-fits-all outfit, and the expectations of a human life are, to the extent possible (to the extent that the reality of the differences between us does not spontaneously resist our efforts), standardized across all cases.</bq> <h>Technology</h> <img src="{att_link}201h_2_battery_left.jpg" href="{att_link}201h_2_battery_left.jpg" align="none" caption="201h (8.5 days) @ 2% battery left" scale="50%"> I had a week during which I only used my M1 Mac very occasionally. What was amazing was that it was right there for me, providing its 20-22 hours of running time without wasting energy doing a whole bunch of stuff I'd never asked it to do. This is how a notebook should be. Energy-efficient. Quiet. Powerful. In that order. <hr> <a href="http://blog.cr.yp.to/20230609-turboboost.html" source="The cr.yp.to blog" author="Daniel J. Bernstein">How to perpetuate security problems</a> <bq>The HertzBleed paper refers to various SIKE details as part of its demo working backwards from visible timings to secret data, but there are many papers demonstrating how to work backwards from power consumption to secrets in a much wider range of computations. The only safe presumption is that all information about power consumption necessary for those attacks is also leaked by overclocking.</bq> <bq>Your constant-time cryptographic library might be vulnerable if is susceptible to secret-dependent power leakage, and this leakage extends to enough operations to induce secret-dependent changes in CPU frequency. Future work is needed to systematically study what cryptosystems can be exploited via the new Hertzbleed side channel.</bq> <bq>Is it possible for a narrative to turn into an article of faith shared among researchers, funding agencies, and journalists, influencing choices of research directions and protective actions, without any of the believers scientifically evaluating whether the narrative is correct? Maybe even with the narrative being dangerously inaccurate?</bq> <bq>Programmers who rewrote their software to take advantage of vector instructions and multiple cores gained more and more speed—but, again, software rewrites take time. Unoptimized non-vectorized single-core software didn't immediately disappear.</bq> <bq>Meanwhile I'm rarely waiting for my laptop, even with it running at very low speed. I'm happy with the laptop staying cool and quiet. Yes, I know there are some people using monster "laptops" where I'd use a server, but are they really getting "extreme" benefits from Turbo Boost?</bq> <bq>The 2H2B paper's "conclusions" section draws an analogy between overclocking attacks and Spectre. Overclocking attacks are, however, vastly different from Spectre in the range of protective actions available to OS distributors and end users today. All of my overclockable servers and laptops have simple end-user configuration options to turn overclocking off (and, in almost all cases, options to set even lower frequencies), whereas speculative execution is baked into CPU pipelines.</bq> <bq>Overclocking produces random heat spikes, random fan-noise spikes, and, according to the best evidence available, random early hardware death. Yes, cryptographers love randomness, but most people find these effects annoying. Meanwhile the speedups from overclocking are mostly in software that hasn't been optimized—which tends to be software that doesn't have much impact on the user experience to begin with.</bq> <bq>Maximum doesn't reflect the overall user experience: for example, this many-core build-and-test process is obtaining only a 6% speedup from overclocking. Maybe the user still thinks that a 6% speedup justifies consuming 24% more energy. Maybe somebody else is paying the power bill.</bq> <bq>Even if everybody starts with a shared understanding that there's an important security problem at hand, the decomposition of responsibility can easily produce paralysis.</bq> <bq>The simplest way out of the finger-pointing logjam is to observe that turning off Turbo Boost etc. stops attacks immediately, whereas asking for masked software leaves users exposed for much longer.</bq> <bq>It's not that turning off Turbo Boost eliminates the implementation risk; see, e.g., TAO's discussion of crystals. The point is simply that we shouldn't be skipping this defense in favor of a defense that's much harder to audit.</bq>