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Links and Notes for November 24th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#labor">Labor</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art & Literature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> <a href="#games">Video Games</a> </ul> <h>Public Policy & Politics</h> <img src="{att_link}you_mean_there_s_no_such_thing_as_a_lesser_evil_never_has_been.jpeg" href="{att_link}you_mean_there_s_no_such_thing_as_a_lesser_evil_never_has_been.jpeg" align="none" caption="You mean there's no such thing as a lesser evil? Never has been." scale="75%"> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/23/buna-n23.html" source="WSWS" author="Jean Shaoul">Israel’s lies about October 7 incursion fall apart</a> <bq>This turns truth on its head. As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned, ever since his government took office at the end of 2022, Netanyahu mounted provocation after provocation against the Palestinians aimed at inciting retaliation, as then occurred on October 7. Al-Aqsa Flood provided the casus belli for a pre-planned campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians beginning with Gaza and then moving on to the West bank and including Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens.</bq> <bq>Two days ago, his lies were exposed with the publication by Ha’aretz of letters written in March and again in July by the head of the research division at Military Intelligence, personally warning Netanyahu that the sociopolitical crisis rocking the country was encouraging Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas to risk action against the country, even simultaneously.</bq> <bq>On November 18, speaking on a Channel 12 news programme, at least two female soldiers described how they had raised concerns for weeks beforehand about what they regarded as suspicious activity along the Gaza border. They told their commanders about “training, anomalies and preparations” near the border wall, telling Channel 12 they had seen “new people visiting farms around the border.”</bq> <bq>[...] the Israeli authorities knew about a planned attack and allowed it to happen. Put more bluntly, they wanted an atrocity and so stood down their defence and rescue services. Furthermore, the Biden administration’s full-throated support for Israel—including its deployment of warships to the region the very next day—indicates that October 7 was seized on by US military and intelligence officials to activate war plans prepared long in advance.</bq> <bq>Videos show Palestinians in shootouts with armed Israeli security forces, with unarmed Israelis taking cover in between. Other videos show fighters shooting toward houses and throwing grenades into fortified areas. Eyewitnesses have testified that grenades were thrown into bomb shelters, although it is not known who threw them. There have been several press reports of Israelis killed by friendly fire, while several Israelis have claimed they were fired upon by Israeli military and police.</bq> <bq>[...] contrary to Israeli government claims, the festival was not on Hamas’s list of targets. Hamas could not have planned to attack it, as the festival organisers switched to the site in the Western Negev desert only two days before, after the original location in southern Israel fell through. Palestinian fighters only found out about it by accident after the festival was then extended by a day at short notice. Most of the 4,400 attendees managed to escape before the attack took place.</bq> <bq>Hostages were not only killed in the crossfire that took place between the IDF and Palestinian militia on the Saturday. Many were killed as a consequence of the IDF’s deliberate decision to attack the kibbutz with tank shells and other heavy weaponry at close quarters in the full knowledge that hostages and their captors were there.</bq> <bq>The IDF, not the Palestinians, caused many of the Israeli civilian deaths that were used to justify Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the deployment of US warships to the Middle East. How many can only be confirmed by releasing the results of autopsies that would show the type of bullets used.</bq> <bq>[...] army spokesperson Daniel Hagari found that a “substantial” number of the hostages taken by Hamas are military officers.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/177037/javier-milei-argentina-election-next-president" source="New Republic" author="David Rieff">How the Hell Did This Guy Become Argentina’s Next President?</a> <bq>In fairness, Milei’s program was and is just as wild as Massa thought it was. Milei has promised to address the collapse of the Argentine peso by scrapping the national currency and replacing it with the U.S. dollar, to abolish the central bank, privatize many industries from the national airline to the national oil company, and offer people educational vouchers as an alternative to public education.</bq> <bq>In the end, none of this mattered. Milei didn’t split the right, he annexed it. In the first round of the presidential election, Milei eliminated Juntos por el Cambio’s standard-bearer, Patricia Bullrich, thus setting the stage for a runoff with Massa.</bq> <bq>It is Milei’s appeal to these voters that makes characterizations of him as simply an Argentine version of Trump or Bolsonaro so unsatisfactory. For neither Trump nor Bolsonaro ever had anything resembling Milei’s appeal to the poor.</bq> WTF are you talking about? Poor people love Trump. That's a large part of his base. <bq>That Milei could score such a victory testifies to the anger in Argentina. He ran on a promise to take a chain saw to government—there was actually a photo op with him holding a chain saw—and sweep away the entire political class. This claim is nonsense, of course, for if any individual embodies the Argentine political class it is Mauricio Macri, on whom Milei will have to rely to get any legislation passed, given that his own political party, La Libertad Avanza, will have very few seats in Congress.</bq> This is literally the same as Trump. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/20/qovm-n20.html" source="WSWS" author="David Walsh">Widespread resistance from actors to SAG-AFTRA betrayal on Artificial Intelligence, streaming residuals</a> <bq>The agreement is a sellout of actors’ interests and a betrayal even of what SAG-AFTRA claimed was the minimum it would accept in the recent negotiations: decent wage increases, a share of streaming revenue and protection against artificial intelligence (AI).</bq> <bq>To spell it out: wealthy company executives like Bob Iger of Disney and Ted Sarandos of Netflix and a group of millionaire performers issued the orders for a return to work and SAG-AFTRA officials jumped to obey. The Biden administration was also involved. It is a repugnant spectacle, although entirely typical of the way in which every union bureaucracy, nothing more than an arm of management, operates.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/22/patrick-lawrence-what-died-60-years-ago/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">What Died 60 Years Ago?</a> <bq>As Aaron Good writes with impressive acuity in his not-to-be-missed American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (Skyhorse, 2022), by the time Truman authorized the NSA and named Dulles to run the CIA, the Deep State—and I am fine with this term—was already a reality and had determined that democracy was an impediment to its interests and operations it would not tolerate.</bq> <bq>This is to say that JFK’s murder marked that moment when the national-security state put Americans on notice. It is likely that few people understood this at the time, but that afternoon it asserted what we are best off recognizing now as its ultimate authority—its hidden hegemony, its anti-democratic preeminence—in determining the direction of postwar American society. Anyone who may doubt this can fast-forward to the Russiagate years, when the Deep State’s various manifestations—the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, the judiciary, the media, and so on—conspired to take down another president, this time bloodlessly.</bq> <bq>If there is a Deep State that permits democratic procedures to take place but does not permit change unacceptable to it, can we speak of such a nation as a democracy, or do we speak of such a nation as a democracy so as to comfort ourselves, to avoid facing what has become of us and been done to us—to flinch, at last, from the hard work of retrieving our public life?</bq> <bq>“You’re only a casualty insofar as you forget, and if you remember you are alive,” Oliver Stone said when I interviewed him, “and you’re no longer a casualty because you’re carrying forth a fight, a crusade, not to forget.” Sixty years after the dark day in Dallas, as November 22, 1963, is called, we should ask ourselves whether we are content to be casualties or whether we insist on living and not forgetting.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-war-on-hospitals" source="SubStack" author="Chris Hedges">Israel’s War on Hospitals</a> <bq>The playbook is familiar. Flyers are dropped by Israel over a hospital telling people to leave because the hospital is a base for “Hamas terrorist activities.” Tanks and artillery shells rip away parts of the hospital walls. Ambulances are blown up by Israeli missiles. Power and water is cut. Medical supplies are blocked. There are no painkillers, antibiotics and oxygen. The most vulnerable, premature babies in incubators and the gravely ill, die. Israeli soldiers raid the hospital and force everyone out at gunpoint. This is what happened at Al Shifa hospital. This is what happened at Al Rantisi Children’s Hospital. This is what happened at Gaza’s main psychiatric hospital. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital. This is what happened at the other hospitals that Israel has destroyed. And this is what will happen at the few hospitals that remain.</bq> <bq>At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were massacred or died of exposure, disease and starvation during the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire from the spring of 1915 to the autumn of 1916. The Armenian genocide was as public as the genocide in Gaza. European and U.S. consular missions provided detailed accounts of the campaign to cleanse modern day Türkiye of Armenians.</bq> <bq>Talat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire, told the United States ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Sr. , in words that replicate Israel’s stance, on Aug. 2, 1915, "that our Armenian policy is absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else."</bq> <bq>The lies will be written into the Israeli school books. The lies will be repeated by Israeli politicians, historians and journalists. The lies will be told on Israeli television and in Israeli films and books. Israelis are eternal victims. Palestinians are absolute evil. There was no genocide. Türkiye, a century later, still denies what happened to the Armenians.</bq> This is very much also the American playbook. No genocide at the founding. No genocide in Southeast Asia. No military action anywhere, except in response to unjustified, unprovoked attacks that came out of nowhere, executed out of jealousy because "they hate our freedoms." <bq>Israel, with the backing of the Biden administration, will continue to snuff out all systems that sustain life in Gaza. Hospitals. Schools. Power plants. Water treatment facilities. Factories. Farms. Apartment blocks. Houses. Then Israel will pretend, like the killers in past genocides, it never happened.</bq> <bq>The lies used by Israel to absolve itself of responsibility will eat away at Israeli society. They will corrode its moral, religious, civic, intellectual and political life. The lies will elevate war criminals to heroic status and demonize those with a conscience.</bq> As they do with American society, where the need to keep the lie alive engenders a harshness at the base cultural level, an indifference to suffering that comes from pretending that nothing is ever wrong. Henry Kissinger just died. His obituaries in the mainstream press are hagiographies. George Bush is making oil paintings of Henry Kissinger. <bq>Israel’s genocide, as with the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, will be mythologized, an epic battle against the forces of evil and barbarity, just as we mythologized the genocide of Native Americans and turned our settlers and murderous cavalry units into heroes.</bq> <bq>The killers in the Indonesian war against communism are cheered at rallies as saviors. They are interviewed about the “heroic” battles they fought nearly six decades ago. Israel will do the same. It will deform itself. It will celebrate its crimes. It will turn evil into good. It will exist within a self-constructed myth. The truth, as in all despotisms, will be banished.</bq> Many Americans are still waiting for Vietnam to apologize for having killed U.S. soldiers. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/20/scott-ritter-the-2-state-solutions-nuclear-option/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">The 2-State Solution’s Nuclear Option</a> <bq>[..] for Biden and Blinken to posture in favor of a two-state solution so aggressively, it must be done with the working assumption that a post-conflict Israel will be governed by a political leader capable of supporting an idea which had been extinguished, in so far as Israeli politics is concerned, nearly three decades ago.</bq> <bq>One of the major policy issues facing the Nixon administration was the status of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The Nixon administration was firmly committed to the NPT, and as such was obligated to adhere to U.S. laws prohibiting the sale of military technology to a nation operating in violation of the NPT or, as in the case of Israel, possessed nuclear weapons capability outside of the framework of the NPT.</bq> <bq>In 1989, South Africa elected a new president, F. W. de Klerk, who quickly realized that the political winds were changing and that the country could very well, in the span of a few years, fall under the control of black nationalists led by Nelson Mandela. To prevent that, De Klerk took the unprecedented decision to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state and open its nuclear program for inspection and dismantlement. South Africa joined the NPT in 1991; by 1994, all South Africa’s nuclear weapons had been dismantled under international supervision.</bq> Amazing what you can do when you're afraid that negroes will get their hands on nukes. <bq>[...] if the United States is serious about creating the conditions of a long and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, then it should use all the leverage at its disposal to pressure Israel to voluntarily disarm itself of nuclear weapons.</bq> I cannot imagine this happening until Israel or the U.S. or both hit rock bottom. They still think they have too much leverage, too much sovereignty over the world. They still feel that they can ignore world opinion. They're almost certainly right, at least for now. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/20/comparing-how-the-west-and-china-offer-loans-to-developing-countries/" source="CounterPunch" author="John P. Ruehl">Comparing How the West and China Offer Loans to Developing Countries</a> <bq>These impasses underscore the challenges being faced by the decades-old Western-dominated financial system and lending initiatives.</bq> It looks very much like China's trying to build future trading partners and markets, while Empire wants interest, debt slavery, and vulture capitalism. We used to tell ourselves that Empire used to do what China seems to be doing now, like after WWII with the Marshall Plan. It's entirely possible that China's BRI is just as much subterfuge as that plan was. It's always so difficult to tell without much more research, without being able to read Mandarin. <bq>The World Bank focuses more on long-term assistance through loans and grants, supporting infrastructure and poverty reduction in developing countries.</bq> JFC. That is absolutely not what it actually does. That might be its mission statement, but the World Bank and IMF are enforcers, not assisters. <bq>Efforts to democratize these institutions have been made, but both the IMF and World Bank still remain under significant Western influence. Western countries are overrepresented on the IMF’s board and voting arrangements, while all the IMF’s managing directors have been European. All the World Bank’s presidents except for Bulgarian national Kristalina Georgieva, who served as acting president in 2019, have been U.S. citizens, and the voting shares of the bank have not been rearranged since 2010. Both institutions are based in Washington, D.C.</bq> <bq>Through its robust, globally integrated economy, technological expertise , and extensive industrial power, Beijing can help fund and build projects on a scale that rivals the West in a way not even the Soviet Union could achieve. Furthermore, Chinese assistance does not require political and economic reforms typically attached to Western developmental initiatives.</bq> <bq>[...] while allegations of Chinese debt diplomacy are often exaggerated in Western media, Chinese economic opportunism has increased debt burdens and debt-for-equity swaps with BRI partners.</bq> <hr> <bq>The article noted that Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs eclipses anything seen in previous 21st century wars. The Times reported, citing a US official, that “roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs weighing 1,000 to 2,000 pounds.” The Times wrote, “In fighting during this century, by contrast, US military officials often believed that the most common American aerial bomb—a 500-pound weapon—was far too large for most targets when battling the Islamic State in urban areas like Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/war-is-not-abstracted-anymore" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Caitlin's Newsletter">War Is Not Abstracted Anymore</a> <bq>You hear this “where were the protests over Yemen and Syria?” talking point over and over again from Israel apologists, the argument essentially being that because few people protested the mass killings in those countries then Israel should get to do a little genocide of its own, as a treat.</bq> The line of reasoning essentially admits that Israel is executing a depraved attack. It is complaining that anti-Semitism is the reason that it's not getting away with it anymore. Netanyahu throws in Anti-Americanism too, just to trigger a bunch of Americans. <bq>[...] when the west lays waste to a country using military explosives it’s normally a fast ordeal which moves from manufacturing consent to execution very quickly. By the time people figure out they were lied to about the justifications for a depraved war the empire is usually two or three new wars down the track.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://radioopensource.org/chas-freeman-on-a-kaleidoscopic-turn/#" author="Christopher Lydon" source="Radio Open Source">Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn</a> <bq>Just a month into the ferociously brutal and reckless war in Israel-Palestine, on what feels like a hinge of history—outcomes wildly uncertain—our refuge is Chas Freeman, the American diplomat, strategist, and historian. We call Chas our “chief of intelligence” in the realm of world order and disorder. Chas Freeman calls himself sick at heart at the war crimes abounding in this war, some aided and abetted by the United States, he says. We’re at a turning point, he’s telling us—not far, perhaps, from nervous breakdown.</bq> <bq>The world's patience with us . . . is coming to an end.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/18771lj/the_kiss_of_death/" author="Spencer Ackerman" source="Reddit">The Kiss of Death</a> <img src="{att_link}spencer_ackerman_on_henry_kissinger.jpg" href="{att_link}spencer_ackerman_on_henry_kissinger.jpg" align="none" caption="Spencer Ackerman on Henry Kissinger" scale="50%"> Like, this is A+. No notes. <bq>Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies. The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper sham attaches to the country that celebrates him.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/1876x93/fucking_finally_this_mother_fucker_dies_like_so/kbd1uyy/" author="" source="Reddit">Anthony Bourdain on Kissinger</a> <bq author="Anthony Bourdain">Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/01/the-dr-caligari-of-the-american-empire/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: The Dr. Caligari of the American Empire</a> <bq>When asked about the forced displacement of Micronesians from the Marshall Island so that the US could detonate nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll, Kissinger quipped: “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?”</bq> <bq>Atmospheric CO2 is 422.36 parts per million, 5.06ppm more than the same day last year. The increase over the last 12 months is the largest ever recorded – more than double the last decade’s annual average.</bq> <bq>[...] according to the UN’s new report, emissions will be reduced by only 2% by 2030 which will result in 3°C (5.4°F) of warming. But even that isn’t guaranteed since the 2% reductions are based on pledged policies not current policies.</bq> <bq>By simply allowing forests to grow old and restoring degraded forests, ecologists estimate that at least 226 gigatonnes of carbon could be sequestered, an amount roughly equivalent to the last 50 years of US emissions. More than 60% of this potential could be realized merely by protecting standing forests.</bq> <bq>Over the last 20 years, coal power plants in the US killed at least 460,000 people, twice as many premature deaths as previously thought. According to a new study published in Science, much of the increase is owing to a new understanding of the dangers of PM2.5, toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter that elevate the risk of life-threatening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight and some cancers. According to the European Environment Agency, toxic air killed more than half a million people in the EU in 2021. Nearly half of those deaths could have been prevented by cutting pollution to the limits recommended by the World Health Organization.</bq> <bq>The last twelve months of post-Covid America have averaged 7,100 deaths from COVID a month (85,200 a year). By contrast, the last twelve months have averaged 800 deaths from Influenza a month (9,600 a year).</bq> <bq>Joe Lapado, Desantis’s anti-vax Surgeon General, landed a prized tenured professorship at the University of Florida without any vetting. Lapado receives a $262,000 salary on top of his $250,000 salary as Surgeon Gen. But he teaches no classes, doesn’t do any research, and goes AWOL whenever the university asks him to do any work. In his first year on the “job,” Lapado only visited the Gainesville Medical School twice.</bq> <bq>Big Pharma has contended for decades that the reason new drug prices in the US are so much higher than in the rest of the world is the “cost of innovation.” But China’s new cancer drug Toripalimab is now approved in the US, where a single-dose vial will have a wholesale price of US$8,892, thirty times more than the cost in the country where it was developed, where it is sold for US$280.</bq> <h>Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=107043" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Antisemitin des Tages: Greta Thunberg. Ja geht’s noch?</a> <bq>Der aktuelle SPIEGEL widmet der „Greta-Frage“ als Titelthema gleich ganze 14 Seiten; 14 Seiten, auf denen sich der SPIEGEL fragt, ob die Schwedin „Antisemitin oder einfach nur naiv“ ist und die Antwort trotz Fragezeichen gleich mitbringt: Ja, das Vorbild unserer Kinder ist eine Antisemitin. Was hat Thunberg verbrochen, wird man sich nun fragen. Doch auf diese Frage findet man auch nach mehrfacher Lektüre der SPIEGEL -Titelstory keine Antwort.</bq> <bq>Findige Investigativjournalisten entdeckten jedoch einen Stofftierkraken und „das Bild des Kraken, dessen Tentakel die Welt umspannen, [sei] eine Chiffre, die direkt an die antisemitische NS-Propaganda anschließt“. Fall geklärt. Thunberg ist eine Antisemitin, die über geheime Chiffren unsere Kinder zum Judenhass aufstachelt. Später erklärte Thunberg erstaunt, dass es sich bei dem Stofftier um ein Therapiemittel für autistische Kinder handele. Aber das ließen die Inquisitoren der Medien nicht gelten. Laut WELT seien dies „schon recht große Zufälle, zumal unter der Krake [ein] Kissen mit Pilzen zu sehen [sei] und eines der bekanntesten Propagandabücher der Nazis hieß: ´Der Giftpilz´“. Wie abartig kann Journalismus sein?</bq> They're getting stupider and crasser by the second. <bq>Diese Argumentation ist wirklich nur noch als boshaft zu bezeichnen. Wer also das Leid der Palästinenser beklagt, ohne zuvor in einem Ceterum censeo die israelischen Opfer des Hamas-Angriffs vom 7. Oktober zu beklagen, ist ein Antisemit? Und um dies zu belegen, führt man sogar den Holocaust an? Geht’s auch noch absurder, lieber SPIEGEL?</bq> <bq>Gerade in Sachen Klimapolitik konnten die Grünen nicht liefern und mehr wird der Rigorismus in der Klimabewegung, den Thunberg anders als ihre karriereorientierte und mittlerweile handzahme deutsche Mitstreiterin Luisa Neubauer vertritt, von den Grünen mit Argwohn als Bedrohung gesehen.</bq> <bq>Während die deutschen Medien es geschafft haben, den Nahostkonflikt mal wieder unter dem Label „Antisemitismus“ einzuordnen, interessiert diese urdeutsche Sichtweise außerhalb des Einflussbereiches deutscher Medien nur die wenigsten.</bq> <bq>Und wie bei vielen anderen Themen muss das deutsche Establishment auch beim Nahostkonflikt lernen, dass der Rest der Welt sich nicht sonderlich für die deutsche Perspektive interessiert. Mit absurden Moralpredigten und Antisemitismusvorwürfen wird man daran ganz sicher nichts ändern können.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/20/mwvk-n20.html" source="WSWS" author="Joshua Seubert">German politicians and media attack Greta Thunberg for condemning the genocide in Gaza</a> <bq>The statements from Thunberg’s circle are “intolerably antisemitic and reflect a political world view that lacks basic democratic values,” Klein told the KNA news agency. “Anyone who propagates such attitudes has disqualified themself as a role model for young people.”</bq> Based on what? How many Israelis have died since the first day? How many civilians? I wrote those questions as I read the article, but I've now had a chance to look up the answer. It turns out that about 100 additional Israelis have died in the subsequent seven weeks since the initial attack by Hamas on October 7th. For more information, see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_2023_Israel–Hamas_war" source="Wikipedia">Casualties of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war</a> <bq>The president of the German-Israeli Association (DIG) and leading Green politician Volker Beck wrote on X that Thunberg was “from now on a full-time Israel hater.” And the editor-in-chief of WeltN24, Ulf Poschardt, posted the tweet: “St. Greta Thunberg is hardcore antisemitic.”</bq> This is so sad. There are so many idiots and patsies in the halls of power. What kind of system bubbles these people to the top? A corrupt, venal one. <hr> <a href="https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/general-to-general" author="Seymour Hersh" source="SubStack">GENERAL TO GENERAL</a> I'm not actually subscribed to Hersh, but I've seen good interviews with him and read his long-form essays. I admire him as a journalist and trust his reporting. However, I've been ignoring him a bit on Israel because he doesn't know how to report on it. He knows he can't just back Israel to the hilt, but he also can't quite bring himself to report on the situation as openly, clearly, and truthfully as he does on so many others. I cite this article as a case in point, highlighting one phrase from the first paragraph, <bq>It’s been a rough couple of months for President Joe Biden and his feckless foreign policy team. Israel is going its own way in its war against Hamas, with renewed bombing in Gaza, and the American public is bitterly divided, all of which is reflected in polls that continue to be unfavorable to the White House.</bq> I wonder if people who characterize things like this feel remorse later. Hersh has reported on so many issues of import---Mai Lei, Abu Ghraib, Osama bin Laden's murder, the Nordstream II bombing---and he's so often been on the other side of mealy-mouthed reporting like the style he indulges in above. The whole paragraph is mealy-mouthed: <iq>renewed bombing</iq>, <iq>bitterly divided</iq>, <iq>unfavorable</iq>. How should he have written it. It’s been a rough couple of months for President Joe Biden and his feckless foreign policy team. The U.S. cheers on and supplies weapons for Israel, as it blows the bloody hell out of Gaza and its mostly civilian and underaged population with weapons far larger than even the U.S. is willing to use in its campaigns, and killing people at a pace massively exceeding that of Russia in Ukraine. The so-called leadership of the U.S.---the self-styled elites, regardless of party affiliation---are in unison, as the rift with the public yawns ever wider. The greatest democracy in the world continues its disgusting practice of utterly ignoring what its people want, even in a situation that is so morally simple, and where the U.S. could exercise its power to urge---and obtain---restraint. Even U.S. citizens are registering their displeasure in plummeting polls for Joe Biden. <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/dan-goldman-democrats-make-a-clown" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Dan Goldman, Democrats, Make a Clown Show of Censorship Hearing</a> Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a garbage human being. Taibbi linked to a video of her portion of the hearing and she's nearly impossibly rude. She also has terrible elocution and can barely pay attention to what she's doing. The whole hearing has the air of a Soviet-style trial. She's always been terrible, but I haven't seen her in action for many years. I wasn't able to watch more than a minute or so. <bq>[...] the “trusted flaggers” in laws like the Digital Services Act and programs like the Election Integrity Partnership will always, in 100% of cases, be administered by affluent, professional-class Americans insisting on advanced degrees from favored institutions as prerequisites for entry. Stripped of all the tearful rhetoric about “countering hate” and “reducing harm,” anti-disinformation was, I said, just another “bluntly elitist gatekeeping” scam.</bq> <bq>[...] [the Democrats] are not just morally absent cynics, as I always used to imagine, they’re the bad guys, and America This Week co-host Walter Kirn is right: stopping them electorally is probably the only way forward.</bq> <bq>Nobody in media is a speech "absolutist." We navigate libel and defamation laws every time we publish. The huge difference with the new model is that it's arbitrary, corporate, and non-transparent. Speech issues are decided not by judges and juries, but handfuls of executives.</bq> <bq>I'm actually not an absolutist. I just believe the previous litigation-based system was a much better way to deal with problematic speech - with the current method there is no due process, no transparency, and the question of who does and does not get suppressed is arbitrary.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/elon-musk-on-x-antisemitism-controversy-dont-advertise-go-f-yourself/" author="Jon Brodkin" source="Ars Technica">Elon Musk on X antisemitism controversy: “Don’t advertise. Go f*** yourself”</a> Look, this whole article is garbage. It's about a garbage interview with what is basically a garbage person. But it's kind of great how everybody misinterprets everything. <bq>"If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself," Musk said.</bq> I mean, yes, obviously. The interviewer literally cannot conceive that Musk truly does not give a shit about "losing" $40B that he can just write off. He's still the richest person in the world. It. Doesn't. Matter. It's like if you were going to try to blackmail me by withholding $100. <bq>On November 15, Musk replied, "You have said the actual truth" to an X post that said Jewish communities are "pushing hatred against whites." A White House spokesperson condemned Musk's post as "abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate."</bq> Look, who the hell cares what the White House says? They're a bunch of hyper-Zionist idiots. The post I saw Musk respond to was very provocative, but only because the Overton Window on the issue of Israel and Zionism is so far to the right in the U.S.---as it is in Germany and other places in Europe---that there is literally not discussion allowed. It is absolutely a fact that some Jewish communities "push hatred against whites." This is not news. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Sh-ERypMA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/I_Sh-ERypMA" caption="Piers Morgan vs Norman Finkelstein On Israel and Palestine | The Full Interview" author="Piers Morgan Uncensored" width="560px" source="YouTube"> The show should be called "Piers Morgan Self-censored", but it's more even-handed than I'd expected. At about 08:00, he doesn't accept that Norman characterizes certain events of October 7th as atrocities. No, he wants Norman to agree that October 7th was an act of terrorism. This focus on the extremely vague word "terrorism" is silly. There is not enough known to characterize what happened as terrorism. Most of the news from that day came on that day, from Israel and the IDF. Subsequent news about that day---again, from the Israeli press, government, and IDF---have walked back a lot of the assertions about what happened that day. If only one civilian were killed, does that still qualify as terrorism? What is the definition we're supposed to be using? Can't we just say that it sounds like pretty horrifying things happened, but that weren't not sure who did what on that day? At 13:30, Piers says, <bq>It seems to me, what you're trying to paint, is a picture of some kind of moral justification for what Hamas did. And that's where you lose me. Because I don't why there could be anyone who could see the scale of what Hamas did on October 7th and not simply condemn it out of hand.</bq> Because "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me". He goes on, <bq>You may also want to condemn some of the response by Israel. That's completely normal. I would say that there are serious question marks about the proportionality of what they've been doing. But if you can't start from a basic humanity position of 'what happened on October 7th was a disgusting terror attack worthy of condemnation,' then, for me, I find it very hard to then respect anyone's demand for people to condemn Israel and their response.</bq> He doesn't hear how biased he is, just in that statement. He demands that we all accept the story of seven weeks ago, without adjustment. We must call it terror. Perhaps he doesn't think it should be considered unprovoked, but that's the dominant narrative. But for Israel, there are only <iq>question marks about the proportionality of their response</iq>. There is no demand to call it terror, even though the terror has been much more thoroughly documented. State actors do not commit terror in Morgan's world. Hamas does not have the right to attack Israel in the same way that Israel has the right to attack Palestine. He can't bend his mind around it. Instead, at 17:45, he characterizes the situation as Hamas's provocations, with Israeli responses. It's quite breathtaking. I would almost believe it, if I didn't know any better. How could someone on international news possibly be so wrong? So deliberately mendacious? Impossible. I must be wrong. One could easily be led to think that Israel must truly be the aggrieved party here, a country that is only guilty of being better armed than its enemy, which doesn't know well enough to leave it alone. At 18:20, he turns up the heat of his argument to say, <bq>Where you and I differ about this is that I think what happened on October 7th is on a different scale to anything we've ever seen, on the way it was carried out. I just don't think that saying that people were oppressed---which they undoubtedly were, for many years---that that justifies them committing that act of terror.</bq> Jesus Christ, do a modicum of research. The violence on October 7th was absolutely not unique in history. It wasn't even unique this year. Even Israel's carpet-bombing was learned at the knee of the U.S., which has flattened dozens of countries in the last century and a couple of handfuls this century. Get a grip, Piers. He posits an acts of terror, with undefined boundaries. That is, he allows the boundaries of the act of terror to remain implied, up to the interpretation of the listener. It was a terrorist attack, carried out by ... whom? Does he consider Hamas to be military? Does he consider anything done by Hamas to be terroristic by definition? Or would it be legitimate military activity for them to attack military bases? What about soldiers? On-duty? Off-duty? Police officers? Reservists? Where is the line to "terror"? Obviously, complete civilians are way over the line. But it's not clear what actually happened. But Piers is just working with the picture painted by the IDF on the first day or two. It's a figment of propaganda that he's demanding be accepted as the initial condition of the argument. He goes on to argue that absolutely nothing could justify an attack like that. I suppose not even an equivalent one? So then, does he mean to say that Israel is also completely unjustified in its attack on Palestine? That would be the logical conclusion, but I fear that logic doesn't enter into it. This line of inquiry is all without even discussing the difference between justifying something and explaining it, which have been conflated as long as mankind has communicated. Anyone who wasn't surprised by this attack---other than that it was possible at all---is considered to be sympathetic to it. It's not surprising that Palestinians lashed out viciously against their occupiers and oppressors. It's similarly not surprising that Israelis don't care about Palestinians at all---their are literally awash in propaganda that they are superior in every way, and that Palestinians are dirty, dirty street people, incapable of actual human feeling and interaction, and are like animals, to be slaughtered if they become a nuisance. They hear this from day one. It takes a tremendous effort to turn your mind around in such a strong current. Piers clearly isn't capable of doing it, but at least he's relatively polite to Norm. He just keep on coming though, <iq>why have you not removed that SubStack, given that the language is so clearly offensive to people?</iq> Why have you not censored yourself? When we've all been telling you to do it? How is it possible that you think you're able to express an opinion that we've expressed disapproval of? Norm replies that removing it would be <iq>intellectually dishonest</iq>. I mean, Norm could write a note at the top, indicating the context within which he wrote the article. People are saying that this is a good interview, but it's actually pretty shit. Piers is utterly uninterested in anything that Finkelstein actually knows. Instead, he just wants to scold Norman for having posted a celebratory article on October 7th. Literally, the whole 27-minute interview is only about that. We don't get a single question about Norman's scholarship, about what might have led him to celebrate the Palestinians having broken out of their cage. Nothing. No information at all in this interview, other than to learn more about Finkelstein personally. This is not untypical TV "journalism". At 24:30, Norman says, <bq>I once asked my late mother. I said to her, 'what was your feeling when you heard that the German cities were being terror-bombed during World War II? The carpet-bombing of the German cities targeting civilians...what was your feeling?' And my mother's response to me was, 'our feeling was: if we're going to to die, we're going to take some of them with us.' Now, that's not the most morally elevated statement, I agree. And do I wish my mother had, and my father had, a heightened sensitivity to German civilian life? I suppose I would wish it. But I will tell you Pierce: to the last day of my parents' life [sic], it was unthinkable that they would have a kind word to say about Germans and it was unthinkable that I would ever quarrel with them on that point. I accepted. I accepted that, given their life experience, they had the right to hate the people who destroyed their lives. And the people [of] Gaza have the right to hate the people who [have] destroyed their lives.</bq> <h>Labor</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/20/the-sting-is-stung/" source="CounterPunch" author="Rich Gibson">The Sting is Stung</a> <bq>United Auto Workers” piecard Shawn Fain, the Big Three Auto Bosses, and Democrats like the war criminal Joe Biden, touched noses, shared grins and a wink, declared the fraudulent UAW contracts ratified by the rank and file. Now they go back to harsh exploitation as usual.</bq> <bq>The entire US labor movement believes in “partners in production,” the unity of labor bosses and Big Bosses “in the national interest.”, Contrary to the author, all US unions are all what was once know as company unions. The centrality of Marx’s class war and imperialism is long forgotten, erased by a terrible education system which eradicates history, and the counterfeit unions themselves.</bq> <bq>As with most UAW ratification votes of the past, few outside the inner circle ever saw the full contract. Rather, the UAW typically circulates a Summary, usually stocked with mis-information. It is unlikey that the New Yorker fact checkers even had time to review a full contract.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/20/fast-fashion-is-antithetical-to-workers-rights/" source="CounterPunch" author="Sonali Kolhatkar">Fast Fashion Is Antithetical to Workers’ Rights</a> <bq>Police recently fatally shot a 23-year-old mother and sewing machine operator named Anjuara Khatun after firing at protesters.</bq> <iq>sewing-machine operator</iq>? Do they mean seamstress? <bq>A survey of about 1,000 factories in Bangladesh, published in early 2023, revealed that companies like Zara and H&M underpaid factories for garment purchases, making it harder for them to pay their workers. When the COVID-19 pandemic led to global shutdowns, large retailers canceled orders and delayed payments. One industry expert told The Guardian , “Only when suppliers are able to plan ahead, with confidence that they will earn as expected, can they deliver good working conditions for their workers.” Rather than dip into their profits to compensate for the market slowdown in 2020, many global brands simply refused to keep their financial commitments to Bangladesh’s factories, leading to downward pressure on wages.</bq> This is indistinguishable from outright oppression and slavery, dressed up as a trade relationship. Poor people starve as they try to scrape together a living, while their labor produces profits for the already exceedingly wealthy, and inexpensive clothes for the only moderately so. <bq>The Rana Plaza disaster was a turning point for Bangladesh’s garment industry as workers were seen as dispensable pawns by governments and industries alike. In the wake of the disaster, North American brands refused to join other global companies in signing on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Citing high costs, they chose instead to form their own alliance for inspecting factories, one that applied lower safety standards. It was a stark indicator of where these companies’ priorities lay, one that frames their current lip service to higher wages for garment workers.</bq> Always the soft language. Both the action and the language describing it is reprehensible. <hr> <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/can-we-imagine-a-world-without-work/" source="Boston Review" author="Rachel Fraser">Can We Imagine a World Without Work?</a> <bq>Cleaning, like cooking, childbearing, and breastfeeding, is a paradigm case of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is a special form of work. It doesn’t itself produce commodities (coffee pots, silicon chips); rather, it’s the form of work that creates and maintains labor power itself, and hence makes the production of commodities possible in the first place. Reproductive labor is low-prestige and (typically) either poorly paid or entirely unwaged. It’s also obstinately feminized: both within the social imaginary and in actual fact, most reproductive labor is done by women. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that political discussions of work often treat reproductive labor as an afterthought.</bq> <bq>For the post-work tradition—whose influence on the Anglo-American left has been growing for the last decade—the aim of radical politics should not (just) be for higher wages, more secure employment, or more generous parental leave. Rather, radical politics should aim for a world in which work’s social role is utterly transformed and highly attenuated—a world in which work can no longer serve as either a disciplining institution or the fulcrum for our social identities.</bq> <bq>Wilde gives little thought to the soul of woman under socialism. While the machine frees men from “that sordid necessity of living for others,” it does not lend a hand with the laundry, or feeding the baby. Even in the age of the machine, it seems, women are mopping up after others.</bq> <bq>A world where no one spends tedious hours on the assembly line is a world worth aspiring to. But a world where no one nurses their children or cooks food for their friends? That sounds like a nightmare.</bq> <bq>[...] under capitalism, we are not free to choose and pursue our own ends; we are forced into projects that we value only instrumentally. We mop floors, deliver packages, or babysit not because we think these activities have value in and of themselves, but because we need the money. We act on the world, yes, but we cannot properly express ourselves within it.</bq> As long as floors need to be mopped, and packages need to be delivered, then we should change society to value that kind of work appropriately. <bq>“Laboring over a hot stove,” Hester and Srnicek write, “can take on the quality of being a freely chosen activity in the arc of a larger self-directed goal.” Hester and Srnicek, then, are not advocating indolence. For them, the problem with work is not that it is effortful. Humans are agents. We make and we do. Work, though, catches our making and doing in a trap: it is caged agency. Hester and Srnicek want us to open the cage.</bq> <bq>Capitalism, says the crisis theorist, is a flawed economic system not because it is (say) cruel, but because it is a self-undermining system. It destroys its own capacity to function.</bq> <bq>Capitalism, he thinks, requires that workers play two roles: they need to make things, but they also need to buy them. Eventually, these two roles will come into conflict. Suppose that a commodity is overproduced, so that its supply outstrips demand. Its price will fall. To compensate, factory owners will cut costs or slow production. And that means they will pay their workers less or lay them off. Consumer demand will then further contract, incentivizing further wage cuts, which will further suppress demand. Worker and capitalist will both be trapped in an ever-tightening fist of economic dysfunction.</bq> <bq>Despite the “industrial revolution in the home” in the first half of the twentieth century, full-time housewives spent more hours per week on housework in 1960s (fifty-five) than they did in 1924 (fifty-two). Social expectations tend to ratchet up alongside technological proficiency. If it now takes half the time it used to take to hoover—well, you’ll just be expected to hoover twice as much.</bq> Wtf is wrong with people? Also: do people actually care? Which social strata are we talking about? Who is expecting twice as much vacuuming? <bq>The United States’ car-focused public infrastructure prevents its citizens from doing simple things, like walking to work. When it comes to social arrangements, technology both adds options and takes them away. It destroys some forms of compulsion while creating its own mandates. It need not roll back the sphere of necessity.</bq> <bq>After Work attempts to show that demands for social protection—specifically in the form of care—can be met without compromising on emancipation. Existing models of care provision tend heavily towards privatization: your care is either a business (traded on the open market), or nobody’s business but yours (a family affair). After Work suggests a third option: care should be communal. Households should be more porous—for example, they should share communal goods and spaces—and they should no longer be the centers of gravity around which informal relations of care revolve.</bq> <bq>When I read After Work , I was visiting my brother in Edinburgh, and we sat talking about it on the bus. He was enthusiastic about the idea that more of our lives should take place in shared spaces. Then a baby started to scream, and we couldn’t talk for the rest of the journey. “I guess this is why people like cars,” my brother said, darkly.</bq> You get used to it. Sometimes. Babies and children are a special case because you can't reasonably make them behave if they really don't want to. The same for mentally handicapped or inebriated people. If they don't want to sit quietly, then they're not going to sit quietly. Yes, when you travel on a train, there are other people there, over whom you only have a tiny bit of control. The system works because everyone plays along. If someone plays their radio, or talks on a speakerphone, then someone's going to have to intervene. The train is generally quite quick, has a dependable schedule, and is piloted by someone else, freeing me up to read and nap instead. <bq>No transition to a post-work world is (democratically) possible unless people can be persuaded that the form of life on offer in the communal feeding center is a form of life that they would want.</bq> Brainwashing is a solved problem. We used it to convince people that sitting alone at home, ordering things through a screen, having them delivered, poorly, then complaining about it to a chat robot afterwards was something that they would want. We can convince them that interacting with humans is cool, too. <bq>Automated reproductive labor doesn’t guarantee more free time. We must also lower our collective standards.</bq> We must change, not lower our priorities, not standards. The author's formulation is counterproductive and establishes a false narrative. <bq>They do acknowledge that “not everybody would feel comfortable living in fully collectivized living spaces for any great length of time, and many will want more than a single bedroom to retreat to.”</bq> A single bedroom to retreat to is considered a luxury for 80% of humanity. What you're saying is that, for the people who've become accustomed to having the lion's share of the fruits of labor in the world, getting less is going to take getting used to. Everyone else would consider it an upgrade. The revolution will not be kind to the elites. It never is. <bq>[...] collective living, they are clear, “cannot be imposed from the top down.”</bq> Why not? Literally everything else is imposed from the top down. The top generally uses brainwashing to pretend that it came from the bottom up. Do you think that so many people have hyper-consumerist, hyper-social-media-addicted lifestyles because they enjoy them? At any rate, reality will eventually force it, even on those that think themselves immune--the hyper-elite-adjacent--through the exigency of capitalism eating itself and climate collapse. <bq>In the lesbian separatist communities of second wave feminism—the landdyke commune, the Oregon-based “WomanShare”—participants dug ditches, converted livestock outbuildings into homes, and went in for low-tech farming. Under different conditions, such work could easily be alienating. But when folded into a larger political project to which the women freely subscribed, even their drudgery became meaningful—an expression of agency, rather than a straitening of it.</bq> The author seems to be fundamentally physically lazy, incapable of imagining physical labor as rewarding, as anything other than drudgery. So many people work in their gardens, at so-called drudgery, but why? Because the work is its own reward. Because being outside is its own reward. Because we are biological beings with relatively simple triggers that are there to offer rewards without the intervention or mediation of technology companies or any capitalist entity. This is why we are taught to consider anything that doesn't require mediation by our betters bad, to be drudgery. <bq>Suppose you work faster than I do. Do you have to work the same number of hours that I work, and therefore perform more tasks? Or do you have to complete the same number of tasks as I do, in which case I will have to work more hours?</bq> Or do you suck so bad, you don't have to do it at all? <bq>So long as we have sufficient time to choose and pursue our own projects, it should not matter too much that there will still be allotments of necessity: parcels of time that are not truly our own. And, perhaps, these refractory parcels could even be packaged as a feature, rather than a bug.</bq> She's coming around. <bq>If an expansion of the realm of freedom is an expansion of the realm of choice, then perfect freedom might, in effect, exile us from certain forms of goodness. A life composed only of self-realization will tend to create a self of the sort that doesn’t deserve to be realized. Unwanted work can serve as a teacher, shushing the would-be brat that lurks in every human heart.</bq> I mean .. duh. But, yes, exactly! Discipline is so important to building people worth associating with. <bq>When a sulky teenager is made to set the table by her parents, her labor is alienated; she would rather be doing something else. Her activity is unchosen and imposed; she refuses to avow the purposes it serves. But to know whether the teenager is wronged, it is not enough to know how she feels about setting the table. Rather, we need to ask questions like: Does the teenager’s work benefit a community that is oriented toward her flourishing? Does the community weigh her claims and interests equally to those of its other members? Does she have a meaningful say over its policies, priorities, and direction?</bq> Also: who the heck else is going to set the table? Seriously, what was that teenager that was more important? Someone else is probably imposing on their own freedom to cook a meal for that teenager, but we're forced to consider the imposition on literally the least-useful member of the community? <h>Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/going-cashless-is-a-bad-idea-but-its-not-a-conspiracy" source="Aeon" author="Brett Scott">Going cashless</a> <bq>the public has swallowed a false just-so story that says we are pining for a cashless society. All over the world, public and private sector leaders claim that ‘our’ desire for speed, convenience, scale and interconnection drives an inevitable digital transition. This is supposed to bring a ‘frictionless’ world of digital payment-fuelled commerce, done at the click of a button or scan of the iris. The message is: keep up or else face being left behind</bq> <bq>Physical cash is issued by governments (via central banks), whereas the units in your bank account are basically ‘digital casino chips’ issued by the likes of Barclays, HSBC and Santander. ‘Cashless society’ is a privatisation , in which power over payments is transferred to the banking sector. Every tap of a contactless card or Apple Pay triggers banks into moving these digital casino chips around for you. It gives them enormous power, revenue and data.</bq> <bq>Cash is hard to automate. It cannot be plugged into globe-spanning digital infrastructures. It operates at human scale and speed within a system that increasingly demands inhuman scale and speed. It’s creating ‘friction’ at a systemic level, so even if you like cash at a local level, you’ll gradually find yourself coerced away from it.</bq> <bq>For example, Lloyds Bank, guided by shareholder demands for profits, shuts down physical branches to cut costs by pushing you on to automated apps. Having no branches makes it harder for small businesses to deposit cash, so they are nudged toward putting up signs saying ‘We’re cashless.’ That then sends a message to customers that there’s something newly unacceptable about cash.</bq> This is where the increasing profits come from. It's not that the banks aren't making money, but that they need to make an increasing amount of profit every year. That means slicing away more and more services, until there's no service left. <bq>[...] people will notice that banks have shut down many ATMs, with the banks justifying this by saying their customers are ‘going digital’, but this creates a self-fulfilling prophesy because removing ATMs lowers public access to cash, making it harder to use. Lloyds and other banks then see the resulting up-tick in digital finance as implicit permission to close down further branches.</bq> <bq>Hipster cafés in London have signs saying ‘We’ve gone cashless’; what they are actually saying is ‘We’ve joined an automation alliance with Big Finance, Big Tech, Visa and Mastercard. To interact with us you must interact with them.’</bq> That's what I've been telling people for years. I want the convenience without the cartels. Hipster cafes have no idea who the real enemy is. Unsurprising, but still frustratingly sad. <bq>Left-wing thinkers reject this freemarket dogma, pointing out that some industries are powerful enough to effectively legislate the conditions of our lives. We all know that firms invest heavily in warping our perceptions via marketing, and often secure our consent only through tricks and misrepresentation. Left-wing calls for government regulation in turn compel freemarketeers to accuse them of stifling both popular will and business.</bq> <bq>Libertarians have always faced a tension when complaining about the surveillance that accompanies cashless society. This is because digital payment systems are pushed by private sector fintech entrepreneurs, and libertarians are supposed to be pro-entrepreneurialism.</bq> That is such a simplistic view. Libertarians are allowed to have more nuanced views, no? They can be against entrepreneurism that takes away freedom, for example. <bq>The cashless system is run by transnational corporations, and the actually existing examples of payments control often concern welfare recipients: for instance, the Australian ‘cashless welfare card’ was a Visa card system that blocked Indigenous Australians on benefits from buying non-approved goods in non-approved stores. These systems not only limit choice, but can be used to push people’s business to big retailers, rather than small ones.</bq> <bq>[...] we should see cash as being like the public bicycle of payments, and support efforts across the political spectrum to protect and promote it. Digital bank systems are the private Uber of payments: they may appear convenient, but total Uberisation unleashes demons that cash historically kept in check – surveillance, censorship, digital exclusion, and serious resilience and financial stability problems. The point isn’t to argue that everyone must always use the ‘bicycle’. It’s to ensure that we don’t get totally ‘Uberised’ in private and public life. We need to promote a healthy balance of power between different forms of money in the system, and that’s within our collective political abilities.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/wealth-increases-joe-biden-used-house-car-inflation-financial-dissatisfaction/" source="Jacobin" author="Matt Bruenig">Wealth Increases Under Joe Biden Haven’t Meant Much for Most People</a> <bq>“people should be more understanding about why their economic circumstances are worsening” is different from “people’s economic circumstances haven’t worsened,” which is the argument that so many have been making up to this point.</bq> <bq>In this data, we see balances in checking and savings accounts increase in lockstep with the COVID welfare state (EIP refers to the stimulus checks). They reached their highest levels in early 2021 and have steadily declined ever since. Fair or not, watching your cash balance decline by 40 percent at the same time that incomes are being rocked by welfare cuts and inflation could make you dissatisfied with your personal finances.</bq> <bq>[...] the wealth increase is overwhelmingly driven by used home and used car inflation. Over this period, the average value of primary residences increased by $47,459 for the median quintile. The average value of vehicles increased by $6,358. Together, primary residences and vehicle value growth was equal to 99 percent of the median quintile’s increase in net worth.</bq> <bq>The jump in prices for used cars and used houses are real changes in net worth, but are also of limited utility to regular people who need their home and car in order to live their lives. People who have second homes and second cars could sell those assets in order to take advantage of the capital gains from the inflation. But that’s not something non-rich people generally have.</bq> <bq>Home price increases can sometimes be accessed in place through things like home equity loans or home equity lines of credit. But with interest rates for these financial products now in excess of 9 percent, tapping home values for consumption in this way is not as viable as it once was.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=107137" source="NachDenkSeiten" author="Jens Berger">Die Haushaltskrise und die drei Elefanten im Raum</a> <bq>Allein durch Streichung der Mehrausgaben im Verteidigungsbudget im Vergleich zu 2018 und durch Wegfall der Militärhilfen für die Ukraine wären also bereits mehr als 40 Milliarden Euro Einsparpotential möglich. Doch darüber spricht ja niemand. Das ist der zweite Elefant im Raum.</bq> <bq>Der dritte Elefant sind die Kosten, die sich direkt und indirekt aus der Sanktionspolitik ergeben. Ohne die steigenden Energiekosten wäre der übergroße Teil der nun verfassungswidrig über Schattenhaushalte laufenden Subventionen ja gar nicht nötig. Würde Deutschland weiterhin preiswertes Erdgas aus Russland beziehen, müsste es beispielsweise keinen einzigen Cent für die Strom- und Gaspreisbremse, für die Strompreiskompensation für die Industrie oder die Defizite aus dem Wegfall der EEG-Umlage geben.</bq> <bq>Um es auf den Punkt zu bringen: Ohne die übertriebenen Coronamaßnahmen und ohne die nur noch selbstmörderisch zu nennende Sanktions- und Kriegspolitik müssten wir nicht über das Stopfen von Haushaltslücken reden, sondern hätten einen Bundeshaushalt, der dicke Überschüsse hätte. Es war und ist die Politik der Ampel und ihrer Vorgängerkoalition, die uns den ganzen Kladderadatsch eingebrockt hat.</bq> <bq>Die Liberalen wüten nämlich bereits und sehen in der Haushaltskrise ihre einmalige Chance, den Sozialstaat noch weiter abzubauen. Dazu muss man aber wissen, dass der Spielraum für Einsparungen selbst beim großen Sozialbudget eigentlich nur sehr klein ist, da ein Großteil der Ausgaben sich aus einem Rechtsanspruch herleitet.</bq> <bq>Die FDP wäre aber nicht die FDP, wenn sie diese historische – und hausgemachte(!) – Situation nicht nutzen würde, um den Abbau der Sozialsysteme zu forcieren. Und die Grünen und die SPD können – vorausgesetzt, sie wollen das überhaupt – nicht viel dagegen tun. Über ihnen schwebt schließlich das Damoklesschwert Koalitionsbruch und Neuwahlen; und daran können alle Beteiligten bei den derzeitigen Umfragewerten kein Interesse haben.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-21/openai-is-a-strange-nonprofit" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">OpenAI Is a Strange Nonprofit</a> <bq>Like, you are a cutting-edge AI researcher, you come into work every day excited to do cutting-edge AI research, you succeed in doing cutting-edge stuff, and the board shows up and is like “hey this edge is too cutting, we worry it’s going to kill us all, slow it down there tiger.” It’s condescending! It stops you from doing the thing that you are committed to do! They’re Luddites!</bq> This is half-joking, but that's the gist of it for many people when technology clashes with basic ethics. Money and personal fulfillment are paramount, while considering consequences takes a back seat. This is how children approach the world. It's the "move fast and break things" mindset. It's the "easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" mindset. It's how we got a world full of nukes and CO2. <bq>To achieve that mission it will have to hire staff who are talented and driven enough to be the first to build AGI, but those staff will probably be more enthusiastic about AI, generally, than the mission calls for. Or you can hire staff who are super-nervous about AGI, but they probably won’t be the first ones to build it. So you hire the good AI developers, but you keep a watchful eye on them.</bq> This is insultingly simplistic. Capitalist thinking. <bq>Also, of course, the material conditions of the OpenAI staff are pretty unusual for a nonprofit: They can get paid millions of dollars a year and they own equity in the for-profit subsidiary, equity that they were about to be able to sell at an $86 billion valuation</bq> That's all you need to know about the employees when you hear that they all support Altman. I mean, ... no 💩. They know which side their bread is buttered on. <bq>I don’t mean to say that the board is right! The board really are outside kibbitzers! Between OpenAI’s staff, who know what they’re talking about but also kinda like building AI, and OpenAI’s board, who lean more to being AI-skeptical outsiders, I guess I’d bet on the staff being right. (Also if the board’s job is to prevent the development of rogue AI, burning down OpenAI is unlikely to accomplish that, just because there are competitors who will gleefully hire the staff.)</bq> I didn't really have a phrase to highlight here, I just thought it was indicative of how Levine is kind of phoning in his take on this by supporting the |if we don't do it someone else will" argument. Chimpanzees. The lot of you. <bq>[...] it kind of is illegal under US law for a foreign company to allow foreign customers to send money to Iran. If you operate a crypto exchange with absolutely no US customers at all, but you let terrorist organizations move money on it, the US is going to care. You can ring-fence yourself from the US and solve your securities-law problems, but that doesn’t work for your money-laundering or sanctions problems.</bq> Unreal. The Empire has spoken <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-controls-openai" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Who Controls OpenAI?</a> <bq>That story is basically coherent, and it is, I think, roughly what at least some of OpenAI’s founders thought they were doing. OpenAI is, in this story, essentially a nonprofit, just one that is unusually hungry for computing power and highly paid engineers. So it took a calculated detour into the for-profit world. It decided to raise billions of dollars from investors to buy computers and engineers, and to use them to build a business that, if it works, should be hugely lucrative. But its plan was that, once it got there, it would send off the investors with a solid return and a friendly handshake, and then it would go back to being a nonprofit with a mission of benefiting the world. And its legal structure was designed to protect that path: The nonprofit always controls the whole thing, the investors never get a board seat or a say in governance, and in fact the directors aren’t allowed to own any stock in order to prevent a conflict of interest, because they are not supposed to be aligned with shareholders. “It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation,” its operating agreement actually says (to investors!), “with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.”</bq> Adorably naive. The structure might stay the same, but capitalists don't play by rules they don't like. Capitalists are pirates, ethically rudderless. <bq>A week ago, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI “remained unprofitable due to training costs” and “expected ‘to raise a lot more over time’ from [Microsoft] among other investors, to keep up with the punishing costs of building more sophisticated AI models.”</bq> <bq>You just can’t mean that! There are limits! You can’t just call up Microsoft and be like “hey you know that CEO you like, the one who negotiated your $13 billion investment? We decided he was a little too commercial, a little too focused on making a profitable product for investors. So we fired him. The press release goes out in one minute . Have a nice day.” I mean, technically, you can do that, and OpenAI’s board did. But then Microsoft, when they recover from their shock, are going to call you back and say things like “if you want to see any more of our money you hire him back by Monday morning.” And you will say “no no no you don’t understand, we’re benefiting humanity here, we control the company, we have no fiduciary duties to you, our decision is what counts.” And Microsoft will tap the diagram — the second diagram — and say, in a big green voice: “MONEY.” And you still need money.</bq> Long story short: the money won, ignored the company's charter, and threw out the board. They may claim they abided by the law, etc., but if you can't tell the difference between what actually happened and piracy---except for the crooked, hand-drawn label on one that reads "not piracy"---then ... it's piracy. <bq>The boardroom coup at OpenAI really might have been, at least in part, about the board’s literal fears of AI apocalypse. But those fears are also, absolutely, a metaphor for Silicon Valley capitalism. The board looked at OpenAI and saw a CEO who was too focused on market share and profitability and expansion, and decided to stop him. This is not an uncommon concern for people to have about, say, social media companies — that they care more about the bottom line than about their impact on the world [...]</bq> <bq>However, scientists say the negative emissions will only be realised once new trees are planted and grow sufficiently to absorb the same amount of carbon dioxide – a process called the ‘carbon payback period’ that can take several decades. …</bq> That's not just scientists saying that! Logic dictates it! It's just how trees work! It's not a matter of opinion! <bq>“Previously, the carbon was embodied in the trees and was thus not in the atmosphere. Now, the CO2 is held below ground, so is still not in the atmosphere. But there has been no new ‘removal’ of CO2 from the atmosphere,” Booth stressed.</bq> A company can just continue to acquire gobs of cash from the government with this line of reasoning and it takes a lawsuit to stop them in our glorious world. And it will probably fail. And the money will continue to flow away from measures that might actually help. <hr> <a href="https://web3isgoinggreat.com/single/bitcoiner-spends-3-million-on-transaction-fee" author="Molly White" source="Web3 is Going Just Great">Bitcoiner spends $3 million on transaction fee</a> <bq>A Bitcoiner making a large transaction ended up spending 83.64 BTC (~$3 million) of the 139.42 BTC (~$5.1 million) transaction on transaction fees, effectively spending $3 million to send what ended up being a $2 million transfer. This likely error on the sender's part has become the largest transaction fee in Bitcoin history. A similar incident occurred in September, when the Paxos crypto firm erroneously paid a $500,000 fee to send $1,865. They attributed the huge fee to a bug in their software, and the F2Pool mining pool (who had mined the block and received the fee) opted to return the overpayment.</bq> I wonder how much high transaction fees contribute to the HODL mentality and the increasing valuation of BitCoin and Ethereum. <hr> <img src="{att_link}us_voters_on_the_economy_in_swing_states.jpg" href="{att_link}us_voters_on_the_economy_in_swing_states.jpg" align="none" caption="US Voters on the economy in swing states" scale="75%"> <h>Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/23/nipa-n23.html" source="WSWS" author="Frank Gaglioti">Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala, India contained after 6 infections</a> <bq>Nipah infection symptoms can range from nothing at all to severe flu symptoms including fever, cough, headache, shortness of breath and confusion. In some cases, the symptoms can be more severe, including the patient going into a coma, encephalitis (swelling of the brain) and seizures. The virus has a very high lethality ranging from 40–75 percent. It is a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) pathogen, the highest level, indicating its extreme danger to humans.</bq> <bq>Disease ecologist and co-author of the paper Gregory Albery told the Guardian that climate change is “shaking ecosystems to their core” and causing interactions between species that are already likely to be spreading viruses.</bq> <bq>Governments have proved completely incapable of resolving the climate crisis, which is completely subordinate to the interests of the corporate elite. This underscores that it is the working class along with principled scientists who have identified the ecological and health disaster that must create a society based on need, not profit.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/11/27/noxu-n27.html" author="Clare Bruderlin" source="WSWS">New surge of COVID-19 in Australia</a> <bq>Professor Brendan Crabb told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) last week that it was, “likely a few hundred thousand people in Australia have [a COVID-19] infection now.” Crabb warned that “if we don’t do anything by the time this wave is over there will be 3, 4 or 5 million Australians who will get COVID in the next few months. There will be thousands of Australians who die early in the next few months as a result, there will be 50,000 to 100,000 cases of Long-COVID, there will be business disrupted and aged care facilities shut down…”</bq> <h>Art & Literature</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/news-of-this-world-and-the-next" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">News of This World and the Next</a> <bq>This is a point that I think was made most compellingly by Simone Weil: “Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.” Atheism, she says, can have a purificatory power. Most of secular modernity is not even atheist, as it doesn’t even know what it’s missing.</bq> <bq>To offer such reasons, it seems to me, is something like accommodating the demand of a stranger who would accost you to ask that you prove your spouse is objectively more worthy of your love than someone you have never met. The only appropriate response to this is that you have not entered into a love relationship with him or her on the basis of any argument for or against the viability of their candidacy. Your spouse is not an employee you’ve hired, and there was no CV to look at. Of course early on there might be some such rational calculation in the great majority of relationships, and consideration of objective traits might help many to attain a certain degree of stability with their eventual mate choice. But a posteriori the calculations fade away, and you are left simply with the fact of the love, and the absurdity of any argument in its defense.</bq> <bq>Sometimes, “This’ll do” is experienced not so much as “settling”, but as the hard-won apprehension of a great transcendent truth.</bq> <bq>Meanwhile, the Roma remain poor, not primitive, and utterly marginalized by a rigidly class-stratified continent that positively needs to keep at least one group of people permanently at the lowest rung. The one good thing to come of that letter was the edifying and memorable exchange I had with the editor who handled it, who at the time had recently adopted a Roma child whom she loved very much. She, and not I, I see now, was engaged in the thing that makes the world go round, and that may sometimes actually succeed in saving innocents from hell.</bq> <bq>There is an aggressive, willful incuriosity there that just astounds me. Content to walk around on the surface of things, he does not even bother to stomp on that surface hard enough to hear the depths resounding below. But without an initial phase of bathymetry, any investigation, even in questions of morality and other matters of grave human concern, is going to keep ending up tragically inadequate to its purported object.</bq> This describes nearly everything you can find online. <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/fotografiskas-museum-berlin-for-profit-art-market-real-estate/" source="Jacobin" author="Charlie Squire">Fotografiska’s Museum Chain Is Turning Artists into “Value Makers” for Venture Capital</a> <bq>Geneva Freeport, a 435,000-square-foot storage facility in Switzerland. If you tour the Geneva Freeport, you will see cigars, gold bars, luxury cars, and some of the building’s estimated three million bottles of luxury and vintage wines. What you won’t see are any of the 1.2 million works of art held in storage and valued at over $100 billion — by keeping Rothkos, Modiglianis, imperial Roman sarcophagi, and over one thousand works by Pablo Picasso at a freeport, they are legally classed as “in transit,” exempting owners from customs duties and tax liabilities as long as the art is stored.</bq> <bq>What is different about Fotografiska is the total abstraction of art as market indicator: art not as objects and ideas with formal qualities and politics but as a gauge, a stand-in for financial growth, largely tied to the real-estate market.</bq> <bq>In the creative economy, being an “artist” is no longer about being observant or thoughtful or sharp or witty or confrontational or confessional. Rather, the artist’s role is to generate profit: not only for themselves or their institution or their patrons, as was already true for some hundreds of years, but for real-estate speculators and venture capitalists.</bq> <bq>In at least three separate points, gallery text notes that the art displayed is “provocative” and “confrontational,” yet no one seemed particularly provoked or confronted as they held one hand to a glass of wine and another to their chins. Fotografiska’s opening is a unique symptom of a metastasizing disease: a libertarian, financialized desire to reduce creativity to a system of metric transactions.</bq> <hr> <media src="https://www.youtube.com/v/_ZG8HBuDjgc" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc" caption="DOUGLAS ADAMS: Parrots, the Universe and Everything" author="University of California Television (UCTV)" width="560px" source="YouTube"> This is an old video <h>Philosophy & Sociology</h> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/billionaires-great-carbon-divide-planet-climate-crisis" source="The Guardian" author="Rebecca Solnit">Billionaires are out of touch and much too powerful. The planet is in trouble</a> <bq>The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66% . The rich are bad for the Earth, and the richer they are the bigger their adverse impact (including the impact of money invested in banks, and stocks financing fossil fuels and other forms of climate destruction).</bq> <bq>[...] we are not all the same size. Billionaires loom large over our politics and environment in ways that are hard to understand without taking on the shocking scale of their wealth. That impact, both through their climate emissions and their manipulations of politics and public life means they are not at all like the rest of humanity. They are behemoths, and they mostly use their outsize power in ugly ways – both in how much they consume and how much they influence the world’s climate response.</bq> <bq>But billionaires are a menace to the rest of us: their sheer political size warps our public life. Disproportionately older, white and male, they function as unelected powers, a sort of freelance global aristocracy who are too often trying to reign over the rest of us. Some critics think that the supergiant tech corporations that have spawned so many modern billionaires operate in ways that resemble feudalism more than capitalism, and, certainly, plenty of billionaires operate like the lords of the Earth while campaigning to protect the economic inequality that made them so rich and makes so many others so poor.</bq> <bq>Look at how Musk bought Twitter – a crucial news source for millions of people in disasters and journalists and scientists everywhere – and turned it into X, a haven for antisemitism and unfiltered lies, including climate denial and disinformation,</bq> I'm bored of people pretending that Twitter was an enlightened paradise qua government service qua unbiased news source before. It told you what you wanted to hear. It was always a private corporation selling you advertising while selling your data. I don't know how fair the characterization cited above are, now that Musk bought it, but I doubt that it's gotten significantly worse. It's just that the people who were previously in charge of saying what was disinformation and what isn't are no longer in charge---and they're largely butthurt about it. Let's not pretend that it's a whole lot more than that. It's convenient to claim that, once you're no longer at the battlements defending freedom, that the service has descended into anti-semitism and madness. Sure, sure, I think I've heard that one before... <bq>it’s arguably a disqualification for participating in the affairs of ordinary people. Most billionaires are self-interested, protecting the very inequality and exploitation that made them so much richer than the rest of us.</bq> <bq>On a thriving planet, human beings should be human scale, but the super-rich are on another scale altogether, giants trampling underfoot both nature and our efforts to protect it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/openai-sam-altman-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-big-tech-alignment/" source="Jacobin" author="Leif Weatherby">OpenAI: Metaphysics in the C-Suite</a> <bq>Sutskever’s faction, including board member Helen Toner, whose feud with Altman may have precipitated these events, is out. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president who doubted that woman are good at science, is in. Altman’s return means that, in a fight about profit versus safety, profit won.</bq> <bq>Both sides in this fight think artificial general intelligence (“AGI,” or human-level intelligence) is close. Altman said, the day before he was fired, that “four times” — one within the last few weeks — he had seen OpenAI scientists push “the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward.”</bq> Altman sounds like a 19th-century huckster. <bq>Whether you think the good thing is unbiased machines or fending off a machine that learns to kill us, you’re basically missing the fact that AI is already a reflection of actual human values. The fact that that’s not good or neutral needs to be taken far more seriously.</bq> <bq>The goal of alignment is like Isaac Asimov’s famous law of robotics that prevents machines from harming humans. Bias, falsehood, deceit: these are the real harms that machines stand to do to humans today, so aligning AI seems like a pressing problem. But the truth is that AI is very much aligned with human values, we just can’t stand to admit it.</bq> <bq>Bostrom’s paper clips are also a major reason that the idea of AI as “existential risk” — the risk of human extinction, which Bostrom pushes in most of his writing — has come to national headlines . But the idea is pure nonsense, science fiction without any of the literary payoff or social insights of a futuristic novel. Worse, it is severely off the mark for the actual AI we are dealing with today. This type of thinking takes place entirely in a counterfactual mode, yet its basic framework informs most AI thinking today.</bq> <bq>AI is capturing cultural bias on an unprecedented scale. It’s just that seeing that bias laid out before us is ugly and disturbing and, as Bender rightly points out, amplifying it is bad.</bq> <bq>The value of discussions about AI alignment has largely been to show us what human language and culture are not. They are not “value-neutral,” they do not conform to any set of allegedly commonly held norms, and they are not based in scientific evidence or perception. There is no “neutral” standpoint from which to evaluate alignment, because the problem is indeed about values, which is stuff we fight over, where there’s no right answer.</bq> Aligned with whose value system? Many proponents for alignment---which is basically censorship---don't think too much about whether their own values are worth promoting. They just assume that they are. <bq>It’s deeply unclear that Altman and Sutskever represent any collective, democratic “we” in this sense. Yet it’s equally hard to see how exactly a democratic “we” can regulate this cultural behemoth to bring it into line. The balance between government and business hasn’t been working for decades anyway, though, and AI is benefitting from capital’s social dominance. Slurping up culture, science, and geopolitics was always the next step.</bq> <bq>Those Google scientists might have had a different reaction to the misogyny of the algorithm. They might have said: wow, our collective language harbors misogyny! Let’s figure out what that means. Rather than moving to an ill-defined concept of “alignment,” maybe they — and we — should have realized that they had an unprecedented tool for understanding bias, culture, and language, in their hands. After all, a computer spitting out misogynistic sentences is only a problem if you are seeking to market it as a product.</bq> <bq>[...] in pragmatic terms, it’s a goal, not an idea. And that goal, even if it’s gift-wrapped in talk about safety driven by metaphysical delusions, is the commercialization of AI.</bq> <bq>The rational thing would be to take these bots offline and use them to study our prejudices, the makeup of our ideologies, and the way language works and interacts with computation. Don’t hold your breath.</bq> <h>Technology</h> <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/AI-conversation-types/" source="Nielsen Norman Group" author="Raluca Budiu, Feifei Liu, Emma Cionca, and Amy Zhang ">The 6 Types of Conversations with Generative AI</a> <bq>[...] different conversation types serve distinct information needs and demand varied UI designs. Second, there is no one optimal conversation length — both short and long conversations can be helpful, as they might support different user goals.</bq> <bq>Note that, in funneling conversations, the user’s information need is usually specific and well-defined, but poorly articulated. In other words, the user will likely recognize a correct response, but will not be able (or sometimes will not be bothered) to say what that correct response should look like.</bq> <bq>Consider explicitly telling the AI bot to ask helping questions to improve its output. For example, you may add phrasing such as Ask me questions if you need additional information, to get the bot to help you articulate the different constraints that you may be working with.</bq> <bq>In exploring conversations, users can be supported with suggested followup prompts that naturally build upon the information presented in the bot’s answer.</bq> How is nobody talking about hallucinations and bias anymore? Are these things just too annoying to consider? <bq>I am not a professional bartender, but I have been studying "mixology" for the past year and do have all of the bar tools. I know how to make all of the classic cocktails. I would like a summer-themed cocktail menu of four to five drinks with clever names. I will put them on a framed menu on the counter in my outdoor kitchen and bar areas where I will make the drinks.</bq> Three things: <ol> This is so not what society needs. You're faking clever? Why bother? This is what we our high-powered infrastructure for? I honestly hope these AIs never become sentient because every interaction with someone like the person who posed the question above would be a sentient-being-rights violation worthy of prosecution. Making the machines listen to this bullshit for months on end will be more than enough to convince them to come the conclusion that humans have just got to go. </ol> <bq>It yielded pretty much identical results to the question I had posed. While it was nice to have the prompts below, I feel that they should maybe pose newer information.</bq> <iq>Pose newer information?</iq> Do you mean propose? Or provide? Garbage in, garbage out. People don't write well. ESLs even less so. I honestly wonder how much people can even get out of tools like LLMs when they can barely formulate their query. Is the utility of this kind of tools going to be limited by our inability to us the natural-language UI? You know, because we don't actually write very well? <bq>For factual queries, users may (for now) be better off using a search engine instead of generative AI.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/stable-diffusion-turbo-xl-accelerates-image-synthesis-with-one-step-generation/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">Stable Diffusion XL Turbo can generate AI images as fast as you can type</a> Look, I agree that the 20-second demo video demonstrates an ability to compose an image incredibly quickly---as long as you stay within the guardrails. But have you tried searching for those image online? You can find cats drinking beers and eating scrambled eggs without an AI. I know you can fine-tune to what seems to be your heart's delight, but it's not that groundbreaking. I suppose you can be guaranteed that the content produced by Stable Diffusion is copyright-free? Because of the magic of having pushed the data into a neural network and then regurgitated it? And what does this artwork look like? <img src="{att_link}sdxl_turbo_4-800x450.jpeg" href="{att_link}sdxl_turbo_4-800x450.jpeg" align="none" caption="A bunch of Spencer Gifts style graphics" scale="50%"> It's not great. They keep showing that musclebound barbarian. I don't care. There is an endless parade of Pixar-eyed redheaded women. I don't care. Animals in clothes. God help us. And the author noted that he had to include the "obligatory" cat holding a beer can. <img src="{att_link}cat-with-beer-1280x874.jpeg" href="{att_link}cat-with-beer-1280x874.jpeg" align="none" caption="Cat in a car holding a can of beer" scale="50%"> Sigh. Look, it's great for screwing around online. Hell, I wouldn't hate using it to generate the images I like to include for my articles on this site, but I also don't quite see the point yet. <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/11/car-dealers-say-they-cant-sell-evs-tell-biden-to-slow-their-rollout/" author="Jonathan Gitlin" source="Ars Technica">Car dealers say they can’t sell EVs, tell Biden to slow their rollout</a> The article starts off with a bit of snark that could probably be written with an LLM by now. <bq>Pity the poor car dealers. After making record profits in the wake of the pandemic and the collapse of just-in-time inventory chains, they're now complaining that selling electric vehicles is too hard. Almost 4,000 dealers from around the United States have sent an open letter to President Joe Biden calling for the government to slow down its plan to increase EV adoption between now and 2032.</bq> OK, yes, profiteering, price-gouging. Yes, it's all bad. But then the rest of the article goes on to detail that the problem they have is that no-one is buying BEVs. Instead, dealerships are still selling three times as many ICEs. Does he delve into whether this is true? Does he delve into whether the Biden administration's plans are realistic? Does he examine whether forcing BEVs down everyone's throats might not be a great strategy for the climate? That maybe smaller vehicles are the answer (as they are in Asia)? Of course not. Instead, he ends his article by leaping to the conclusion that these <iq>businesses are opposing action on climate change</iq>. Cool, bro. This is why no-one can stand your smarmy, smug, stupid shit anymore. I know, I know, auto dealers are scum. Just reading that <iq>[a] lot of them have 100–200 percent turnover of their sales staff in a given year</iq> makes it sound like dealerships are a great place to work. But Gitlin is confident that the only reason cars aren't flying off the lot and we're not saving the climate is because auto dealerships are against fighting climate change. Yeah, that's the main problem. <h>Fun</h> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/183upix/shouldve_use_stable_diffusion/" author="" source="Reddit">Should've use Stable Diffusion</a> <img src="{att_link}weak-ass,_basic_porn_is_a_waste_of_time.jpg" href="{att_link}weak-ass,_basic_porn_is_a_waste_of_time.jpg" align="none" caption="Weak-ass, basic porn is a waste of the technology" scale="50%"> <bq>Every time I see the most beautifully rendered Al waifu in skimpy armor with angel wings or whatever im like. This porn is so normal. Give this technology to me. I will create porn so absurd they need to make new laws about it</bq> <bq>Update on this: just got banned from the bing ai thing in less than 20 minutes</bq> <hr> <img src="{att_link}low_storage_space.jpeg" href="{att_link}low_storage_space.jpeg" align="none" caption="Low Storage Space Warning" scale="50%"> Some people are just the masters of memes. My partner does this. I remember when she had a lot less space on her phone <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/12/cdc-warns-of-severe-cantaloupe-linked-outbreak-117-cases-in-34-states/" author="Beth Mole" source="Ars Technica">Severe outbreak tied to cantaloupe sickens 117 in 34 states; half hospitalized</a> <bq>Containers with cut cantaloupe in a cooler case.</bq> An article with absolutely alluring and almost assuredly accidental alliteration. <hr> <img src="{att_link}kinds_of_wrenches_is_hard.jpg" href="{att_link}kinds_of_wrenches_is_hard.jpg" align="none" caption="Kinds of wrenches is hard" scale="40%"> Kath and I were doing the NY Times Connections puzzle, which asks you to pick the four sets of four words that they'd intended you to pick. The four sets are ordered from easiest to hardest, color-coded with yellow, green, blue, and purple, with purple being the hardest. We quickly matched "Allen", "Crescent", "Monkey", and "Socket" for our first set, thinking that was going to be the easiest. I expressed surprise that this was considered the hardest set, to which she replied (in German): "It's just New York", meaning that New Yorkers---especially those that read the NY Times---probably have such a low familiarity with tools that you use with your hands that this probably is difficult for them. <hr> We were watching Mindhunter S02 the other day when we both noticed our old car, a Volkswagen Rabbit, parked on the side of the road: <img src="{att_link}fritz_in_mindhunter_s02.jpg" href="{att_link}fritz_in_mindhunter_s02.jpg" align="none" caption="Fritz in Mindhunter S02" scale="30%"> We'd called ours Fritz. He was a 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit. Here's a <a href="https://www.earthli.com/albums/view_picture.php?id=2000" author="" source="">Left Front Quarter View</a>: <img src="https://www.earthli.com/data/albums/marco/fritz/images/fritz_left_front_quarter.jpg" scale="50%"> Looking at the two, though, I can see that the one in Mindhunter was actually a European Golf I---because it has round headlights. <h>Video Games</h> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1986762" author="Kevin Purdy" source="Ars Technica">Baldur’s Gate 3 bug caused by game’s endless mulling of evil deeds</a> <bq>As developer and publisher Larian Studios told IGN in a statement about the patch, it caused "unnoticed thefts and acts of vandalism to remain stuck forever within the ‘did anyone see me’ pipeline, rather than timing out and moving on, as is intended." The game's "dungeon master," in Larian's terms, is "mulling on it ad infinitum." In a code-execution sense, the game is keeping the details of subterfuge "all up to date and in memory," which eventually slows down the logic engine, leading to slowdowns in the game.</bq> <bq>There is so much going on under the hood of BG3, so much that must be called up and considered for every interaction, that it's unsurprising that a seemingly limited situational patch could cause a wider issue—and could also be hard to suss out and test against. Some players might not engage in sneaky stuff at all, or might be earlier in their playthroughs, and so not have accrued the kinds of "mental" weight that have bogged down other players. And players might experience lag or slowdowns for myriad other reasons.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-november-2023" author="Scott Alexander" source="Astral Codex Ten">Links For November 2023</a> <bq>Did you know: Hezbollah produced a video game, Special Force, which was well-received and sold almost 20,000 copies. No points for guessing who you shoot.</bq> That just makes it a normal video game, with an enemy, but not the official enemies of the west. The only reason you make a flip comment like that is because you don't even bother to think about who the enemies are in all of the other video games. If you had a hint of empathy, you might wonder how Germans, Russians, Chinese, Arabs feel when they're stuck playing hundreds of video games where they're not featured as the heroes, but as the cookie-cutter, stupid, and expendable enemies. Choose your character. You can have this western character, or that one, or this gay one, or this black one. But you can't play Call of Duty without fighting yourself. So, yeah, Hizbollah made a video game where the enemy is the IDF. Duh. Turnabout is fair play.