<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Climate Change</a> <a href="#technology">Technology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/15/dear-techno-savages-leave-us-alone/" source="CounterPunch" author="Koohan Paik-Mander">Dear Techno Savages, Leave Us Alone</a> <bq><b>You are a cancerous rib pulled from capitalism’s side, ceaselessly demanding unending growth</b>, as if metasticization were a good thing. Artificial intelligence will never affirm life, no matter how many 3-D facsimiles it prints. <b>Your singular motive is profit. Your reductive logic is an insult and a danger to Life itself.</b></bq> <bq>You and your disruptions are not welcome among us. We don’t want chip-implants in our brains. <b>We don’t want to move to Mars. You are alien to our embodied existence. We are of the Earth.</b></bq> <bq><b>Digital technologies are capitalism’s greatest “triumph.” Trillions of algorithms work ceaselessly 24/7 to buy and sell on world stock markets</b>, to secure deals to cut down forests, extract commodities on all continents and seabeds, to set up factory farms, and to displace traditional sustainable communities, which have survived for millennia precisely because of their respect for cycles and geographies.</bq> <bq>And still, you endlessly claim to be the provider of “solutions”! You use this assertion to lure us into your precincts. You invent problems that don’t exist. Stop! <b>We cannot accept the ravaging of the Earth and human civilization that you present as “solutions.” You are the problem.</b></bq> <bq>Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on coercion, manipulation, deception, extraction and accelerating inequity — <b>all cruel ruses that have been imposed for the last 500 years in a multitude of forms: colonialism, capitalism, and militarism, now culminating as insidious techno-feudalism.</b></bq> <bq>Now, you target us as the next wave of raw material! You wring your greedy hands, with reveries of extracting all the data in the world and more, to fill your large-language maw. <b>You dream of replacing forests and farmlands with endless computer gulags and nuclear reactors to process your data hoards.</b> You plot to channel infinite computations into glorious palaces, prisons and genocides.</bq> <bq>Your increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same predicament as all those who have also struggled historically for liberation. We must declare ourselves immune to your delusions of omnipotence. You cannot algorithm us into silence and conformity. <b>Our small communities are spread across the Planet, determined to dismantle capitalism and return to joy, love, beauty, and wonder, connecting with nature, our bodies, and each other. It has happened before, and it shall happen again.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/?p=2012351704" source="Antiwar.com" author="Sheldon Richman">Is Israel Mad?</a> <bq><b>In America the Reform Jewish movement agreed and explicitly renounced the claim that they were a diaspora longing to “return” to their national home in Palestine.</b> In their view Judaism existed to spread God’s word and set an example for the world. Nationalism conflicted with that mission. Theirs was the prophetic universalist Judaism that had long clashed with tribalism and the ghetto mindset.</bq> <bq>The Israeli Arab Jew Alon Mizrahi points out that Zionism should be judged by what it does, not by what it says. “Palestinians are, and forever will be, the foremost victims of Zionism,” he writes. “But <b>for too long we have neglected to look at the terrible price Jews have been paying for it in terms of their humanity, their morality, their freedom and creativity</b> and, tragicomically, their sense of place and belonging among our brothers and sisters of all races and places, including, yes, Palestine.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/13/new-report-on-sexual-violence-during-october-7th-attack-raises-serious-questions-about-the-uns-supposed-anti-israel-bias/" source="CounterPunch" author="Peter Bolton">New Report on Sexual Violence During October 7th Attack Raises Serious Questions About the UN’s Supposed Anti-Israel Bias</a> <bq>[...] the team of UN personnel who produced the report did not conduct their own research. Tellingly, press reports have also revealed that they did not even meet with any survivors of sexual violence that allegedly took place on October 7th . Rather, <b>they relied to a large extent on anecdotal and unverified reports from institutions in Israel.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2421388-the-war-in-gaza-is-creating-a-health-crisis-that-will-span-decades/" source="New Scientist" author="Grace Wade">The war in Gaza is creating a health crisis that will span decades</a> <bq>The lack of planning for the coming decades of healthcare needs is partly due to the enormity of the current humanitarian crisis. Most people in Gaza are living in crowded conditions without sewage treatment and trash removal. <b>On average, people have less than 1 litre of clean water per day. As a result, infectious disease is rampant.</b></bq> <bq><b>Hunger is also widespread. Almost two-thirds of households eat one meal a day, and a quarter of the population faces imminent starvation and extreme malnutrition.</b> Conditions are most dire in northern Gaza where 1 in 6 children are malnourished, according to the survey. Gaza’s health ministry reported on 7 March that 20 people, including 15 children, have died from malnutrition and dehydration. <b>Poor surveillance means these numbers are likely much higher.</b></bq> <bq>Bombing has made much of the territory unsafe. UNICEF found that by December, <b>more than 1000 children had lost one or both of their legs since the conflict began</b> – or more than 10 children a day, on average. And there are few options to obtain care for these injuries: <b>as of 21 February, only 18 of the 40 hospitals in Gaza were still functioning, but with reduced capacity.</b> “They don’t have drugs. They don’t have machines. They don’t have power. They might have a few doctors who are running an emergency room. So, there’s really no functioning health system,” says Selena Victor at humanitarian organisation Mercy Corps, which is providing emergency food in Gaza.</bq> <bq>The impact will be most severe for children. <b>Persistent malnutrition early in life stunts growth and impairs brain development</b>, causing deficits in cognition, memory, motor function and intelligence, says Haj-Hassan. It also <b>weakens children’s immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to illness.</b></bq> <bq>Given these consequences, <b>long-term health plans for Gaza must be established.</b> Such plans will have to address rebuilding infrastructure, developing mental and physical rehabilitation programmes and routinely screening for illness.</bq> Nobody's making plans because they know they're not going to be around or they'll be Egypt's problem. West Bank! Look lively! You're next! <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/pramila-pattens-rape-fantasies" source="" author="Norman Finkelstein">Pramila Patten's Rape Fantasies</a> <bq>The standard practice is to identify possible (“reasonable grounds to believe”) breaches of international humanitarian and human rights law and then call for a formal investigation. But <b>the Patten mission, although confessedly something less than an investigative body, makes judgments that go well beyond those of a typical investigative body to the point of near-certainty (“a finding of fact”) befitting the final verdict in a court of law.</b> What’s yet more odd, the Patten mission renders these fine determinations even as it acknowledges severe constraints imposed by limited evidence and time.</bq> <bq>Doesn’t it give pause that, more than three months after the attack, none of the alleged victims of—according to the Israeli government and the New York Times —rampant, systematic sexual violence on 7 October stepped forward to testify before the mission? Not one. The report endeavors to paper over this glaring lacuna by pointing up “the lack of trust by survivors” in the United Nations. But in the instant case, <b>it was the Israeli government itself that orchestrated this UN mission’s visit. It’s hard to fathom that in a country celebrated for its tribal closing of ranks in the face of external danger, and—not incidentally—in a culture known for its libertine sexual frankness, not a single victim of not just rape but sexual violence of any type was willing, and couldn’t be coaxed, to testify before a Government-blessed mission at such an existential moment in the nation’s history.</b></bq> <bq><b>The mission itself concedes—albeit buried at the tail end of the report —that “in the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified,”</b> and “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence was found in open sources,” and “no discernible pattern of genital mutilation could be established.”</bq> <bq>[...] photos and 50 hours of footage, from every conceivable angle and by every conceivable electronic device—yet the mission was unable to isolate a single direct image of sexual violence, even as no less than gang rapes were allegedly occurring in open space. <b>If the report was [sic] properly packaged and publicized, the title would read: “October 7: No Direct Material Evidence of Rape.”</b></bq> <bq><b>The report goes on to state that “[a]t least two of the allegations of sexual violence [at kibbutz Be’eri] previously reported were determined by the mission team to be unfounded</b>, due to either new superseding information or inconsistency in the information gathered.” It further notes alleged instances of sexual violence at other locales “which could not be verified.”</bq> <bq>[...] <b>it is a stage production directed by the UN bureaucracy to appease Israel and its powerful backer in Washington.</b></bq> <bq><b>The Patten mission “benefitted from the full cooperation of the Government of Israel.” Yet, it couldn’t locate a single victim of sexual violence or a single piece of direct evidence</b>, be it forensic or digital, of sexual violence on 7 October. It therefore beggars belief that rampant sexual violence occurred on that day.</bq> <bq><b>The available evidence is entirely consistent with the postulate that, if rapes did occur on 7 October—and most likely they did—these were isolated incidents perpetrated in the main by Gaza riff-raff and hooligans who entered Israel in the third wave.</b> It is this writer’s considered opinion—admittedly speculative in nature but nonetheless grounded in the known details of the 7 October attack, its modus operandi, and the predispositions of its perpetrators—that this is the most plausible scenario.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/11/patrick-lawrence-old-man-shouting-the-american-empire-is-doing-great-but-it-isnt/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Old Man Shouting, “The American Empire is Doing Great!” But It Isn’t</a> <bq><b>Never mind that Biden reduced an occasion intended to address all Americans as to the condition of their nation to a cheap stump speech.</b> He avoided falling down for his hour at the podium while stringing coherent sentences (mostly) together in the cause of his political survival. That is what counted.</bq> <bq><b>There is no change in Biden’s stone-solid support for a regime whose conduct more than casually resembles that of the Reich</b>—only another performance in the service of facile appearances.</bq> <bq>There are many other miscalculations to note in this line. The Iraq invasion, Afghanistan, the ongoing covert ops in Syria, the destruction of Libya—all failures reflecting <b>an overestimation of U.S. power in the 21st century and an underestimation of its accumulating weaknesses.</b></bq> <bq>Economic nationalism and straight-out protection is the new economic ideology. The Biden regime is midway in erecting export controls and other barriers intended to damage China’s high-technology industries. Late last month it announced that <b>it intends to block Chinese-made electric vehicles from the American market—this on the pretext that they represent a security threat. Pitiful all around.</b></bq> <bq>Many presidents before Biden were guilty of selling American foreign policy to those who proposed to buy it. In the case of Israel, this derives from a lobby that has grown grotesquely powerful and thinks nothing of using its wealth to destroy America’s political process, silence critics of the Zionist state, and so dismantle altogether what remains of our democracy. <b>As to Ukraine, it is merely the latest in a long line of conflicts waged, like money-laundering schemes, to benefit the military-industrial complex.</b> Capital, to finish the thought, drives our bus. And <b>of all the things that must not come in for criticism in the nation we have made of ourselves, the power of capital is surely near the top of the list.</b></bq> <bq>Post–Gaza and post–Ukraine, it is already becoming clear, <b>the West will find that it has redefined its relations with the wider world.</b> But to set a new course requires a certain surrender Western leaders—all of them, not just Biden—cannot yet accept.</bq> <bq><b>No claim to superior morality or the rule of Western law is any longer possible.</b> All that remains is material superiority, primarily by way of the weaponry of war, just as it was when da Gama got to southern India.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>the West’s leaders, America’s above all, have no clue of the surrender our moment asks of them.</b> To surrender as I mean this term will require leadership of a kind Western nations have rarely before seen, and there is none in sight at this point.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/03/emmanuel-todd-demography-religion-putin-ukraine/" source="" author="Michael Ledger-Lomas">Emmanuel Todd Prophesies the Defeat of the West</a> <bq>[...] he came to lament the later twentieth-century expansion of higher education, which in France and other Western countries was introducing a rift between the 40 percent or so of citizens who had benefited from it and all the rest. Globalization exacerbated this divide, because <b>people with higher education sided with the wealthy elite in the misguided hope of sharing in its gains.</b></bq> Is this not more a lack of principle and value? Does it not clearly reflect that the more officially educated you are, the fewer egalitarian principles you are likely to espouse? "I've got mine, jack," is both the siren and swan song of western civilization, such as it is. <bq>The overrepresentation of the zombies in the Charlie marches exposed their hollowness: <b>they were more concerned with maintaining France’s distribution of social power than with defending universal rights and freedoms.</b></bq> <bq>Todd has often essentialized and overdetermined the world as he finds it, a tendency evident in The Defeat of the West. His admittedly gripping portrait of America and Europe’s post-Christian nihilism is so overwhelming that it leaves little space for solutions. Only the Germans inspire him with some hope. <b>Although Todd has always classed Germany as an authoritarian society and disliked its efforts to foist economic austerity on the European Union, he loathes American power more.</b></bq> <bq>For all their confused values and stuttering economies, European societies remain stronger and wealthier than his gloomy prognostications or his loaded comparisons with Russia allow. <b>Perhaps the “nihilism” and the “narcissism” which characterize their politics are in the eye of the beholder.</b></bq> He could have written this for the NYT, to be honest. <hr> <a href="https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/too-dystopian-for-whom-a-continental-nigerian-writers-perspective/" source="Uncanny Magazine" author="Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki">Too Dystopian for Whom? A Continental Nigerian Writer's Perspective</a> <bq><b>Nigeria, where I live, became the poverty capital of the world in 2018 and maintained it for the next three years, having more poor people than India, the former poverty capital, with more than five times Nigeria’s population. We were surpassing them in sheer numbers, not just percentages.</b> A population of 200m managing to have more poor people than one of over a billion with the closest poverty numbers in sight, illustrates just how steep and staggering those numbers are. <b>It is also number one in open defecation, with the fourth lowest life expectancy on earth, lower even than war-torn countries like Syria, Afghanistan, and Palestine that has had conflict on and off for nearly seventy years.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=2010677" author="Scharon Harding" source="Ars Technica">Cut submarine cables cause web outages across Africa; 6 countries still affected</a> <bq>All 13 countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, <b>South Africa</b>, The Gambia, and Togo) reportedly suffered nationwide outages, with most seeing multiple networks hit.</bq> <bq>Earlier this month, three undersea fiber cables in the Red Sea were cut, disrupting an estimated 25 percent of Internet traffic in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe and forcing plans to reroute traffic. <b>The cause of these damaged cables hasn't been confirmed.</b></bq> Hey, South Africa! Fuck with the bull; you get the horns. -- Mossad <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/16/it-can-happen-to-you/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">It Can Happen to You</a> <bq>Palestinians who had gathered near the Kuwait roundabout outside Gaza City <b>to obtain humanitarian aid were hit with gunfire from helicopters, tanks, and drones, resulting in dozens of deaths and 160 injuries.</b> [...] Then the IDF <b>opened fire on the civilians who tried to recover the dead bodies</b> of those who were killed at the Kuwait roundabout while waiting for food. [...] On Wednesday, Israel bombed Israel one of the last remaining UNRWA aid distribution warehouses in Rafah, <b>destroying food stores intended for starving Palestinians, killing at least one UNRWA worker and wounding “scores” of civilians.</b> [...] This week the IDF released a video of a drone strike on two Palestinians in Gaza, one of whom the Israelis claimed was carrying an RPG. However, analysis of the imagery by Dr. Ramy Abdu revealed the object to be a bicycle not an RPG, which the IDF later grudgingly admitted following an inquiry by Bellingcat’s Aric Toler. <b>The two men were walking back from an aid distribution point. The surviving victim, whose lung was punctured in the airstrike, was carrying a sack of flour.</b></bq> <bq>A survey from January by Tel Aviv University found that most Israelis approve of the carnage inflicted on the civilian population of Gaza: “<b>A large majority of the Jewish public thinks that the IDF uses adequate or too little force in Gaza… An absolute majority (88%) also justifies the scope of casualties on the Palestinian side.</b></bq> <bq>Israeli Defense Chief Yoav Gallant dispelled any notion that Israel was rethinking an invasion of Rafah: “Those who think we are delaying will soon see that we will reach everywhere. <b>There is no safe place…anywhere in the Middle East.</b>”</bq> <bq>A former IDF commander told Haaretz: “Our form of combat at the moment is unusually wasteful. You could term it ‘a war of cruel rich people.’ We’re attacking innumerable targets, without asking whether it’s worth attacking them, and artillery is being used in places where it’s not really obligatory…<b>In principle, it would be possible to arrive at similar achievements with 10 percent of the destruction we have caused.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/2024/03/18/israel-the-hermit-kingdom" author="Ted Rall" source="">Israel, the Hermit Kingdom</a> <bq><b>Israelis’ cluelessness is understandable. They’ve been oppressing the Palestinians for decades. They’ve ignored UN resolutions requiring that they stop occupying Arab territory</b>, they’ve sent nearly a million religious fanatics to colonize the West Bank, and they’ve run the only apartheid state in the world following the end of that system in South Africa—<b>yet nothing bad has ever happened to them.</b> America kept sending them billions of dollars a year, arming them with high-tech weapons and intelligence, and ran interference for them at the UN whenever the world tried to hold them accountable for human rights abuses. <b>Why should the good times come to an end?</b></bq> The U.S. is similarly blindsided by its lack of support around the world. It is being forced to use the iron fist without the silk glove much more often. <bq>Israelis are not stupid people. How did they fail to anticipate that they would soon be shunned and despised for what most of the world sees as a grotesque and opportunistic overreaction to October 7th? As a nation created by the UN, no other country depends as much upon international goodwill for its survival.</bq> No, they are some of the most highly educated and simultaneously highly propagandized people in the world. They are not unique in this regard, though. The elites of most OECD nations are very, very adept at fooling themselves into believing that they have the moral high ground, all the while benefitting from a system of plunder that is what made them elites in the first place. This is the way of the world. I'm surprised to see Rall write something like <iq>depends as much upon international goodwill for its survival,</iq> because, well, what the hell is that supposed to mean? The U.N. doesn't have the right to revoke the charter---if there even is such a thing---to any Westphalian nation-state under its supposed aegis. What does Israel have to fear specifically more than any other nation? It can fear reprobation in the form of sanctions and so on, but that's not special. Any nation can fear that. Does Rall think that Israel's "right" to be a country can be retracted? That is not at all the case. That's ludicrous. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/19/chris-hedges-israels-trojan-horse/" author="Chris Hedges" source="Scheer Post">Israel’s Trojan Horse</a> <bq>Oxfam in a March 15 report accuses Israel of actively hindering aid operations in Gaza in defiance of the orders by the International Court of Justice. It notes that 1.7 million Palestinians, some 75 percent of the Gaza population, are facing famine and two-thirds of the hospitals and over 80 percent of all health clinics in Gaza are no longer operable. <b>The majority of people, the report reads, “have no access to clean drinking water” and “sanitation services are not functioning.”</b></bq> <bq>Oxfam says Israel employs “a dysfunctional and undersized inspection system that keeps aid snarled up, subjected to onerous, repetitive and unpredictable bureaucratic procedures that are contributing to <b>trucks being stranded in giant queues for 20 days on average.</b>” Israel, Oxfam explains, rejects “items of aid as having ‘dual (military) use,’ <b>banning vital fuel and generators entirely</b> along with other items essential for a meaningful humanitarian response such as protective gear and communications kit.”</bq> Look, this is not new. This is how you win the war. It shouldn't surprise anyone. The U.S. did the same thing in Iraq. Do you remember? It filled the country with depleted-uranium munitions, then sanctioned and embargoed any and all medical equipment that could have helped treat the ensuing skyrocketing cancer rates. This all happened. It's not a matter of dispute. No-one could stop the U.S. The media in Western countries found the entire topic wholly unprofitable. Few even noticed it was happening. Fewer cared. This will be much of the same. Within some circles, this is news. For some, the response in Gaza is what those people deserve for having attacked Israelis. For others, it's a genocidal horror show. What is undeniable is that it will continue to happen, and then it will pass by, and it will grow ever smaller in the rear-view mirror. <bq>Israel has allowed 15,413 trucks into Gaza during the past 157 days of war. Oxfam estimates that the population of Gaza needs five times that number. Israel allowed 2,874 trucks in February, a 44 percent reduction from the previous month. Before Oct. 7, 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily.</bq> What a spectacularly shitty way of reporting these numbers. Please normalize the units so we can compare them! For example, 15,413 / 157 = 98 trucks per day since October 7th. That's 20% of the aid trucks that Palestine had when their economy was severely constrained, but hadn't yet been completely flattened. In February, which had 29 days this year, 2,874 / 29 = 99 trucks per day, so, while it was a 44% reduction relative to January, it was was still above average for the entire five-month period. That means that January had ~144 trucks per day, which is way above the average. That suggests, then, that October--December had far fewer trucks. <pre> 3x + 99 + 144 = 98 x 5 3x + 243 = 490 3x = 247 <macro convert="none">x<macro convert="all"> = 82.33 </pre> The number of aid trucks allowed into Gaza, while much, much lower than before October 2023, almost doubled in January, and has now lowered again, but not quite to the low levels of the first three months. I think that gives us a better picture of what he was trying to say. <bq>Israel, by design, is creating a humanitarian crisis of such catastrophic proportions, with thousands of Palestinians killed by bombs, shells, missiles, bullets, starvation and infectious diseases, that the only option will be death or deportation. <b>The pier is where the last act in this gruesome genocidal campaign will be played out as Palestinians are herded by Israeli soldiers onto ships.</b></bq> I'm not sure I agree that they would go to all of this trouble. Once you've got everybody in Rafah, it's just a quick jump across the Egyptian border. So, why would you want to drag 1.2 million people to the shore for slow deportation on ships? Which ships? Transporting 10,000 people is one thing. 1.2 million (or more) is quite another. On the other hand, Netanyahu offhandedly threw out a comment that the Palestinians could maybe use the new pier to escape, so what do I know? <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtXswOv1AWw" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/WtXswOv1AWw" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Sarah Wagenknecht" caption="German MP Sahra Wagenknecht rips her colleagues in parliament for arming Ukraine with more weapons."> <bq>Schon die Regierung Scholz hat eine rote Linie nach der anderen überschritten. Inzwischen sind wir so weit, dass <b>deutsche Luftwaffenoffizere in aller Seelenruhe darüber debattieren, wie man mit deutschen Marschflugkörpern russische Ziele zerstören kann.</b> Unsere grandiosen Militärexperten von den Grünen belehren uns jetzt seit zwei Jahren, welchen gamechanger wir als nächstes liefern müssen damit die Ukraine damit garantiert den Krieg gewinnt. Also, <b>wenn der Papst dann in diesen ganzen Wahnsinn hineinruft, dass Kiev lieber verhandeln sollte als das Land in den Selbstmord zu treiben, dann wird sogar <i>er</i> als Putin Troll von ihnen allen niedergemacht.</b> Also, wer diese Debatte verfolgt, der kann sich doch nur noch Fragen: <b><i>haben sie wirklich alle den Verstand verloren?</i></b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://thisishell.com/interviews/1712-oded-naaman" author="Oded Na'aman" source="This is Hell!">Normalizing Slaughter</a> This was a fantastic interview with an extremely eloquent interviewee. <bq>Israeli consciousness and Israeli culture, on the one hand, denies---ignores---Palestinian existence. Israelis generally don't speak Arabic---most of them---they don't understand the Palestinian experience. They don't understand what it means for Palestinians to live under this regime. But at the same time, the Palestinian existence was contained through the occupation, through the state dealing with Palestinians with Israeli IDs inside Israel, and through the blockade inside Gaza in the case of the Gaza strip. So, Palestinian existence was both accommodated and contained, and denied, as the same time. This status quo has ended, on October 7th. October 7th made it impossible for Israelis to continue to ignore Palestinian existence on this land. And yet, it made them believe, most of them, a lot of them, that Palestinian existence on this land is intolerable. And now, they're facing this problem: no matter how much violence, no matter how many Palestinians must die, there will always be Palestinians on this land. And I think that's true of Jews as well. They're not going away. But Israelis can't accept this. And this cognitive dissonance, this break from reality, this recognition that reality is such that both peoples will exist on this land. And, at the same time, this idea that it's impossible, that coexistence is impossible---intolerable---too dangerous---this combination of attitudes leads to madness, to tantrum. And that has no clear goal and no clear end. And I think that that's something that's really important to understand. Israelis are profoundly afraid and they're unable to accept reality, even as they see it. [...] The only way this will stop is if we accept the fact that we will live on this land together. There's no way around it. And, as long as we don't accept it, this madness will go on. [...] This has to do with a deep anxiety that Israelis have about their existence. The tragedy of it is that, by letting themselves be led by this fear and anxiety, they are themselves undermining everything that made this country mean something to us, everything that made it valuable. [...] Morality is not like a bonus. Morality is not something you do after you feel safe enough and then you add morality to the mix because that's a nice thing. Morality is the base of our existence. If you lose all sense of boundary, if we treat people in these profoundly inhumane ways, we lose ourselves completely. [...] Israel is, right now, it's worst enemy.</bq> Clinging to principles and morality is a luxury that you have when your survival is secure. Exigent, desperate circumstances are no excuse for losing your morals, but they are a <i>reason</i>. You should never kill someone to save yourself. That's immoral, as it places the value of your life over theirs. It transfers your own bad luck onto them, for no other reason than that you were stronger in that instance. It is, however, understandable. This is not an argument against self-defense, either. Situations in which your life is directly threatened are much less morally fraught. But people like to fuzz the boundaries of such situations, to make it seem as if dangers that are absolutely not imminent are very much so, so that the can increase the set of cases where they can act selfishly without being immoral. That's a game that they play with themselves and anyone who believes them. Israelis fool themselves into believing that their fear for their own safety excuses them for whatever immoral acts they allow to be perpetrated in their name. That is not the case. Anyone who lives and works in relative safety and security in Israel who agrees that the extermination of the Palestinians is necessary in order to guarantee their continued safety and security is immoral. Anyone who is uninformed about the severity of the situation---of what is being done in their names---is derelict in their duties as citizens and human beings. They are not alone in this. A recent poll in the U.S. revealed that fully half of Americans have no idea whether more Palestinians or Israelis have been killed in the recent "war". Americans are almost always blissfully ignorant of what is being done in their name in order to secure their position at the top of the heap. They are no less immoral than Israelis, in this regard. Or most Europeans, for that matter. The first step is awareness; the second is to choose the side of justice and morality. Choosing a path that benefits you most personally---be it financially or in terms of perceived safety---is immoral if someone else suffers for your gain. Choosing in this way opens you up to manipulation by the elites, who are only too happy to cow the masses into quivering, fearful goo, only too ready to let anyone and everyone die if they can only be guaranteed their own safety and prosperity. This applies to anyone---Israelis, Americans, Europeans, anyone---not just those who've already bought options on housing on the Gaza coast. <bq>I propose to think of it as the spectrum between the side that thinks that only one people can live on this land and the side that thinks that both people are going to live on this land. This is, I feel, a different way of drawing the lines. And I think it's important. Because I think a lot of people, being horrified by what Israel is doing right now, a lot of people have reached a conclusion that Israel is just profoundly and fundamentally corrupt and should not exist. Now, I don't think that they're necessarily antisemitic, because I also think that there's deep moral corruption in Israel, but I think that that attitude, that conclusion, is precisely what drives those who feel strongly about Israel's [continued] existence to reach the opposite conclusion: that, if it's between us or them, we're the ones who should exist. And, I think that that dichotomy is what drives this war. This war is based on the dichotomy that only one side can exist on this land. And the only way this war will end, the only way any kind of better future will be made possible is if there's more widespread recognition, understanding, that both sides are going to exist on this land and we have to figure out a way for both sides to exist that doesn't oppress either side. And, of course, in the context of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the main question is how can Israelis and Palestinians live in a way that doesn't oppress Palestinians, because Palestinians have been oppressed for many, many years by Israel. So, my point is that, my message is, if you want the war to stop, talk about coexistence. That doesn't mean that you endorse everything that Israel is doing, not at all, and Israel should change radically---radically---but the only way to change the paradigm of war, is to speak of coexistence. And I think that's true within Israel, I think that's true outside of Israel, and I think anyone who wants a ceasefire should speak in this way, rather than deny the right of either group to exist.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/23/the-famine-makers/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">The Famine-Makers</a> <bq>Human rights lawyer and former UN genocide expert Craig Mokhiber on the Biden administration’s“ceasefire” resolution before the UN Security Council: “<b>A draft that does not demand an immediate ceasefire, but instead suggests one might be negotiated if certain conditions are met, and that genocidal attacks can otherwise continue, is not a ceasefire resolution. It is a ransom note.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/a-barely-disguised-genocide" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">A Barely-Disguised Genocide</a> <bq><b>In any system where people are being indoctrinated at mass scale by the powerful you’re going to see the majority of that population buying into the indoctrination, but conflating the people with the political ideology they’re indoctrinated with serves only to confuse and distort.</b> If people had conflated “Nazism” with “Germany” that logic could have been used to justify exterminating every German after WWII, but because that distortion wasn’t made it opened up the possibility of de-indoctrinating the nation from that pernicious worldview.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/things-that-have-been-discredited" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix"> Things That Have Been Discredited During The Destruction Of Gaza</a> <bq>Don’t babble at me about how bad and wrong it is for Palestinians to use violence unless you can offer me a coherent plan for what they should do instead.</bq> This is the same logic I've heard from Israel: the other side is too dangerous to our side to allow them to continue to exist. Both sides think this way. Both sides are currently justified in thinking this way. Israel has mistreated and tortured Palestinians for so long that Palestinians have no reason to believe that they will simply stop or ease up. The Palestinians rightly understand that they will be pushed to the side until they are eradicated or a handful are left, selling cigarettes on reservations. Israelis also rightly believe that Palestinians will not stop resisting their subjugation, knowing that they will turn to violence because nothing else works. They know this subconsciously even as they consciously ignore the existence of the Palestinians. That is, their fear of the Palestinians drives their every move, pushes them into a deep immorality, but they also don't bother trying to understand why the Palestinians might hate them so much. The Israelis, being the overwhelmingly more powerful side, need to give way and seek peace. The Palestinians will continue to lash out, having been trained over generations not to trust the Israelis---by the behavior of the Israelis themselves. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/22/does-zionism-lead-to-genocide/" author="Robert Scheer" source="Scheer Post">Does Zionism lead to genocide?</a> This is an interview with Max Blumenthal, editor in chief of the Grayzone. I copied the transcript from the linked article instead of writing it myself. <bq>All of these characters are just so despicable. How can you support them? And what I wanted to say, because there was a lot of grumbling in the audience. And then you could see if you watch the Q and A one question or another was about, well, is Trump any better? And yeah, of course Trump isn’t going to be better on Palestine, but how do you influence a party that is so far gone and so deeply amoral without actually withholding your vote and withholding your support and what they want us to do. This whole campaign is just going to be about the bad orange, four times indicted Hitler being so evil that we have to hold our nose and vote for a genocider in chief, and I’m not going to do it. And what I wanted to say to these women, who are liberal women, good hearted, liberal women is would you support Joe Biden who says, I kind of didn’t have time to make this point, Joe Biden says that he has grave issues with abortion. He’s a Catholic and he has serious doubts about whether abortion should be on demand. He said that. What if Joe Biden stated that he would support the Republicans on the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court and actually move towards banning medical abortion, which is responsible for something like 70 percent of abortions now where you just take a series of pills. You would go and form another party. You would leave the Democratic Party and you’d form the abortion party. I mean, they would do it. They’d be so outraged over this one issue. But when we say that we’re outraged over the issue genocide, of Zionism dominating this party, this fascistic ethno-supremacist ideology of the Democrats being pro war, wanting war with Russia, rejecting any peace on the Korean Peninsula. Trumping up a new Cold War with China, supporting AFRICOM in Africa, supporting coups and sanctions in Venezuela and Nicaragua that are creating a migration crisis, and then saying, Oh, let’s just, you know, welcome the migrants in that we created and make them slave labor. When we say that we’re outraged by that, they accuse us of playing purity politics. So really we just have to hold the line on that issue of war and peace and not be moved By their time tested scare mongering about Donald Trump. And at some point, they’re going to have to realize that they have an entire generation of people that actually cares more about humanity than their leadership does, and they’re going to have to answer to them, or they will continue to lose.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-journalistic-malpractice-to-say" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Caitlin's Newsletter">It's Journalistic Malpractice To Say Gazans Are Starving Without Saying Israel Is Starving Them</a> <bq>At a time when only 20 percent of news readers ever make it past the headline of a given story, this is an extremely destructive and propagandistic act of journalistic malpractice. <b>The editors of The New York Times know exactly what they’re doing packaging a story about Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians like it’s a troubling prediction about the weather.</b></bq> <bq><b>If a population was being deliberately starved by siege warfare from a nation like Russia, China or Iran, we may be absolutely certain that the name of that nation would appear in the headline.</b> But because the western media exist to generate propaganda and not to report the news, we get headlines like “Gaza faces famine during Ramadan, the holy month of fasting” from the BBC, and “Famine in northern Gaza is imminent as more than 1 million people face ‘catastrophic’ levels of hunger, new report warns” from CNN, and “Famine imminent in northern Gaza, says UN-backed report” from Reuters, and “‘Catastrophic levels of hunger’ in Gaza mean famine is imminent, says aid coalition” from The Guardian. We saw this with Saudi Arabia’s US-backed starvation of Yemen as well. <b>When the mass media talked about Yemen at all (usually they just ignored it), editors consistently obfuscated the fact that this was a population being deliberately starved by a cruel blockade and the deliberate targeting of food infrastructure.</b> The fact that it was being made possible by the United States was almost never mentioned.</bq> <bq><b>By always going out of their way to tell you an enemy of the US-centralized empire is committing an atrocity the millisecond it looks like they might be, while being furtive and obfuscatory about the crimes of the US and its allies</b>, they give their audience a skewed understanding of who is and is not committing the real evils in our world.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-truth-vs-alex-jones-tv-review-2024" author="Brian Tallerico" source="Roger Ebert.com">The Truth vs. Alex Jones</a> <bq>It can be tempting to write Jones off as a blowhard idiot who’s just trying to profit off the stupidity of his listeners, but that number reveals the impact of his ignominious reach. And i<b>t’s not hard to extrapolate that kind of poisonous thinking to other damaging conspiracy theories that have gone viral over the last decade, crushing reasonable discourse in this country.</b> Even if you don’t want to discuss the proliferation of bullshit that can be at least partly attributed to people like Jones, the specifics of this case are horrifying and enraging.</bq> The reviewer is exactly the kind of person who will never muster a single watt of energy to expend on anger over the amount of damage done by the mainstream media as they manufacture consent for one bloody debacle after another---the Iraq War, RussiaGate, Trump in general, COVID policies, Hunter Biden's laptop, Ukraine, Gaza all spring to mind. No, this guy's anger will always be safely aimed at the targets chosen by the selfsame media, eager to distract a populace from its own bloodlust. <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <img src="{att_link}you_get_more_selfish_the_more_money_you_have.webp" href="{att_link}you_get_more_selfish_the_more_money_you_have.webp" align="none" caption="You get more selfish the more money you have" scale="50%"> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1bnet7w/the_real_truth/" author="" source="Reddit">The real truth</a> <bq>"You get more conservative when you get older" only really worked for the generations that got RICHER as they got older. The real truth was always just "You get more selfish the more money you have".</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00723-3" source="Nature" author="Richard G. Wilkinson">Why the world cannot afford the rich</a> <bq>As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, <b>the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich.</b></bq> And third: noncooperation between nation states on energy and environmental measures. <bq>Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. <b>In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/12/bidenomics-inequality-inflation-ira-joe-biden-climate" source="Jacobin" author="Doug Henwood">Bidenomics Puts Business, Not Workers, First</a> <bq>According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta , workers in the bottom half of the pay distribution saw nineteen consecutive months of yearly real wage declines in 2021 and 2022, and workers in the top half, twenty-three. According to another set of Atlanta Fed numbers , which adjust for changes in workforce composition — low-wage workers exited in large numbers in 2020, artificially boosting the average wage, and their return artificially depressed it in 2021 — <b>average real hourly wages have fallen an average of 0.4 percent a year under Biden; under Trump, they rose 1.4 percent a year (which was three times Obama’s rate, by the way).</b></bq> <bq>Another measure, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s estimates by demographic , show real weekly wages down 5.1 percent in the Biden years. Traditionally worse-off demographics are doing generally better than the more historically fortunate: younger doing better than older, those without college degrees doing better than those with, black and Latino doing better than white. <b>But in most cases, those doing better are generally less negative than those doing worse. Real wages have turned positive in recent months as inflation has declined, but there’s lots to make up for.</b></bq> <bq>The share reporting stress from price increases has fallen modestly, from 65 percent in October 2022 to 61 percent in June 2023. It’s stayed there since. <b>Price stress most affects those on low incomes, of course — around 80 percent of those under $50,000 felt it. But almost half of those earning between $100,000 and $150,000 report price stress.</b> The share of the population saying that they could get all the food they wanted was 72 percent before the pandemic; it’s now 54 percent.</bq> <bq><b>This points to a problem with much of the Biden policy trio: private investment, not public investment, will be the principal lever.</b> As a the White House put it in an IRA explainer, it’s an effort to “mobilize financing and leverage private capital.” That was describing one program, but it’s applicable to the entire assemblage. <b>Incentives are supposed to trigger private investments that are many multiples of public spending — $3 trillion, on Goldman Sachs’s projections.</b></bq> <bq>Giddy celebrations of the package as a new New Deal overlook how firmly embedded Biden is in the ongoing preeminence of private capital. Ronald Reagan and his “magic of the marketplace” is still casting a long shadow. <b>FDR was no socialist — quite the contrary — but his administration did show an interest in public investment that’s utterly lacking in Biden’s.</b> (For evidence, check out some of the Living New Deal’s maps. We’re still using that infrastructure, constructed almost a century ago.)</bq> <bq><b>US domestic oil production since Biden took office is higher than it was during the Trump years (and more than twice as high as during the George W. Bush years</b> [...]</bq> <bq>But, with Biden — to steal a line from Gore Vidal, who said it about America — there is always the “but.” Pro-union, but he busted a rail strike. Pro–public investment, but mostly stimulating private investment. Pro-climate but doing little to subdue oil and gas (though, yes, there is a Congress that loves oil and gas). <b>Supposedly the biggest agenda in decades, but promoted with so little political skill or energy.</b></bq> <bq>If Biden wants to get reelected, he’s got to hope that people’s experience of inflation catches up with the official statistics — <b>prices may be rising more slowly than they were, but they’re still rising rather than receding.</b> And he’s got to convince people not merely that he has a long-term economic agenda, but that it might have some positive effect on their lives.</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://undark.org/2024/03/08/interview-paul-sutter-science-trust/" source="Undark" author="Dan Falk">Paul M. Sutter Thinks We're Doing Science (and Journalism) Wrong</a> <bq>Starting one or two decades ago, <b>scientists decided that we need to be able to measure each other’s success</b> — you know, what sets a good scientist apart from a bad</bq> <bq><b>P-hacking</b> happens when you do some survey or you perform some study. And you’re looking for: does this cause this; does x cause y? And you run through your data, you do your analysis, and you get a very high p-value: It says, oh, x does not cause y. But I can’t publish that; I can’t write an article about that. No journal will accept that. The problem with that is, if you take enough data, <b>if you collect enough data, then you have a very high chance of two variables just randomly being correlated and having a low p-value</b> out of pure statistical luck, simply because you’ve collected enough data.</bq> <bq>The process of peer review — because we’re all so busy, we are writing so many papers of our own, peer review is not paid for, we are all volunteers — <b>no one has the time to actually properly check these claims, to walk through the process of the paper</b>, especially since most modern papers are based on so much computation and so much data analysis. It’s hard to wade through. And so <b>peer review has come to be relatively meaningless in the 21st-century.</b></bq> <bq>By the time you have actually secured a long-term position in science — what we would think of as tenure at a research intensive university — you are now in your mid 30s, a dozen times, <b>often with very low pay, especially compared to your colleagues who got a Ph.D. and then went outside of academia.</b></bq> So you have to break the sustenance part from the research part. <bq>[...] pretend it’s a meritocracy, where only the smartest researcher comes out and gets tenure — really, <b>we’re selecting for people who are compatible with that kind of lifestyle.</b></bq> <bq>I believe that many Republicans were actually turned off by the March for Science, in that they were convinced: “<b>Aha, science is just a Democrat thing. It’s not a Republican thing. Got it. These people are all Team Blue, and I’m Team Red, therefore I’m not going to support it.</b>” I actually think the March for Science backfired.</bq> Yes. Stop alienating people who could be allies to feed your own ego. <bq>To <b>go find people who are anti-science and try to understand where they’re coming from</b>, empathize with them, and find ways to bring science to them, and show them how science is important.</bq> <bq>We need to be aware of that slowness of science as we speak to the public, so that when we are participating in the political process, we can say, “<b>I don’t know yet. Here’s what we have so far, here’s where the evidence is leading. But it’s going to change because our minds are going to change.</b>”</bq> <bq>My take on <b>scientism is that [it] is a belief that science is the superior way of viewing the world</b>, of approaching the world, and is better than other ways of approaching the world, like faith, or philosophy, or the humanities,</bq> ...or history, or art and music. <bq><b>There are many, many questions that science does not have a solid answer on, and may not ever have a solid answer on.</b> And it’s perfectly legitimate for people to turn to other modes of inquiry and investigation into this beautiful, messy world that we live in, to seek answers and comfort from that.</bq> <bq><b>Science is about curiosity. It’s about rigor. It’s about doubting yourself. It’s about doubting your peers.</b> It’s about applying a strict methodology to problem solving, to arrive at results. That’s the soul of science. That’s what science is really all about. And that’s what many, or all, pseudoscientific beliefs lack.</bq> <bq>People don’t understand why scientists are doing what they’re doing? <b>They’re doing it because they love it, because they’re passionate about it, because they’re excited about it.</b> People can connect with those kinds of human emotions, they can connect with passion [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_Hubble_confirm_Universe_s_expansion_rate" source="ESA" author="">Webb & Hubble confirm Universe’s expansion rate</a> <bq>Over the past 34 years Hubble has shrunk this measurement to an accuracy of less than one percent, splitting the difference with an age value of 13.8 billion years. <b>This has been accomplished by refining the so-called ‘cosmic distance ladder’ by measuring important milepost markers known as Cepheid variable stars.</b></bq> <bq>The bottom line is that the so-called Hubble Tension between what happens in the nearby Universe compared to the early Universe’s expansion remains a nagging puzzle for cosmologists. <b>There may be something woven into the fabric of space that we don’t yet understand.</b></bq> <bq><b>At present it’s as though the distance ladder observed by Hubble and Webb has firmly set an anchor point on one shoreline of a river, and the afterglow of the Big Bang observed by Planck from the beginning of the Universe is set firmly on the other side.</b> How the Universe’s expansion was changing in the billions of years between these two endpoints has yet to be directly observed. “We need to find out if we are missing something on how to connect the beginning of the Universe and the present day,” said Adam.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/fitness/v02-max-and-aerobic-performance/" source="Garmin" author="">What Every Cyclist Should Know – V02 Max and Your Garmin</a> <bq>The air you inhale fills your lungs, where oxygen is extracted and mixed with your blood supply. Your heart pumps this oxygenated blood through your arteries to your muscles, where, when available, it is <b>used as a catalyst facilitating the transformation of nutrients into the fuel molecules your muscles need to contract.</b></bq> <bq>VO2 max plays a critical role in identifying the currently optimal training load. <b>The fitter you are, the higher your VO2 max and the harder you need to challenge yourself to maintain and improve your fitness level.</b> This fundamental training principle is built into and automatically considered when determining the personally optimal range of your training load. It also reveals when you aren’t being challenged enough, and when <b>overdoing it is increasing your chances of burnout and injury.</b></bq> <bq><b>When your training status is productive, it means that your workouts are simultaneously challenging enough for you</b> and are paying dividends in the form of improved aerobic performance capacity.</bq> <h id="politics">Climate Change</h> <a href="https://www.monbiot.com/2024/03/11/dry-run/" source="" author="George Monbiot">Dry Run</a> <bq><b>There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture.</b> So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox . As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, <b>it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area.</b> This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it</bq> <bq><b>Above all, we need to change our diets.</b> Those of us with dietary choice (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, <b>this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use.</b></bq> <bq><b>Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst alternative (almond milk)</b>, and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soya milk.</bq> <bq>Last month, at the behest of the EU’s agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commission deleted from its new climate plan the call to incentivise “diversified” (animal-free) protein sources. <b>Regulatory capture is never stronger than in the food and farming sector.</b></bq> <h id="technology">Technology</h> <a href="https://thebaffler.com/latest/electric-boogie-woogie-wagon-albert" source="The Baffler" author="Dan Albert">Electric Boogie Woogie Wagon</a> <bq>The challenge for the first half of the present century is to fully electrify our cars. And we’ll need a comprehensive network of charging stations to keep our EVs rolling. But instead of pursuing direct public ownership of this charging network, <b>the Biden administration has decided to underwrite private investment, absorbing the downside risk while giving the upside profits to private companies already benefitting handsomely from the country’s EV transition.</b></bq> Because we've given up on public transportation. Also, the U.S. elites love to socialize risk and privatize profit. <bq>In the name of climate action, the Biden administration has stepped in to help with the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which earmarks $7.5 billion for EV charging infrastructure. But this cash will go not to grand, publicly owned projects—it’s going to private investors. <b>Those billions are already sluicing through state transportation departments and straight to the bottom line of automakers like Tesla and GM</b>, [...]</bq> <bq>The vehicles themselves keep good track of range and the locations of available chargers.</bq> We should just be aware that there is an almost certain lack of autonomy here. You are connected to and dependent on a network. It is privately owned, so you cannot use it without it tracking you. <bq>For example, Sandy Munro had been a Tesla skeptic until 2018 when his Detroit-area consulting firm dissected the company’s Model 3, costing it out to the last nut and bolt. He concluded that <b>Tesla could earn up to a 30 percent margin</b> [...]</bq> Which is the most important thing, of course. The price, the margin, the profit---it's the only reason and justification for doing anything. It's a religion, this faith in the pricing mechanism. If it were worth doing, then it would be profitable, forever and ever, amen. Faith that no-one is cheating. It shrinks our vision. It restricts us to short-term profitable solutions. We're now optimizing a decadent vehicular lifestyle that is wildly incompatible with our future. But it's---or appears---profitable now, so we can't choose a different path. Building EVs requires lots of fossil fuel for transport and power. <bq>That indicates the tipping point has been reached: <b>automakers are profitably selling electric vehicles that consumers want to buy</b>, above and beyond what the government requires, and in absolute numbers EV sales are rising, despite industry panic about stagnation.</bq> So we're still selling and buying personal vehicles at a staggering pace, but they are hopefully overall less damaging to the environment. New giant vehicles every two to three years is still the desired lifestyle. <bq><b>EV sales continue to grow in absolute numbers and as a percentage of car sales.</b> Ever more buyers, whether motivated by climate concerns, cost of ownership, or the sexiness of the product, are going electric. And EV prices are continuing to fall rapidly.</bq> Where are the numbers, though? Where does the U.S. stand? <bq>[...] consumers do seem to want them, and the market can provide them profitably.</bq> Which consumers? Certain more important cohorts? <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies</a> <bq>Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you . America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. <b>Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years.</b></bq> The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker. Absolutely not. No. The number of people blocking ads on mobile is a rounding error. Most people browse on their phones or their work machines. I wonder how well they've corrected for selection bias. Almost no-one I know uses an ad-blocker, other than those I've told to install one. <bq>When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to <b>allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors.</b></bq> <bq>In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, <b>tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out"</b></bq> <bq>The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that <b>Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA.</b></bq> <bq>The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. <b>Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself.</b> Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:</bq> <bq>If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning <b>you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again.</b></bq> <bq>A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. <b>It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further".</b></bq> <bq>Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. <b>Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie</a> <bq>The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." <b>But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.</b></bq> <bq>Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. <b>A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.</b></bq> <bq>Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. <b>These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.</b> This is better than "the best of both worlds."</bq> <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://ericportis.com/posts/2024/okay-color-spaces/" source="" author="Eric Portis">Okay, Color Spaces</a> <bq>CIE XYZ turns color mixing problems and color matching problems into math problems. This has proven so useful that <b>every modern color space is defined in terms of CIE XYZ.</b> When we say that a system is “color managed” what we’re saying is: it’s built on top of CIE XYZ.</bq> <bq>CIELAB is a relatively simple mathematical transform of CIE XYZ, making it easy to implement in “color managed” digital contexts. But – tragically! – CIELAB isn’t exactly perceptually uniform . Worse, the more experiments people did, the clearer it became that <b>no three-dimensional space could ever be perceptually uniform; three dimensions just cannot capture all of the weird and wonderful ways that our eyes and brains process color comparisons.</b></bq> <bq>When trying to predict how people are going to perceive the difference between two colors, we need to account for way more than three variables. For instance: <b>How large are the color samples? Where are they in the subject’s field of vision? How long have they been there? What other colors were there recently? Crucially, what other colors surround the samples? What’s the ambient background lighting like?</b></bq> <bq>[...] should note that OKLCH was not the first color space to adopt Munsell’s lightness-chroma-hue “API” ; even CIELAB had a polar version that worked like this, called LCH. But OKLCH does appear to be one of the best . <b>Both OKLCH and Oklab have their uses. Gradients in polar spaces work differently than gradients in rectangular spaces. They’re not better or worse, mind you – just different.</b></bq> <bq>People tend to think about color in terms of three variables: lightness, chroma, and hue. Oklab does a good job of isolating these variables, but in order to use them, <b>we have to navigate it using polar coordinates instead of rectangular ones. When we navigate Oklab this way, we call it OKLCH.</b></bq> <bq>[...] many others (for instance: changing hue, saturation, and/or lightness) benefit from being done in a <b>perceptually uniform space that models how our eyes and brains process light.</b></bq> <hr> <a href="https://isburmistrov.substack.com/p/all-you-need-is-wide-events-not-metrics" source="" author="Ivan Burmistrov">All you need is Wide Events, not “Metrics, Logs and Traces”</a> <bq>[...] <b>we can try to automatically extract a template from a log message via removing tokens that looks like IDs, and get a hash of this template.</b> This can allow to quickly get the most frequent error, for instance, via grouping by this hash. Meta has such a system, and it’s pretty cool.</bq> <bq>Metrics can be easily mapped, too. <b>We just need to emit a Wide Event once per some interval containing the state of the system (system metrics like cpu, various counters,…).</b> Prometheus, by the way, does exactly that with the scraping approach.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://samwho.dev/bloom-filters/" source="" author="Sam Rose">Bloom Filters</a> <bq>Picking the correct number of hash functions and bits for a bloom filter is a fine balance. Fortunately for us, <b>if we know up-front how many unique items we want to store, and what our desired false-positive rate is, we can calculate the optimal number of hash functions, and the required number of bits.</b></bq> <bq><b>The more items you plan to add, the fewer hash functions you should use.</b> Yet, a larger bloom filter means you can use more hash functions. More hash functions keep the false-positive rate lower for longer, but more items fills up the bloom filter faster. <b>It's a complex balancing act, and I am thankful that mathematicians have done the hard work of figuring it out for us.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>it's important to remember that these rely on you giving good estimates of the number of items you expect to add, and choosing a false-positive rate that's acceptable for your use-case.</b> These numbers might be difficult to come up with, and I recommend erring on the side of caution. <b>If you're not sure, it's likely better to use a larger bloom filter than you think you need.</b></bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://www.theonion.com/parents-really-hitting-it-off-with-daughter-s-emotional-1851327818" author="" source="The Onion">Parents Really Hitting It Off With Daughter’s Emotionally Abusive Boyfriend</a> <bq>“Andrew is such a gentleman—I was about to suggest Emily stick to salad tonight, but then he just went ahead and ordered it for her!” said Brenda Barkan. [...] “I was a little hesitant at first, because they arrived at the restaurant a few minutes late, <b>but then Andrew rolled his eyes at Emily and blamed it on her ‘nonexistent time management skills.’</b> That got us on the topic of how pathetic it is that she’s even thinking about studying for the LSAT, and before you knew it, <b>we realized this guy was the perfect man to control our daughter.</b>” At press time, the Barkans added that they could tell their daughter really liked Andrew too, as <b>he had done a great job convincing her that no one else would ever love her.</b></bq> Man, sometimes the Onion is really, really dark.