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Links and Notes for July 21st, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h>COVID-19</h> <h>Economy & Finance</h> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/new-york-using-ai-to-detect-subway-fare-evasion.html" author="Bruce Schneier" source="">New York Using AI to Detect Subway Fare Evasion</a> <bq>If we spent just one-tenth of the effort we spend prosecuting the poor on prosecuting the rich, it would be a very different world.</bq> Amen, brother. <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2023/07/27/brickbat-getting-slammed/" author="Charles Oliver" source="Reason">Brickbat: Getting Slammed</a> <bq>Yuba City, California, officials have agreed to pay close to $20 million to settle a lawsuit by a man left paralyzed after being slammed to the ground by police after a traffic stop. According to his lawyer, Gregory Gross cannot walk or use his hands and now requires 24-hour-a-day nursing care. Police had stopped Gross for suspicion of drunk driving and causing a slow-speed collision in which no one was injured. Police bodycam video showed Gross, already in handcuffs, crying out in pain as an officer twisted his arms. It later showed officers slam him to the ground and hold him facedown on the ground. And it showed officers mocked him as he called out that he could not breathe and could not feel his legs.</bq> He had to sue them to get money. They should have apologized and offered to take care of him for the rest of his life. <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/jon_reynolds/2023/07/25/oppenheimer-reignites-debunked-arguments-in-support-of-nuking-whole-cities/" author="Jon Reynolds" source="Antiwar.com">Oppenheimer Reignites Debunked Arguments in Support of Nuking Whole Cities</a> <bq>[...] genocidal Nazis found themselves noosed up and swinging by their necks, and such may have also been the case had the US lost the war after instantaneously vaporizing over a hundred thousand Japanese citizens with atomic weapons in the span of roughly 72 hours. Our “debates” around whether the bombs were necessary – let alone a war crime – are a sick privilege only afforded to us because we came out on top, with minimal credit for that victory owed to the use and development of nuclear weapons.</bq> <bq>Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled a meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson, where, "I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."</bq> <bq>[...] the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, “based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”</bq> <bq>Admiral William Halsey, who participated in the US offensive against the Japanese home islands in the final months of the war, publicly stated in 1946 that "the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment." The Japanese, he noted, had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia “long before" the bomb was used. Yet, such peace efforts were ignored, and instead, Japan became a showcase for the United States to demonstrate its new power to the Russians: “If the bomb won the war, then the perception of US military power would be enhanced, US diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase, and US security would be strengthened,” writes Ward Wilson over at Foreign Policy. “The $2 billion spent to build it would not have been wasted. If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced.”</bq> <bq>[...] there were no Japanese civilians featured in Oppenheimer, nor any footage of the bombings. Instead, the film lazily regurgitates the tired narrative that these cities had to be nuked to end the war, with director Christopher Nolan perhaps spending more time focusing on creating a nuclear explosion without CGI than effectively demonstrating why using these weapons was entirely unnecessary.</bq> <bq>In the absence of refusing to wholeheartedly condemn the use of nuclear weapons, we are left with moral ambiguity around their use. Sure, these weapons might be terrible, but maybe, sometimes, it’s okay to use them. And if we can be propagandized into believing that using nuclear weapons against cities is sometimes necessary, the limits are truly endless on what else we can be propagandized into supporting.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/26/kpcx-j26.html" author="Andre Damon" source="WSWS">New York Times admits, then covers up, massive Ukraine casualties</a> <bq>Just one month ago, Times columnist Bret Stephens mused of the offensive bringing a “crushing and unmistakable defeat” for Russia, while Washington Post columnist Max Boot quoted General David Petraeus as stating that he expects “the Ukrainians to achieve significant breakthroughs and accomplish much more than most analysts are predicting.” It has produced something else: A nightmare on the scale of the First World War, in which whole units are wiped out, replaced with conscripts, then wiped out again, then told to assault well-defended trenches.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/21/seymour-hersh-ordinary-people-by-the-millions/" source="Scheer Post" author="Seymour Hersh">Ordinary People by the Millions: interview with Tom Frank</a> <bq>Put both of those strategies in effect for fifty years with slight evolutionary changes (The New Democrats! The War on Christmas!), drag the nation through various disasters for working people and endless triumphs for the white-collar elite, and you get the politics we have today.</bq> <bq>The Democrats now inhabit a world where they are moral superstars, people of incredibly exalted goodness. The media is aligned with them like we’ve never seen before, so are the most powerful knowledge industries, so is academia, so is the national security establishment. And so are, increasingly, the affluent and highly educated neighborhoods of this country. The Democrats are now frequently competitive with the Republicans in terms of fundraising, sometimes outraising and outspending the GOP, which is new and intoxicating for them.</bq> <bq>Trump’s success was made possible by Democratic betrayal of those same voters. Every time some Democrat went before an audience of industrial workers and told them they had to get a college degree or learn to code, they brought this shit on. And while Biden has worked hard to reposition the Democrats with his middle-class-Joe persona, I doubt it will be enough.</bq> Biden a man of the people? Are you fucking kidding me? Do people actually believe that? <bq>[Clinton] remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on.</bq> <bq>The first is the familiar professionalism model: Put a bunch of really smart people in charge and have them fix everything. That’s the model of the Obama administration, and Clinton before that, and McNamara’s Pentagon before that, and going back to the ’50s before that. This model has all sorts of problems. For example, it assumes that those really smart people have no interests or biases of their own and that they will always act on behalf of the public. This is wrong in theory, and I think we can now say with confidence that it has failed in reality as well.</bq> It's the culture, though. It values only helping yourself and not helping others. Other people's suffering is their own fault because the system, while not perfect, is very clearly good, if not the best we could hope for. That's the story. The underlying tenets cannot support anything like the public good, not for long, and not seriously, because there are overriding priorities. Value and power must flow to those who already have it. Politics sucks because the people suck -- they've been programmed to suck, from birth. Anyone who, by some miracle, doesn't suck, is swimming upstream. Goodness is an unexpected side-effect of the drive to profit and elite power-consolidation. <bq>When faced with its great challenge in the global financial crisis—the moment of maximum opportunity for change—this strategy gave us no daring or imaginative reforms but plenty of bailouts and rescues for the well-connected friends of the professionals in charge. Its great aspiration was the status-quo-ante.</bq> <bq>FDR did not care if his old classmates hated him.</bq> <bq>[...] as newspapers shrivel and die all over America, the handful of surviving news organizations have become increasingly similar to one another, staffed with the same kind of well-graduated people who see everything the same way. Naturally enough, they read like propaganda.</bq> <bq>[...] being an empire rubs a lot of Americans the wrong way, with our democratic instincts.</bq> They like the benefits, but don't know where they come from. I was just telling some people here that if they want to be rid of empire, they may have to lose a few privileges---those that actually trickle all the way down to them---but it would better for everyone in the long run, not to mention being morally and ethically the correct thing to do. <bq>You will wait for years for our enlightened leadership class in DC to decide all on their own that imperialism is a bad idea, and I am sorry to say they are going to disappoint you every time. They like being an empire. They aren’t all that concerned about climate change either, except insofar as they can use it as a weapon against those damned Republicans.</bq> Yup. They just want to in charge, experience the level of comfort they feel they deserve, and don't really believe it could end for them. And they absolutely don't care about anyone else, not in any meaningful way, not if it means sacrificing anything that would impinge upon their lifestyle, their perceived security, now or into the future, and for their children, whom they will coddle into only being able to survive in a world of privilege, a world that will necessarily continue to incorporate empire, massive inequality, and massive injustice. I got mine, Jack. I deserve it. I've worked for it. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/20/the-world-needs-a-new-development-theory-that-does-not-trap-the-poor-in-poverty/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">The World Needs a New Development Theory That Does Not Trap the Poor in Poverty</a> <bq>No development is possible these days, as most of the poorer nations are in the grip of a permanent debt crisis. That is why the Sustainable Development Report 2023 calls for a revision of the credit rating system, which paralyses the ability of countries to borrow money (and when they are able to borrow, it is at rates significantly higher than those given to richer countries). Furthermore, the report calls on the banking system to revise liquidity structures for poorer countries, ‘especially regarding sovereign debt, to forestall self-fulfilling banking and balance-of-payments crises’.</bq> <bq>The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that ‘the public debt of developing countries, excluding China, reached $11.5 trillion in 2021’. That same year, developing countries paid $400 billion to service their debt – more than twice the amount of official development aid they received.</bq> <bq>[...] the facts of the neocolonial structure of the world economy: developing countries, with rich holdings of resources, are unable to earn just prices for their exports, which means that they do not accumulate sufficient wealth to industrialise with their own population’s well-being in mind, nor can they finance the social goods required for their population.</bq> <bq>[...] the report itself makes an interesting point: that the war in Ukraine has driven 23 million people into hunger, a number that pales in comparison to the other drivers of hunger—such as the impact of commercialized food markets and the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2011 report from World Development Movement called “Broken Markets: How Financial Market Regulation Can Help Prevent Another Global Food Crisis” showed that “financial speculators now dominate the [food] market, holding over 60 percent of some markets compared to 12 percent 15 years ago.”</bq> <bq>The UN’s Guterres went to the Security Council to announce , “We are doing everything possible to… ease the serious fertilizer market crunch that is already affecting farming in West Africa and elsewhere. If the fertilizer market is not stabilized, next year could bring a food supply crisis. Simply put, the world may run out of food.” On June 8, 2023, Ukrainian forces blew up a section of the Togliatti-Odesa pipeline in Kharkiv, increasing the tension over this dispute. Other than the Black Sea ports, Russia has no other safe way to export its ammonia-based fertilizers.</bq> Ukrainians are a bunch of slack-jawed hillbillies who continually attack Russian infrastructure whose loss in no way impacts Russian citizens but rather severely endangers citizens of other countries. It is clear that they don't care at all if a bunch of Africans starve, counting on the fact that Russia will expend energy trying to prevent that eventuality. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/19/why-the-ukraine-conflict-will-unravel-nato-and-biden/" source="Scheer Post" author="Radhika Desai">Why the Ukraine Conflict Will Unravel NATO and Biden</a> <bq>[...] the US ‘aided’ Europe during the two World Wars on a more or less commercial basis, vastly increasing its economic and financial clout at the expense of ‘allies’. Ruinously for them, it demanded repayment of its war loans after the First World War and, equally ruinously, demanded policy alignment after the Second.</bq> <bq>With its aims unchanged even as its capacities declined, the US had to thwart such European impulses. It succeeded with its military intervention in Yugoslavia, chiefly by demonstrating the effectiveness of its superior air power and this success ensured that henceforth eastward EU expansion would normally be accompanied by NATO expansion. However, this was no stable arrangement.</bq> <bq>Knowing that Europe, already reluctant to go to war with Russia, would be even more reluctant (for sound economic reasons) to join any anti-Chinese venture, Biden sought so resolutely and completely to sunder Europe from Russia and bind it to the US through the Ukraine war that it would have no choice but to go along with the US on China later.</bq> <bq>Sanctions have generally been confined those that hurt the least, leaving so many western companies still operating in Russia one wonders what the fuss is all about. Weapons supplies have focused on those that are easiest to spare, often obsolete, leaving Ukraine with a ‘ Big Zoo of NATO equipment ’ that is hard to deploy or repair efficiently.</bq> <bq>[...] despite the billions in military assistance, despite exhausting Western weapons stockpiles, despite discovering the quantitative and qualitative limits to Western weapons production capacities notwithstanding astronomically expensive military industrial complexes, despite ever more deadly weapons now including cluster bombs, despite reliance on neo-Nazi battalions, despite US and Ukrainian willingness to incur macabre levels of Ukrainian and mercenary casualties, it has been clear for some time that Ukraine is losing and has no prospect of winning.</bq> <bq>[...] not only should Ukraine demonstrate progress on requisite reforms, but it should conclude a peace treaty with Russia before it can join NATO, a point repeated more than one by Jens Stoltenberg at Vilnius.</bq> <bq>The US has only military might to offer allies. So, Biden’s impending military failure in Ukraine is likely to prove the effective undoing of NATO. If the US cannot ensure military victory, its utility to Europe can only be limited. And if Biden’s has failed in this intermediate Russian stage, it can hardly go onto its final, Chinese one.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/19/patrick-lawrence-anything-anything-anything-to-avoid-debating-r-f-k-jr/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Anything Anything Anything To Avoid Debating R.F.K. Jr.</a> <bq>The Atlantic headlined its take-down of Kennedy, in unstated contempt, “The First MAGA Democrat.” What kind of people are they who find repellent the thought of dismantling the imperium and reviving this broken nation? Answer: People who think being liberal Democrats is more important than being Americans–or being, indeed, human.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/15/real-change-is-impossible-while-our-world-is-shrouded-in-secrecy/" source="" author="Caitlin Johnstone">Real Change Is Impossible While Our World Is Shrouded In Secrecy</a> <bq>“We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it’s all bankrupt,” Assange said. “And the reason it’s all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don’t know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis?</bq> <bq>It’s an extremely important point if you think about it: how can we form theories about how our governments should be operating when we have no idea how they are currently operating? How can a doctor prescribe the correct treatment when he hasn’t yet made a diagnosis?</bq> We can know how we'd like it to work. We just can't know where we are relative to that, so we can't know how much work there is to do. An institution may look democratic, but by which measure? It's like TDD: the implementation may be faking just enough for the test to pass. <bq>[...] how can people know what government policies to vote for if they can’t even clearly see those policies? How can people know what to vote for when everything about their understanding of the world is being actively distorted for the benefit of the powerful?</bq> <bq>You will never see a collective uprising of the masses against their rulers when the dominant message being inserted into everyone’s mind is that everything is basically fine and if you don’t like the way things are you can change it by voting. If the veil of secrecy was ever ripped away from the US empire’s inner workings and everyone could see the full scale of its criminality in the plain light of day you’d probably have immediate open revolution in Washington. Which is precisely why that veil exists.</bq> <bq>None of us individually have the power to rip the veil of secrecy away from the empire, but we do each individually have the ability to call out its lies where they can be seen and help wake people up to the fact that we’re being deceived and manipulated.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/us/chemical-weapons-stockpile.html" source="NY Times" author="Dave Philipps and John Ismay">U.S. Is Destroying the Last of Its Once-Vast Chemical Weapons Arsenal</a> <bq>American armed forces are not known to have used lethal chemical weapons in battle since 1918, though during the Vietnam War they used herbicides like Agent Orange that were harmful to humans.</bq> How the fuck do you write a sentence like that? How in God's name can an educated person say Agent Orange wasn't a chemical weapon? <bq>Other powers have also destroyed their declared stockpiles: Britain in 2007, India in 2009, Russia in 2017 . But Pentagon officials caution that chemical weapons have not been eradicated entirely. A few nations never signed the treaty, and some that did, notably Russia, appear to have retained undeclared stocks.</bq> Gotta get in that evidence-free jab at Russia. <bq>According to the IHS Conflict Monitor, a London-based intelligence collection and analysis service, fighters from the Islamic State used chemical weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2016.</bq> London-based: probably Mi6 or Bellingcat. <bq>“Honestly, I never thought this day would come,” she said. “The military didn’t know if they could trust the people, and the people didn’t know if they could trust the military.”</bq> The military couldn't trust the people? WTF are you on about? Seriously, what does that even mean? There are two authors and who knows how many editors on this article and this is what they've landed on? Ridiculous. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/16/chris-hedges-cornel-west-and-the-campaign-to-end-political-apartheid/" source="Scheer Post" author="Chris Hedges">Cornel West and the Campaign to End Political Apartheid</a> <bq>[...] and Democrats or participate in public debates. Third parties and independents are effectively disenfranchised, although 44 percent of the voting public identify as independent. This discrimination is euphemistically labeled “bipartisanship,” but the correct term, as Theresa Amato writes, is “political apartheid.”</bq> <bq>Amato was the national presidential campaign manager and in-house counsel for Ralph Nader in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Her book “Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny” is a sobering account of our political apartheid, based on her experience in the Nader campaigns</bq> <bq>Those that attempt to challenge the stranglehold of the Republican and Democratic party duopoly are attacked as spoilers, as being naive or egomaniacs. These attacks have already begun against Cornel West, who is running for The Green Party nomination. The underlying assumption behind these attacks is that we have no right to support a candidate who champions our values and concerns.</bq> <bq>The ruling corporate parties are acutely aware that they have little to offer a disillusioned public other than more wars, more austerity, more government control and intrusion into our lives, more tax breaks for Wall Street and corporations</bq> <bq>The only electorally viable candidates outside the two-party structure are the very rich, such as Ross Perot or Michael Bloomberg, who, as Amato writes, are able to “buy their way around the barriers of ballot access restrictions and nonexistent media coverage.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/28/roaming-charges-98/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Fighting Our Real Enemies</a> <bq>87% of actors earn under $26,000, which is the cutoff under the current contract to qualify for health insurance. Meanwhile, Netflix is offering $900,000 for a single AI product manager.</bq> <bq>Teenagers in the US are now 2.5 times more likely to die than in Western Europe and the gap is widening: guns, car crashes, suicides and fentanyl, seem to be the driving forces.</bq> <bq>A Wall Street Journal story on the possible bankruptcy of a drug-maker called Mallinckrodt, which was the largest producer of opioid pills in the U.S. from 2006 to 2014, opens with this graph: “A group of hedge funds is devising a plan to cut off about $1 billion meant to help victims of opioid addiction, opening the way to keep some of the money for themselves.”</bq> Damned skippy. Those addicts don't deserve money. They're addicts! Those hedge-fund managers, though. If they're savvy enough to get money---notice that I didn't write "earn"---legally, then they deserve it. They are the job-creators, innovators, and leading lights of our society. <bq>Joy Alonzo, a professor of pharmacology, gave routine lecture about the opioid crisis to students at the University of Texas Medical School. One of the students in the class, who is the daughter of Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, accused Alonzo of disparaging Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick. Patrick’s chief of staff rang up the college administration to complain and within hours Alonzo was suspended from her job, with university Chancellor John Sharpe sending Patrick’s chief of staff a text saying: “Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week. jsharp” Alonzo, one of the country’s leading experts on opioid addiction, has taught in the system for more than a decade.</bq> <bq>As part of its public school “turnaround” vision plan, the Houston Independent School District–the largest in Texas– is shutting down 28 school libraries and turning them into disciplinary centers.</bq> <bq>As the Sicilian capital of Palermo is encircled by fire, large sections of the city of Catania (pop: 300,000) have gone 48-hours without water or electricity because the cables laid under the roads have melted in 46C heat.</bq> <bq>People keep asking me, as they wipe the sweat from their brow: “Is this the new normal? Is this what summer’s going to be like from now on?” My answer is no. We won’t know what the new normal is until after we’ve stopped burning fossil fuels. And we’re still using more each year than the year before.</bq> <img src="{att_link}global_fossil_fuel_consumption.jpg" href="{att_link}global_fossil_fuel_consumption.jpg" align="none" caption="Global Fossil Fuel Consumption" scale="75%"> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/so-friggin-likely-new-covid-documents" source="Racket News" author="Matt Taibbi">"So Friggin' Likely": New Covid Documents Reveal Unparalleled Media Deception</a> <bq>It has to be reiterated that these documents still don’t prove that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute, or that American scientists were implicated in the episode. What the documents do show, however, is that both scientists and journalists abandoned their traditional mission to keep their minds open and consider all reasonable evidence without fear of political considerations, in favor of a new discipline that openly admitted political factors and sought a “single message” over free-ranging inquiry.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/in-rare-good-news-irs-to-curtail" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">In Rare Good News, IRS to Curtail Home Visits</a> <bq>After yesterday I wondered what the Democratic strategy is for people like me. I assume based on support levels for candidates like RFK, Jr. and Cornel West that a lot of us who grew up voting blue find themselves out of step with current leadership on issues like war and censorship, but it’s worse than that. The Democrats’ pitch now is VOTE FOR US OR YOU’RE TREASONOUS SCUM. They mean it in a literal sense, whether it’s “Russian asset” Tulsi Gabbard or “dangerous anti-Semitic and anti-Asian” RFK or even West, whose campaign manager Jill Stein was just called “almost certainly a Russian agent” by the party’s once-avuncular Clinton-era consigliere, James Carville. [...] In my case, elected officials of one party essentially called me a dangerous money-grubbing FSB whore who should be jailed on television, while the other has now actually done something in response to the IRS showing up at my house. This kind of thing is getting harder to ignore. Thanks, really, to Chairman Jordan, who’s lived up to a friend’s recommendation as someone who’ll be an old-school stickler on certain issues, even if he disagrees with you on others. Why is that such a hard thing for some politicians to be?</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/elon-musk-thought-he-was-buying-the" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">Elon Musk thought he was buying the whole internet</a> <bq>He wants his own WeChat because he wants to control all of human life both on Earth and beyond and he can’t conceive of other websites mattering more than Twitter because Twitter makes him feel good when he posts memes. As far as I’m concerned, Musk is simply doing the billionaire equivalent of when someone breathlessly explains insular Twitter drama at you irl like it’s the news. He thinks Twitter is real life and he’s willing to light as much of his fortune on fire as possible to literally force that to be true. Now matter how cringe it is.</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/07/on-the-road-the-worlds-greatest-travel-destination.html" source="3 Quarks Daily" author="Bill Murray">On the Road: The World's Greatest Travel Destinatio</a> <bq>What I have in mind for my ‘Africa’ is a place that affords a frontline opportunity for real experience of real life. Simple as that. In so much of Europe and much of Asia, what you’ve come to see and do is mediated by reservations, ticket punchers, tour guides, maîtres d’ and so on, putting the experiencer at some separation from the experience — the food in sought-after restaurants, the remnants of the Colosseum or Hadrian’s Wall or Stonehenge, cultural events like bullfights in Madrid, Japanese Sumo wrestling or the changing of various guards before various palaces from Beijing to Stockholm to the Kremlin. These are all surely there, but they are presented to you .</bq> Sure, but there are uncurated experiences available in Europe. You have to go into nature: cycling or hiking. Or simply avoid recommended experiences, trusting to serendipity and finding joy in that which you get rather than focusing on goals---and being disappointed when you fail to achieve everything you've been programmed to desire. This section compares the most touristic of what Europe has to offer with the what is most likely also a heavily mediated experience---this dude didn't seriously stay in Africa without lots of support, but probably thinks he did it all on his own---but feels less like one because Africa has perhaps fewer amenities or doesn't offer them on safari, or whatever. It's honestly hard to tell. <bq>Comparing the grandeur of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, the delight of Thai cuisine or any other product of human endeavor with the experiences that make Africa the greatest travel destination is a category error. It’s not the same thing to equate, under the broad category of ‘travel destinations,’ the bas relief carvings at Angkor Wat to watching an elephant family bathing at the water hole.</bq> But why would you compare them at all? Isn't it all subjective? <bq>[...] places without the intervention of such constructs as “the 25 must-try restaurants in Milan.”</bq> But this is a straw-man argument, comparing the best of Africa with the worst social-media-mediated expectations of Europe. After writing that there's no comparison, he goes on to compare anyway. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/07/the-bear-season-two-review-restaurant-work-greatness-money/" source="Jacobin" author="Eileen Jones">The Bear’s Second Season Is Yet Another Triumph</a> <bq>No doubt the most brilliant people who ever lived in the world were — and are — laboring people who never had a chance to pursue their ambitions or fulfill their talents. Or even discover what their ambitions and talents were, because they were too busy and too tired and too discouraged just trying to make a living.</bq> <bq>These moments are parsed out so sparingly — they’re generally hogged by the rich, who get all the opportunities anyway and can’t appreciate them and face almost no consequences if they fail — that it’s a real tribute to The Bear, capturing the feeling of wonder and ecstasy as the world of possibilities opens up.</bq> <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/opinion/translation-apps-foreign-languages.html" author="John McWhorter" source="NY Times">Are translation apps making the learning of foreign languages obsolete?</a> <bq>In Europe, nine out of 10 students study a foreign language. In the United States, only one in five do. Between 1997 and 2008, the number of American middle schools offering foreign languages dropped from 75 percent to 58 percent. Between 2009 and 2013, one American college closed its foreign language program; between 2013 and 2017, 651 others did the same. At first glance, these statistics look like a tragedy. But I am starting to harbor the odd opinion that maybe they are not. What is changing my mind is technology. Before last Christmas, for example, I was introduced to ChatGPT by someone who had it write an editorial on a certain topic in my “style.” Intriguing enough. But then it was told to translate the editorial into Russian. It did so, instantly — and I have it on good authority that, while hardly artful, the Russian was quite serviceable.</bq> That's exactly the arrogance I expect from an American. Americans have no respect for their own language, so they have no trouble at all considering a <iq>serviceable</iq> translation adequate for the vassals of their empire. I just cannot conceive of what life will be like for the poor empirical subjects who get to mediate their communications through shitty, inadequate apps---and they will be shitty and inadequate, but most people won't notice---even though they can speak English. I'm not sure what the play here is, though. Most people are barely capable of learning their native language---and most fail miserably at that. What's the point of learning a second language even less well? Maybe knowing multiple languages is a form of snobbery. I would, of course, concur, but snobs never think that they're snobs. I think that learning languages teaches you how to learn other things better, it reveals connections between cultures, it allows you to empathize better. I'm not at all surprised to hear that Americans are trying to automate it because the members of this culture---even the best exemplars of it---seems to be congenitally incapable of thinking of anyone but themselves. They buy the myth that they can all have as much of what they happen to like as much as they want and there is no need to consider any repercussions or consequences. If you can afford it, you can have it. I just had a conversation with very nice people who could only conceive of the concept of not using too much water in the shower if you, as in a camp shower, actually had to physically pay directly for it. Otherwise, if the boiler can pump it, it's yours. But I digress. Maybe with languages, it will be sufficient to have a machine write your intent and hope for the best. These people have long since given up on the notion of connecting with strangers, or even considering members of other countries to be human, so they're not giving up much. Right now, the machines mangle everything and will lead to more miscommunication, but when I see how Americans deal with their own culture in English, they're just exporting what they do to each other to the rest of the world. Perhaps it's up to the rest of the world to resist it better. <hr> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/we-cant-afford-to-be-climate-doomers" author="Rebecca Solnit" source="Guardian">We can’t afford to be climate doomers</a> <bq>Stanford engineering professor and renewable energy expert Mark Z Jacobson tweeted the other day, “Given that scientists who study 100% renewable energy systems are unanimous that it can be done why do we hear daily on twitter and everywhere else by those who don’t study such systems that it can’t be done?”</bq> This means nothing. The fact that it is technically possible has been true for decades. We only have to reduce. We don't even need to invent anything. We won't do it. We do not have the systems in place to enact anything approaching climate protection in the most wasteful societies. They will determine what will happen. In fact, an opposite religion has taken such strong hold that even the smartest, most enlightened of the people living there simply can't conceive of a society mediated by anything other than money, can't conceive of limited resources, believe that out of sight is out of mind, drive everywhere in the most wasteful of vehicles, consume, consume, consume, and can't see anything wrong with it. They will drag this fucking boat under the water, completely oblivious to their role in this debacle. We cannot stop them. Everything is working against us. You would have to eliminate all of American culture to save the planet. There is no way to reconcile America as she is with saving the planet. One of them has to go. It will be the planet---because no-one can stop America. It eats everything. It corrodes otherwise intelligent people into espousing the most warped opinions. You can be an Earth-science teacher in a town without drinking water and still talk about luxuriating in 30-minute showers and washing your hair every day. People cannot. Fucking. Get. It. Nothing connects on a personal level. One's own behavior and benefit will always be paramount. They start off different, but they all end up the same: defeated by America's poisonous form of capitalism and dog-eat-dog philosophy (if you can even call it that). <bq>One day this week, someone told me that she was “angry at people’s refusal to acknowledge what’s happening to the planet” and when I waved a couple of surveys at them showing that in 2023 “Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (69%) favor the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050”</bq> What a fucking joke. Who did you ask? I haven't met a single person who would say that unless they thought they would be entered in a contest to win a 13MPG truck by saying it. If they did say it, they meant <iq>carbon neutral</iq> as long as it could happen "without sacrificing a single, tiny thing that I have been brainwashed into thinking is important for my life". <bq>I don’t know why so many people seem to think it’s their job to spread discouragement, but it seems to be a muddle about the relationship between facts and feelings. I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis.</bq> JFC, please talk to actual people in this country. Get out of your hippie bubble of planet-saving folks. No-one else in your country cares. They do not grasp the problem. They all want to travel the world, visit places, buy new cars, buy giant houses. They. Do. Not. Understand. And those that do? They. Do. Not. Care. They are laser-focused on personal promotion and do not see any reason to restrict their lifestyles to ones that use less energy. They don't even understand the question. They can't follow the discussion. Believe me, I've tried. People can't understand what I'm saying. They seem to agree with me, but then cite examples that indicate that they completely missed the point. It's not a matter of will or determination---they are not even prepared to understand the situation. We are so far away from where we need to be at this point. Go ahead and "fight defeatism", Rebecca. You'll still only be talking to people basically already agree with you, people who are capable of understanding what needs to be done. But defeatists and deniers aren't the reason we will fail to maintain a livable climate. It's not even apathy. It's blank incomprehension. It's the idiocracy. We are living on Ark B, Rebecca. Most people aren't even as clever about the climate as the Golgafrinchan captain of Ark B. Look---really look; watch TV here; look at what people are ingesting---and you too will despair. No-one is even prepared to take a shorter shower or turn the AC above 70ºF for even a minute. Personal comfort is paramount and isn't even seen as related to climate change or the effort required to combat it. Changing attitudes and lifestyles is not even seen as a component of the solution---to say nothing of being the absolute crux of it. <h>Programming</h> <a href="https://blog.ploeh.dk/2023/07/17/works-on-most-machines/" author="Mark Seemann" source="Ploeh Blog">Works on most machines</a> <bq>When you have general-purpose software, though, do you really need containers?</bq> Well, yes. The point isn't that you need a container to paper over software that isn't sufficiently generic: it's to avoid fixing incompatibilities that have nothing to do with your target deployment systems. I think the author is thinking too much of highly general-purpose software whereas the majority of software doesn't need to run everywhere and anywhere. If it's built for the cloud, it's going to run in a container anyway. If it's built for a specific device, it's going to run on that device. Why not just run that software at the developer side in the same environment? That way, you can avoid wasting a ton of time fixing problems that are related to how it runs in development rather than production. <bq>Ultimately, you may need to query the environment about various things, but in functional programming, querying the environment is impure, so you push it to the boundary of the system. Functional programming encourages you to explicitly consider and separate impure actions from pure functions. This implies that the environment-specific code is small, cohesive, and easy to review.</bq> It implies it, but it in no way guarantees it. The author is also forgetting about the quality of the developer that is likely to be building the solution. In this post, he assumes that the developer uses enough tests to thoroughly test the system---even to the point where he is able to determine where a solution isn't sufficiently generalized yet---that the developer uses methodology like functional programming to separate pure from impure code, and that the developer is good enough to do all of this in a way that is both efficient and leads to a finished product. This is not at all a guarantee---or even a likelihood---in the real world. In the real world, developers are not reaching for the stars---even if they had the capabilities, which many do not, they're often not given the time to do things correctly---they are just trying to get it done. If they can "cheat" by restricting the world of possible environments---rather than accommodating their software to environments it will never encounter---then why not? It's actually an engineering problem. If you're going to make something that has to work well underwater, the only reason it needs to work out of water is because it makes it easier to work on, not because you think it's worth the time making it function properly when in air. <hr> <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230725-00/?p=108482" author="Raymond Chen" source="The New Old Thing">Before you try to do something, make sure you can do nothing</a> <bq>Too often, I see relatively inexperienced developers dive in and start writing a big complex thing: Then they can’t even get it to compile because it’s so big and complex.</bq> <bq>Start with something that does nothing. Make sure you can do nothing successfully. Only then should you start making changes so it starts doing something. That way, you know that any problems you have are related to your attempts to do something.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/25/Alpine-does-not-make-news.html" author="Drew DeVault" source="">Alpine Linux does not make the news</a> <bq>Alpine does not make the news. There are no commercial entities which are trying to monetize it, at least no more than the loosely organized coalition of commercial entities like SourceHut that depend on Alpine and do their part to keep it in good working order, alongside various users who have no commercial purpose for the system. The community is largely in unanimous agreement about the fundamental purpose of Alpine and the work of the community is focused on maintaining the project such that this purpose is upheld.</bq>