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Links and Notes for August 1st, 2025

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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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#economy">Economy & Finance</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#climate">Environment & Climate Change</a> <a href="#medicine">Medicine & Disease</a> <a href="#art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://indi.ca/theres-no-white-people-in-norway/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">There's No White People In Norway</a> <bq>It all shows how meaningless whiteness is. It's the Starbuck and McDonald's on the edge of the highway that you wish would go away. If you go anywhere that has a culture and a history besides colonialism you can see how thin and grim the recent folding of identities into whiteness is. The warring tribes of Europe could barely identify with the next tribe over and still don't, really. This unified white identity only became relevant relative to us, people that they hated more than each other. Whiteness is a purely hateful identity, it has no food, no culture, no positive meaning besides not being othered people. There's no there there, it's just a process of constant, carnivorous expansionism, including of the identity itself.</bq> <bq>It's important to understand that colonization was a deeply traumatic event for the colonizer as well. I'd say they can go to hell, but they're already there in many ways. Europeans left their homes and cultures and native land to plunder other lands and cultures and natives in the name of whiteness. As fun as the oppression was, it's still depressing losing who you were, to be assimilated into interchangeable consumers forever.</bq> <bq>The damning state of places like Norway and all of Europe is that they can regulate their speed limits, but still be driven off a cliff by American morons and European bureaucrats. I refer to the jumped up steel and coal cartel called the EU and the American tribute army called NATO, which run their own policy, which is just white supremacy.</bq> <bq>Anti-immigration sentiment is really just people trying to mind their business and being exploited by business interests that like immigration (ie indentured servitude and slaves) but want to pay less for them by keeping them hated. As I've said, White Empire is really ruled by Corporate AI (and has been since the 1600s) which really does not see color, but will happily use it in its marketing campaigns.</bq> Excellent description. <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2025/07/28/the-fbi-took-her-40000-without-explaining-why-she-fought-back-and-lost/" source="Reason" author="Billy Binion">The FBI took her $40,000 without explaining why. She fought back—and lost.</a> <bq>Linda Martin found out the hard way that the most powerful law enforcement agency in the U.S.—the FBI—can seize your assets without articulating why. Worse: Law enforcement took her savings in a raid that was itself unconstitutional. Worse still: A lawsuit she filed met its demise last week, allowing the federal government to continue the dubious practice of taking people's valuables without having to explain the reason it is justified in doing so.</bq> This is like having no law at all. And is the FBI still the most powerful law-enforcement agency in the U.S.? Or is it ICE now? <bq>"Owners must decide whether to fight against the federal government, default, or plead for mercy, all without knowing why the FBI is doing this to them," he says. "It's therefore little surprise that 93% of federal forfeitures never get to a court, meaning the FBI gets to keep the money without ever telling anyone why they should be allowed to"—which, at least for now, will remain the status quo.</bq> This is just robbery, with a minimum of window dressing to make the perpetrators feel good about themselves. No-one else needs to believe the fairy tales they tell about their unvoiced justifications. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/29/trumps-blatant-attacks-on-international-law-are-nothing-new-for-the-us-theyre-bipartisan/" source="Scheer Post" author="Ben Norton">Trump’s Blatant Attacks on International Law Are Nothing New for the US. They’re Bipartisan</a> <bq>You know who helped establish the precedent for attacking UNESCO? Barack Obama. He cut US funding for UNESCO in 2011, after the UN body voted to admit Palestine. Obama then went on, in 2016, to sign the biggest deal for US military aid to the Israeli colonial regime in history, at a neat $38 billion. Likewise, Obama waged wars on Syria, Libya, and Yemen, not to mention his drone wars in Pakistan and Somalia and his continuation of the US military occupation of Afghanistan.</bq> <bq>[...] what Donald Trump is doing today — withdrawing the US from UN bodies, tearing up climate change treaties, and attacking multilateral organizations — is exactly what the US empire has done for decades, regardless of who the president of the regime is. Trump himself is not the sole problem; he is a symptom of the deep structural rot. The problem is US imperialism, and it is thoroughly bipartisan.</bq> Trump is just crasser about it. He doesn't know where to stop to get what he wants without ruining the game. This will eventually work in our favor, as he dismantles the very mechanisms that enable his outsized power as U.S. president. In the short- and medium-term, it will be at best unsettling for many---fear of unknown reprisals and learning how to live in a lawless state, not knowing whether you're the predator or prey, subject to the whims of a mercurial evil whirlwind of hate, swatting people right and left with little rhyme or reason---and, at worst, completely life-shattering---as you find out for sure that you're the prey. <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/abolishing-the-first-amendment" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">Abolishing the First Amendment</a> <bq>I know, sadly, where this goes. I witnessed it in the many dictatorships I covered as a foreign correspondent for two decades in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Those of us who fight for an open society are silenced, attacked as traitors and criminals. We are blacklisted, censored and at times, locked up. If we can escape in time, we are forced into exile. As we are silenced, the sycophants, grifters, Christian fascists, billionaires, Zionists and thugs, elevated to the highest positions in the federal government by the Trump White House, are rewarded with absolute power, luxury and debauchery. Our corporate-indentured ruling class has no genuine political ideology. Political parties are a farce, a species of entertainment to beguile the population in our pretend democracy. Liberalism, and the values it claims to represent, is a spent and bankrupt force. The burlesque in the committee room in Trenton was another depressing reminder that there is little now that will halt our path towards an authoritarian state, not the press, not the universities, not the courts, which cannot enforce the few rulings made by courageous judges, not the political class, including the Democratic Party, and not the electoral process.</bq> <bq>We must resist, if only to assert our integrity and dignity, if only to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, if only to slow the consolidation of tyranny, if only to revel in the small pyrrhic victories that resistance alone makes possible. But we should not be fooled.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/we-need-a-planetary-system-of-diplomacy-for-the-21st-century" source="Aeon" author="Sam Haselby">We need a planetary system of diplomacy for the 21st century</a> <bq>The island, with an area smaller than a soccer field, changes nationality twice a year. Pheasant Island is the only example in the world of a temporal condominium, a political territory shared by multiple powers with alternating sovereignty. Governance is, in turns, entrusted to the French and the Spanish naval commanders stationed at Bayonne and San Sebastián, who carry the honorific title of ‘viceroy’ – a curious title, especially in France, where royalty has ended in exile or decapitation.</bq> <bq>The Treaty of the Pyrenees was a triumph of modern diplomacy. It served as the capstone to the Peace of Westphalia, the continent-wide settlement that put an end to a century of devastating wars in Europe. The preceding Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) had been the most brutal phase, killing approximately 8 million people. Europe had been ravaged from Sweden to Spain, a third of Germany’s population was gone, it was the bloodiest conflict on the continent before the First World War. But diplomacy had brought it to a close and the deal on Pheasant Island completed it.</bq> <bq>There has been less warfare between countries in recent decades, and fewer people have died annually from armed conflict in the past 30 years than in the previous century, despite the recent wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, South Sudan and the Near East. The result is far from being perfect but, as the former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld once said, multilateral bodies like the UN were ‘not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.’ That minimal programme has been achieved, somehow. That the postwar world has remained free from nuclear warfare is a success story for which multilateral diplomacy deserves more credit than it usually gets.</bq> Hammarskjöld's statement cannot help but sound so damned smug because the current conflicts are largely restricted to visiting violence on lesser, largely still colonized (if we're honest) peoples. It must be cold comfort to the occupied and beleaguered peoples to hear that Europe pats itself on the back, congratulating itself on keeping its conflicts away from its own shores. <bq>And climate change is only one of several critical challenges. Scientists have identified nine planetary boundaries; six have already been crossed. Besides climate, these include changes in land and freshwater use, biodiversity collapse, disruptions to nutrient cycles, and the spread of novel entities like PFAS (‘forever chemicals’), GMOs and microplastics. Ocean acidification is now reaching a tipping point. These threats are scientifically clear, yet none has been met with adequate international action. In truth, the Earth system is entering uncharted waters, but diplomacy still behaves as if we’re in familiar territory. We are unprepared for the storms ahead and unwilling to redesign the vessel.</bq> <bq>The UN was founded to manage conflicts between countries, not to resolve the conflict between humanity and the planet. A flat organisation cannot solve a vertical problem.</bq> <bq>The idea that Earth was neatly divided into a patchwork of nation-states, all guarding their sovereignty and engaging in diplomacy with one another, had not been true for very long. In Children of a Modest Star (2024), the political scientists Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman argue that, in 1945, half the world’s population did not live in a nation-state, but in a mandate territory, colony, protectorate or overseas possession. Only from around 1965 onwards have nearly all people on Earth lived in modern states.</bq> <bq>What was in reality a relatively recent and arbitrary development – the world as a jigsaw puzzle of autonomous states – was etched in stone and presented as timeless.</bq> <bq>Republic of Congo, and one from 38 other countries. During the Assembly, 42 different languages were being used, with English, Chinese and Hindi being the most common. Participants came from all corners of the world. In line with global statistics, more than half of them were younger than 35, two-thirds lived on less than $10 a day, more than a third had never used a computer in their life, a third had never attended school, and 10 per cent could neither read nor write. Sixteen members belonged to an Indigenous community, and six were refugees.</bq> <bq>In diplomacy’s third act, we need spaces where the world can speak as the world on the problems of the world. Global climate governance involves deep moral choices about the future of the planet that cannot be left in the hands of national negotiators alone. For instance, how are we going to distribute the remaining carbon budget? Can rich countries continue as before because their economies are so carbon-intensive, or should the last gigatons be given to the poorer countries who need them for their basic development?</bq> <bq>As the planet approaches irreversible tipping points and faces the risk of a runaway climate for centuries to come, should we buy some time by spraying sulphate particles into the stratosphere to reflect the Sun’s rays? This type of solar radiation management could create an artificial volcanic winter, giving humanity a few extra years to get its act together. Is it too dangerous to attempt? Or is the greatest danger that governments might cease all other efforts once they can cool Earth by simply sprinkling dust?</bq> <bq>[...] should humanity have a say in matters such as PFAS and microplastics, or can these issues continue to be settled behind closed doors by political and economic elites? Should the Moon be opened up for the exploitation of its minerals and solar energy, and, if so, under what conditions? And how about Mars and the growing use of interplanetary space?</bq> <bq>Classical Chinese diplomacy, for instance, centred on the notion of tianxia, ‘all under Heaven’, encompassing the entire physical world of lands, seas and mortals. Confucian values like ren (benevolence), yi (righteousness) and xin (trustworthiness) continue to inspire Chinese diplomats and may prove relevant when sketching the outline of a planetary democracy. Similarly, the Indian concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, a Sanskrit phrase meaning ‘the world is one family’, could help us – it goes back to one of the Upanishads written between 800 and 500 BCE and was used as the theme of India’s G20 presidency in 2022-23. Indonesia has inscribed the traditional practice of musyawarah‐mufakat, village-based deliberation and consensus-making, in the foundational philosophy of the country’s democracy. The African philosophy of ubuntu – ‘I am because we are’ – remains a potent reminder of human interconnectedness and the universal bond between all living things.</bq> <bq>Right after Earth was dethroned from the centre of the solar system, a self-centred perspective became deeply ingrained in the core of Western philosophy and diplomacy, and it has remained there until now. It continues to shape the way we deal with the planet today,</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/negotiating-terrorists-no/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">There's No Negotiating With Terrorists, AKA Americans</a> <bq>The Global Inequality Project does not name whiteness as a logic of global extraction. It does not confront how white epistemic authority continues to shape what is knowable, fundable, and publishable. In doing so, it doesn’t merely risk reproducing the same hierarchies—it actively sustains them, reaffirming who gets to be seen as rigorous, credible, and “clear.”</bq> <bq>Racial capitalism is not a side note—it is the organizing logic behind global inequality. These frameworks weren’t invisible—they were ignored. They remain excluded not because they lack insight, but because they lack whiteness.</bq> <bq>[...] what becomes possible when whiteness is no longer mistaken for clarity, but recognized as control?</bq> <bq>Across the old world, we have hospitality codes, especially re: strangers, but these are continually exploited by energy poor (be it solar/slaves or oil) people from the north that don't share meals, wash their asses, or keep their word. We have to understand that there's no humanity to white people, just a collapsed white hole where their souls used to be. I'm fine if people want to renounce their whiteness and join humanity, but anyone who identifies as white is an enemy. There's no content to that culture beyond colonization, there's no higher meaning than hierarchy, there's no supreme creator at the top, just white supremacy. We keep extending hospitality to these people like they're people and that's a category that keeps repeating.</bq> You want to be careful with that final sentiment: alienation---treating people as "not people"---is the crux of what makes the enemy evil. Do not stare too deeply into that abyss. <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/07/no-use-crying-over-spilt-ice-gang-on.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">No Use Crying Over Spilt ICE: Gang on Gang Violence in a Post-Democratic Era</a> <bq>What is the definition of a gang? I would generally argue that this word is a contrived label used by rich people to describe any group of poor people organized around using force to acquire wealth like rich people without a state to hide behind. However, an even better definition may ironically come from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement who describes a gang on their website as "An association of three or more individuals whose members collectively identify themselves by adopting a group identity, which they use to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation." I say "ironically", in fact quite painfully so, because these self-righteous pig fuckers, better known as ICE, seem to have essentially described themselves to a T.</bq> <bq>[...] an administration, be they Democrat or Republican, requires the decimation of a large civilian population then ICE will provide their services for a hefty sum of pilfered tax dollars and what these services essentially amount to is what can probably best be described as human trafficking on an industrial scale. Or what historians once referred to as a pogrom.</bq> <bq>ICE is a notorious gang of lecherous body-snatchers that preys on desperate people for a paycheck and some of these people are fighting back. That's it. Basically, what 2pac would call thug life. It's not wrong, it's not right, but it really shouldn't be that shocking either and neither should the fact that such acts of criminal blowback are increasing to unprecedented levels considering that the government has recently bumped up their payments to ICE under the condition that they accelerate their long raging war on human movement to an unprecedented level of barbarism and cruelty.</bq> <bq>In order to meet his own insane quota of detaining 3,000 migrants a day, Trump has arbitrarily revoked long standing protections for federally recognized refugees and unilaterally terminated temporary protection status, essentially rendering well over a million legal immigrants illegal overnight. As if that wasn't criminal enough, the Donald is also pushing to gut the 8th Amendment by affectively outlawing bond hearings for millions of immigrants awaiting court hearings, damming these largely nonviolent offenders of invisible lines to years in glorified concentration camps.</bq> <bq>The only factor that makes pretty much every federal government agency any different than the Crips or the Bloods is a massive standing army and a compulsory school system that grooms all of us from childhood into believing that this criminal enterprise somehow amounts to some form of democracy.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-gaza-rivera" source="Substack" author="Chris Hedges">The Gaza Rivera</a> <bq>Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see. They are intoxicated by the power of their industrial weapons and license to kill with impunity. They are drunk on self-adulation and the fantasy that they are the vanguard of civilization. They believe that the extermination of a people, including children, condemned as human contaminants, makes the world, especially their world, a happier and safer place.</bq> <bq>Starvation is not a pretty sight. I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took an estimated 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs — scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. I watched hundreds of skeletal figures, ghosts of human beings, trudge at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never got up. Many were the remains of entire families.</bq> <bq>Starvation reduces the iron needed to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, which affects heart and brain function. Anemia sets in. The body, in essence, feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs atrophy. The volume of blood decreases.</bq> <bq>Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops.</bq> <bq>The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://mattbivens.substack.com/p/the-riviera-of-madness" source="The 100 Days" author="Matt Bivens, M.D.">The Riviera of Madness</a> <bq>“Among those shot were children, paramedics, journalists, and persons with disabilities,” the UN investigation found. Only 183 people were killed — a low-ish number that no doubt made for more muted international headlines. But 6,106 were wounded — 4,903 of them shot in the legs — and their wounds were often life-wrecking.</bq> <bq>“That word apartheid [applied to Israel] is exactly accurate,” says former President Carter in the short video below (from eight years ago). “The Palestinians can’t even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory. The Israelis never see a Palestinian ... [and] the Palestinians never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers. So within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated — much worse than they [blacks and whites] were in South Africa, by the way.” Carter continued, “The other definition of ‘apartheid’ is: One side dominates the other. And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people.”</bq> <bq>All of that would now change. Today, less than 1% of Gaza’s chickens remain; the fishing industry has collapsed to 7% of pre-October 2023 levels; food that could be delivered instead rots in the sun on the wrong side of the fence. We’re coming up on nearly 2 years since Israel declared it would do this — that it would deny food, water, gas and electricity to about a million children. When they announced this intention to torture, how did we respond? It’s worth remembering. Even after months of ever-more-alarmed reports; even after UNICEF had warned that 90% of Gaza’s children were hungry and 70% had diarrhea from lack of clean water; even after the International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu precisely over the war crime of an openly-pursued starvation policy; our leaders responded by inviting Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress so they could applaud his awesomeness. That was exactly a year ago. He received 58 standing ovations.</bq> <bq>[...] plans to provide free or affordable dental care to every U.S. person on Medicaid would cost far less than $1 billion. That’s too expensive, though. We can’t have that. Instead, we can give 4 times that amount every year to Israel, and in special years when Israel has announced it is engaged in the mass starvation of a civilian population, we can give 17 times that amount. Israelis enjoy universal healthcare, by the way.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/dare-to-hope" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">Dare To Hope</a> <bq>It’s been a fairly effective weapon over the years. Campus protests have been stomped out, freedom of expression has been crushed, entire political campaigns have been killed dead, all because it’s been normalized to make evidence-free claims about someone’s private thoughts and feelings toward Jews if they suggest that Palestinians deserve human rights.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2025/08/08/ice-ignores-order-to-stop-seizing-random-hispanics/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">ICE Ignores Order To Stop Seizing Random Hispanics</a> <bq>In other words, the government is arguing that speaking Spanish or working in construction, “alone or in combination,” is sufficient to round up the brown folks. In the zeal to seize and deport millions of “illegals,” Trump and his henchman, Stephen Miller have constructed a paramilitary force that operates outside the law and without constraint. For those who hate either undocumented immigrants or Hispanics, this might not bother you, but should this force that operates with impunity start seizing anyone who appears “ethnic” or angers Trump or pisses off an ICE agent disappears them, it might turn out to be someone you know, even love. It’s a fundamental precept in the United States and law enforcement operate within the law and be subject to the orders of the courts. If that’s not the case with ICE, which is morphing into the dominant agency in the federal government, don’t be surprised when it turns on you or someone you know or love. And don’t be surprised when you realize that there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/hiroshima-nagasaki-us-nuclear-lies/290336/" author="Alan Macleod" source="Mint Press News">80 Years of Lies: The US Finally Admits It Knew It Didn’t Need to Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki</a> <bq>Hiroshima and Nagasaki drastically curbed the U.S.S.R.’s ambitions in Japan. Joseph Stalin’s forces had invaded and permanently annexed Sakhalin Island in 1945 and planned to occupy Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island. The move likely prevented the island nation from coming under the Soviet sphere of influence. To this day, Japan remains deeply tied to the U.S., economically, politically, and militarily. There are around 60,000 U.S. troops in Japan, spread across 120 military bases. Many in Truman’s administration wished to use the atom bomb against the Soviet Union as well. President Truman, however, worried that the destruction of Moscow would lead the Red Army to invade and destroy Western Europe as a response. As such, he decided to wait until the U.S. had enough warheads to completely destroy the U.S.S.R. and its military in one fell swoop.</bq> <bq>Ultimately, then, the people of Japan were the collateral damage in a giant U.S. attempt to project its power worldwide. As Brigadier General Carer Clarke, head of U.S. intelligence on Japan wrote, “When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them [Japanese citizens] as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”</bq> <bq>[...] as we look back at the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, we must understand that not only were they entirely avoidable, but that we are now closer to a catastrophic nuclear confrontation than many people realize.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/08/roaming-charges-118/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: Empire of the Downpresser Men</a> <bq author="Adam Tooze" source="London Review of Books" caption="The End of the American Century?">The two pillars of America’s global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has forever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominate much of American political life.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/to-future-generations-they-knew-they" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix">To Future Generations: They Knew. They All Knew What Was Happening In Gaza.</a> <bq>Nobody cares what religious belief systems you happen to hold in your head while you advocate massacring civilians, they care about the fact that you advocate massacring civilians. Being Jewish doesn’t give you some kind of magical immunity from being held to basic moral standards and being judged by society for supporting a mass atrocity. It’s got nothing to do with anything.</bq> <bq>We’re being told the holocaust in Gaza can’t be ended, and we’re being told the war nobody wants in Ukraine must continue. We are ruled by monsters.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/avoid-premature-compassion" author="Ted Rall" source="">Avoid Premature Compassion</a> <bq>After more than a year of Israel’s relentless genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, establishment and mainstream people and institutions finally feel it is safe to criticize the Jewish state. This is the latest instance of a dispiriting aspect of social behavior. Most people can identify wrongdoing when they see it, but they will not call it out until it feels safe to do so. This is especially true when the perpetrator is rich or powerful. However, that can take a long time—so long that it is often too late for the victims.</bq> <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-keeps-eating-everything/" source="" author="Paul Kedrosky">Honey, AI Capex Keeps Eating ... Everything</a> <bq>Taking just Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, and their quarterly earnings and published data, they spent around $69 bn in the quarter, which is $276 bn annualized. Total IT equipment spending in the quarter was $608 bn annualized, so the Big Four alone were almost half of the spending, and most of that, we know, was AI capex. Given that information processing equipment spending added 1% to GDP growth in the quarter, from the BEA's own figures, then AI capex, including both software and equipment, was at least 0.6% in that. We now have a range: AI capex's contribution to Q2 growth was somewhere between 0.6% (on the low end, undercounting smaller players) and 1.3% (on the high end). It, for practical purposes, ate Q2 GDP growth.</bq> <bq>This has all created accelerating externalities, however. The more interconnection and colocation of peering points, the more the cost incentive for others to locate there, in particular for data centers. And the more energy, water, and, most importantly, real estate required.</bq> <bq>Northern Virginia is losing 100–150 acres of land a year to data centers (see here, here, and here for some of the numbers) A third of data centers are now directly adjacent to housing, schools, playgrounds, and churches. Some housing developments are now encircled by data centers.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">You can’t fight enshittification</a> <bq>You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society. "There's no such thing as society" is what you say if you benefit from society (which absolutely exists) and don't want it to change.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/30/dhfs-j30.html" source="WSWS" author="Nick Beams">Official backing for crypto creating conditions for financial crisis</a> <bq>Normally, the so-called libertarians who promote crypto rail against any regulation. But on this occasion, they pressed for its passage, spending hundreds of millions on lobbying campaigns directed at both sides of the Congressional aisle to secure legislative support for crypto. They wanted government approval for crypto stablecoins, in the guise of regulation, to reassure major companies, banks, financial institutions and small investors that it is safe, thus ensuring the inflow of more money. For crypto this is an existential question. Having no intrinsic value, the price of coins can only increase, and profits made, provided new investors and their money are pulled into the market—the same mechanism as any other Ponzi scheme.</bq> <bq>Back in May, Eichengreen wrote, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Congress he envisaged a situation “where stablecoin issuers held $2 trillion or more of Treasury securities. If panicked customers force them to sell these securities, Treasury prices could collapse, sharply increasing interest rates and destabilising other financial markets and our entire economy.”</bq> This is how they plan to bankrupt social security, which holds treasuries nearly exclusively. It's probably not accidental. <bq>She likened the present push for crypto to the situation in 2000 when “advocates for over-the-counter derivatives descended on Washington begging to be properly ‘regulated’ so that they could gift the world with financial ‘innovation.’ What we got was a seven-fold increase in poorly regulated credit default swaps that culminated in the great financial crisis of 2008.” It was not possible, she continued, to imagine a “worse moment to encourage financial ‘innovation’ than when market, economics and monetary policy are so uncertain.” If over the next few months, the Fed had to raise rates more sharply because of inflation, markets would tank, crypto would fall further and faster, financial institutions holding crypto on their books could run into trouble, causing credit markets to freeze.</bq> <bq>The emergence of another financial crisis has the potential to go far beyond the scale of 2008 because of the exponential increase in speculation, parasitism and outright criminality.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-07-29/ubs-fx-trades-were-too-good" author="Matt Levine" source="Bloomberg">UBS FX Trades Were Too Good</a> <bq>Yes, right, if you have a foreign-exchange derivative product that carries “lucrative fees,” that means that the customers don’t understand it. (If they understood it, they’d demand lower fees.) If you have a product like that, you will naturally be tempted to sell it to as many customers as possible. And then every so often, something will go wrong, and you’ll have to spend a year or two resisting that temptation and having contrite no-materials meetings with the customers to make them feel better.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/" source="BikePacking" author="Josh Meissner">When We Get Komooted</a> <bq>To capital, the corporation is a vehicle for profit; the platform is their plantation. Capitalists see our forests only for their timber value, and they wield the power to impose their limited view on us.</bq> <bq>Unsustainable growth is not just ideology but an imperative, and it’s blatantly unsustainable. In a 2023 interview, Hallerman revealed that Komoot’s revenue was roughly split between recurring subscriptions and new users making one-time payments for map regions, with ad revenue making up a small remainder. That means they had to keep signing new users and expanding into new markets to stay in business. Komoot relied on continual growth in a finite world—an impossibility. What cannot continue forever is, by definition, unsustainable.</bq> <bq>Private equity’s business model lies in squeezing the maximum amount of profit from the company until it dies and then throwing it away. Having acquired an expiring business, Bending Spoons immediately started culling the hands who were keeping it alive. They fired the knowledgeable employees with next to no handover and alienated the most passionate users. What’s left is an illusion of a brand, a captive user base, a trove of user data, and a product on life support. Together, a latent infrastructure of extraction and capital accumulation, ripe for intensified monetization.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2025/07/27/a-billion-people-would-be-plenty-to-sustain-civilisation/" source="Crooked Timber" author="John Quiggin">A billion people would be plenty to sustain civilisation …</a> <bq>Except for some purchases of raw materials from the “Global South”, produced by a relatively small part of the labour force, the OECD, taken as a whole, was self-sufficient in nearly everything required for a modern economy. So, the population of the OECD in the second half of last century provides an upper bound to the number of humans needed to sustain such an economy. That number did not reach one billion until 1980.</bq> <bq>A billion person world could not support mega-cities with the current populations of Tokyo and Delhi. But it could easily include a city the size of London, New York, Rio, or Seoul (around 10 million each) on every continent, and dozens the size of Sydney, Barcelona, Montreal, Nairobi, Santiago or Singapore (around 5 million each). Such a collection of cities would meet the needs of even the most avid lovers of urban life in its various forms. Meanwhile, there would be plenty of space for those who prefer the county.</bq> City people require more resources, don't they? That is, people who enjoy urban life for the privilege it brings require the output of many people for them to be satisfied. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/27/the-true-unemployment-rate-may-be-25/" source="CounterPunch" author="Pete Dolack">The True Unemployment Rate May be 25%</a> <bq>Nobody controls the capitalist system; it has its own momentum to which all companies must bow to remain competitive and, ultimately, in business. The unceasing competition of capitalism, its relentless drive to enclose ever more human activity within its logic of profit at any cost, mandates the world we now live in.</bq> <bq>Our need to sell our labor, the resulting reduction of human beings’ labor power to a commodity, and the endless competitive pressures on capitalists to boost profits underlie the world economic system. A race to the bottom is what global capitalism has to offer, and all it can offer.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/24/how-stablecoins-are-reinventing-financial-hegemony/" source="CounterPunch" author=" Imran Khalid">How Stablecoins Are Reinventing Financial Hegemony</a> <bq>Consider this: the World Bank still pegs the average cost of cross-border remittances at 6.35 percent, with settlement times dragging on for up to five days. Stablecoins, riding on blockchain rails like Solana, settle transactions in real-time, 24/7, often for less than a dollar. It’s little wonder that what began as a niche tool for crypto settlements is now seeping into mainstream finance, from trade invoices to remittances and digital payrolls.</bq> But what's the difference from credit cards or PayPal? Don't say the blockchain; if it's real-time, it's not on the chain. Real-time settlement is not on-chain. If it's not on-chain, then it's not really crypto, is it? It's just the same as the existing financial infrastructure. Sure, it's faster and cheaper, but is it as reliable? Without the chain, there's no guarantee of trust. The financial world doesn't have the blockchain either---but it has built up trust in a different way. I don't find it to be particularly trustworthy ... but it does work. I can take money out of a Swiss bank account from other countries. I can use my Swiss-issued credit card pretty much anywhere. There is a trust in that system. <bq>[...] it is easy to see why some observers see stablecoins not just as dollar stabilizers but as potential accelerants of its decline. They lubricate capital flows but also create loopholes that may erode traditional levers of control.</bq> <bq>If a future stablecoin bubble were to burst, the fallout would reverberate far beyond crypto exchanges and potentially boomerang back to the very U.S. Treasury market they were supposed to bolster.</bq> <bq>A financial ecosystem that relies on minting ever more digital tokens to prop up the dollar may find itself building castles on sand if deeper structural weaknesses—ballooning debt, polarized politics, the erosion of institutional guardrails—go unaddressed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">AI’s pogo-stick grift</a> <bq>When agentic AI grifters insist that the entire internet has to adopt and faithfully use standard APIs so their bots can accurately analyze the internet's contents, they are re-inventing the pogo-stick problem. Yes, if you could get the entire world to arrange its affairs to your benefit, you could surely do some incredible things, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a rollerskate.</bq> <bq>Techno-solutionism can warp our world view: if we think technology can solve all our problems, then the only problems that we’ll end up solving are the ones that lend themselves easily to tech fixes. In other words, we’ll end up flattening complex structural and political problems into things that computer code can address, and ignore all the messy elements it can’t. We’ll also delegate problem-solving away from our elected representatives, and to the tech elites.</bq> <bq>Despite the fact that skepticism isn’t profitable, the good news is that more and more people are increasingly asking, “just because we can do something with technology, does that mean we should?” This is an important question, but there’s an even more fundamental question we need to ask first, and that is “can this technology actually do what we’re told it will?”</bq> <bq>[...] we won’t be able to rein in Silicon Valley’s harms if the stories we keep telling about technology are couched in terms of reverence, awe, and magic. Techno-solutionist solutions should instead be met with skepticism. At its most basic level, that skepticism should recognize that the developers of such solutions are first and foremost selling something, not trying to make the world a better place. We should therefore put the burden on them to convince us that their technology is not bad: not bad in the evil, harmful sense, and also not bad in the sense of just plain not sucking.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/intro.html" source="" author="Hilary J Allen">Fintech Dystopia - Introduction</a> <bq>It's important that we don’t allow our frustrations with the existing financial system to blind us to the flaws in a mirror image fintech-based system that replicates and exacerbates everything we didn’t like about finance in the first place.</bq> <bq>First, develop a business model that centers a particular technology. Tell some stories about how that technology will solve a legitimate problem (preferably using the words “democratize” and “disrupt”). Bend or break some laws with that business model, and profit from not complying with the law. Get away with bending or breaking the law, and with harming people along the way, because lawmakers and regulators are too timid to stop “innovation.” Get big enough that you can convince lawmakers and regulators to change the law so that you never have to comply with it and those who are harmed have no recourse – because you haven’t actually solved the problem, and your business model isn’t good enough to survive if you have to follow the same rules as everyone else. Bonus points if the law is changed in a way that guarantees you a monopoly or oligopoly position. Lather, rinse, repeat.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/at-250-million-top-ai-salaries-dwarf-those-of-the-manhattan-project-and-the-space-race/" source="Ars Technica" author="Benj Edwards">At $250 million, top AI salaries dwarf those of the Manhattan Project and the Space Race</a> <bq>[...] researchers are making more than NBA stars.</bq> <bq>This vision explains why companies treat AI researchers like irreplaceable assets rather than well-compensated professionals. If these companies are correct, the first to achieve artificial general intelligence or superintelligence won't just have a better product—they'll have technology that could invent endless new products or automate away millions of knowledge-worker jobs and transform the global economy. The company that controls that kind of technology could become the richest company in history by far.</bq> It's hilarious that, should this transformation happen, no-one even considers that it would also lead to systemic change, perhaps in which a private entity doesn't just control the foundational technology of the future. They can't imagine that it might help us drop the shackles of capitalism because they can't imagine anything else. They would claim that only capitalism could have produced it. What it produces instead is scams. <hr> <img src="{att_link}adam_smith_hates_landlords.webp" href="{att_link}adam_smith_hates_landlords.webp" align="none" caption="Adam Smith hates landlords" scale="75%"> <bq author="Adam Smith" source="The Wealth of Nations" date="1776">As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Bragging about replacing coders with AI is a sales-pitch</a> <bq>It's true that tech job listings are down 36% since ChatGPT's debut – but that's pretty much true of all job listings: And the major decline in tech hiring isn't the result of hiring far fewer programmers – the tech companies have mostly cut back on hiring marketers, administrative assistants, and HR staff. The whole fucking economy is in freefall. It's so bad that Trump just fired the country's head labor statistician and pledged to replace her with a flunky who wouldn't produce numbers "that made him look bad":</bq> <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-recession-door-opens/" author="Jack Rasmus" source="ZNetwork">The Recession Door Opens</a> <bq>The second report indicating the US economy now balances on the precipice of recession is the advance (preliminary) US GDP report for the 2nd Quarter 2025. Here’s just three reasons why the announced 3% growth rate is not actually 3%. First, readers should understand the US, virtually alone among advanced economies, puffs up its quarterly GDP numbers by multiplying the quarter change from the previous quarter by annualizing it. That is, 3% for the 2nd quarter is actually 4 times roughly what the economy actually grew from the previous 1st quarter. 3% sounds a lot better than 0.75% if one is publicly hyping the growth rate in the media. However, even the 3%(0.75%) is grossly over-estimated for several reasons. Here’s just two of many: First, real GDP is artificially boosted by under-estimating the real rate of inflation. This occurs every report. Second, in the case of the 2nd quarter GDP report, the 3% is grossly over-estimated by temporary effects due to Trump’s current tariffs policies now rolling out which has dramatically distorted the contribution to GDP from what is called ‘net exports’—i.e. the difference and gap between imports into the US and US exports to the rest of the world.</bq> <bq>Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ Act just passed by the Congress will have a net negative impact on GDP, and will not boost US economic growth as Trump claims. Most of the at least $3 trillion in corporate and individual (and estate) tax cuts are just a continuation of previous 2018 cuts. The effect of the 2025 bill is just to make them permanent. That’s not net new fiscal stimulus from tax cutting. Meanwhile, the so-called working class $500 billion tax cuts in the bill—for tips, overtime pay, social security, interest on new cars, etc.—have been dramatically reduced and made temporary. In contrast, the program and employment spending cuts in the bill—for Medicaid, ACA subsidies, education, layoffs of federal workers, and so on—amount to at least $1.5 trillion and take effect immediately. They will significantly reduce current consumer spending this year and next.</bq> <bq>[...] over the next year US GDP is likely to weaken due to less consumer spending—as state and local government layoffs rise and Trump spending cuts take effect as well as due to less immediate and historically low impacts of tax cuts on the real economy—while the short term positive effect on Imports-Exports on 2nd quarter GDP dissipates.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/07/trumps-team-of-cowards/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Trump’s Team of Cowards</a> <bq>The downward revision to which Trump referred was made on August 21, 2024, more than two months before the election. This revision was widely discussed in the media at the time. For example, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times both had major news articles on it. Anyhow, this is a clear indisputable fact. Trump is mistaken, the revisions took place before the election, not after the election as Trump keeps insisting. Donald Trump’s top economic advisers, people like NEC director Kevin Hassett, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Stephen Miran, the Chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, are not stupid. They all know that Trump is clearly mistaken on this simple, but very important fact.</bq> I'm gonna have to beg to differ on this one: I think that these people could very well be a very special kind of stupid that allows them to both do some work that looks intellectually advanced while still be spectacularly stupid and uninformed about many other things. <bq>Yet apparently none of them can talk to Trump and explain to him his mistake. This is a big deal in the current situation, but it should also be taken as a really big warning on the troubles ahead. If Trump decides something about the state of the economy, no one on his team is going to ever correct him, no matter how crazy it is. If his tariffs, budget cuts, and arbitrary and ad hoc regulatory changes give us 20 percent unemployment and 20 percent inflation, and Trump says we have a perfect economy, none of his aides is going [to] tell him otherwise. That means that there will never be any opportunity to correct a mistaken policy, because Trump’s advisers are too scared to tell him the real economic situation. That is very bad news. This means that we not only are looking at bad outcomes due to poorly crafted policies, we are likely looking at situations where Trump will never reverse course because his aides are too scared to tell Trump the truth about the state of the economy.</bq> This is true but not news really. Trump does what Trump wants because he has been trained to believe that he can bend reality to his will and he convinces himself that, when reality imposes its will, it's what he always wanted in the first place. He loves to declare victory and then quit. He gets bored easily so that he has to have some way of convincing himself that he's a winner even when he's had to give up long short of an impetuously declared goal. He's a machine for seeking personal gain and profit with the least amount of effort. He's currently leveraging large swaths of what remains of the U.S. economy to do. Trump is only interested in huge levers of gain, large arbitrage opportunities---anything else feels like a waste of time. If a potential gain is not quickly met, he quickly moves on to greener-looking pastures. <bq>Everyone understands that a president’s cabinet will be loyal to them, but the willingness of Trump’s top aides to completely ignore reality to humor their boss is unprecedented in this country. It is very bad news.</bq> Look, Dean, you were making a very good point. This is bad news. But it's not unprecedented. We just had four years of a presidency where they finally admitted, after the fact, that the president was largely, if not completely, unaware of anything that was going on, and they all pretended that he was not only not mentally incapacitated but that he was more mentally fit than anyone else ever. And here you are, Dean, having (A) been largely unaware that this was happening as it was happening, even though it was incredibly obvious that it was happening and that we were being brazenly lied to about it, and, now, (B) just months after the perpetrators cheerily admitted to having lied to the country for four years about Biden's mental incapacity, you're acting as if it had never happened, simply because it wasn't Trump that did it. Please be a touch more self-aware about the delusions you share with the rest of your silo. <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-money-trap/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's your Ed at?">AI Is A Money Trap</a> <bq>[...] they're in "early-stage discussions" about an employee share sale that would value the company at $500 billion, a ludicrous number that shows we're leaving the realm of reality. To give you some context, Shopify's market cap is $197 billion, Salesforce's is $248 billion, and Netflix's is $499 billion. Do you really think that OpenAI is worth more than these companies? Do you think they're worth more than AMD at a $264 billion market cap? Do you?</bq> <bq>The amount of cash they are burning does not suggest they’re rapidly approaching any kind of sane burn rate, or we would have heard. Putting aside any kind of skepticism I have, anything you may hold against me for what I say or the way I say it, where are the profitable companies? Why isn’t there one, outside of the companies creating data to train the AI models, or Nvidia? We’re three years in, and we haven’t had one. We also have had no exits and no IPOs. There has been no cause for celebration, no validation of a business model through another company deciding that it was necessary to continue its dominance by raising funds on the public market, or allowing actual investors — flawed though they may be — act as the determiner of their value.</bq> <bq>And that, right there, is Silicon Valley’s own housing crisis, except instead of condos houses they can’t afford with sub-prime adjustable rate mortgages, venture capitalists have invested in unprofitable, low-revenue startups with valuations that they can never sell at. And, like homeowners in the dismal years of 2008 and 2009, they’re almost certainly underwater — they just haven’t realized it yet. Where consumers were unable to refinance their mortgages to bring their monthly payments down, generative AI startups face pressure to continually raise at higher and higher valuations to keep up with their costs, with each one making it less likely their company will survive. </bq> <bq>It’s almost as if nobody actually wants to buy Perplexity, or any of these sham companies, which I know sounds mean, but if you are worth billions or tens of billions of dollars and you can’t make more than a bottom-tier baseball team in fucking Ohio, you are neither innovative nor deserving of said valuation. But really, my pissiness and baseball comparisons aside, what exactly is the plan for these companies? They don’t make enough money to survive without a continuous flow of venture capital, and they don’t seem to make impressive sums of money even when allowed to burn as much as they’d like. These companies are not being forced to live frugally, or at least have yet to be made to, perhaps because they’re all actively engaged at spending as much money as possible in pursuit of finding an idea that makes more money than it loses. This is not a rational or reasonable way to proceed.</bq> <bq>Perplexity’s had three years and a billion dollars, it doesn’t seem to be close to profitable. How long does Perplexity deserve, exactly? An eternity?</bq> <bq>OpenAI just got $10 billion in June 2025, and had to raise another $8.3 billion in August 2025. That is an unbelievable cash burn, one dwarfing any startup in history, rivalled only by xAI, makers of “Grok, the racist LLM,” losing it over $1 billion a month.</bq> <bq>[...] now we have a massive expansive data centre buildout, the likes of which we’ve never seen, all to capture demand for a product that nobody makes much money selling.</bq> What are they doing with all of that money? <bq>What is missing is any real value generation. Again, I tell you, put aside any feelings you may have about generative AI itself, and focus on the actual economic results of this bubble. How much revenue is there? Why is there no profit? Why are there no exits? Why does big tech, which has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into generative AI, not talk about the revenues they’re making? Why, for three years straight, have we been asked to “just wait and see,” and for how long are we going to have to wait to see it? What’s incredible is that the inherently compute-intensive nature of generative AI basically requires the construction of these facilities, without actually representing whether they are contributing to the revenues of the companies that operate the models (like Anthropic or OpenAI, or any other business that builds upon them). As the models get more complex and hungry, more data centers get built — which hyperscalers book as long-term revenue, even though it’s either subsidised by said hyperscalers, or funded by VC money. This, in turn, stimulates even more capex spending. And without having to answer any basic questions about longevity or market fit.</bq> <bq>What would have happened if companies like Microsoft and Meta instead spent the money on things that actually drove productivity, or created a valuable competitive business that drove economic activity? Hell, even if they just gave everyone a 10% raise, it would have likely been better for the economy than this, if we’re factoring in things like consumer spending. It’s just waste. Profligate, pointless waste.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/the-kanye-data-center-crossover/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="">The Kanye/Data Center Crossover</a> <bq>[...] consider my friend's golden retriever. It barks when the postal worker comes to the door, and it stops barking when they leave. It thinks, and I use that word advisedly, it has convinced the delivery person to leave. After all, every time, if it barks long enough, the scary person outside the door goes away. This, however, is an error in the dog's mental model of causality. The mail delivery person always goes away. That is what postal workers do: they come, and they go away. The dog, despite careful daily experimentation, has discovered a spurious correlation, but thought it causal, and now it reinforces his belief that his actions are what makes the mail person go away. The same thing is true in economic data. If the US continues to grow quarterly despite trade stress, high tariffs, and near-record policy uncertainty, there is a temptation to think that these things caused the quarterly growth. But they almost certainly did not, in particular given what we now know about the billions of dollars flowing into the economy from AI capex. This misunderstanding also helps explain why US jobs numbers are weird and being revised downward, despite superficially sprightly economic growth. You can see the problem. If you don't understand what's causing economic growth, and you double down on the things you think are causing it, you are likely to end up in a bad policy place, sooner or later.</bq> <bq>[...] most of the cost in a data center is not in the shell, or power, or cooling water. It is in the processors. And having to replace them every few years creates intense pressure on the investment. You must earn a high enough return before replacement to justify the expenditure. In financial terms, your income must exceed the risk-adjusted, weighted average cost of capital, which runs 12-14%. Given that cap rates are for data centers embedded in income-seeking real estate income trusts (REITs, and more on them in a moment) are already under 5%, this is problematic.</bq> <bq>[...] any time you have an asset-liability mismatch (you owe money longer than the income-producing thing you borrowed for lasts) you potentially have a large problem. You may not be able to generate enough future income to finance that debt, putting you into a debt spiral, if your rental income assumptions are wrong.</bq> <bq>[...] consider unintended consequences. All that money is coming from somewhere. There is an argument to be made that a poorly understood accelerating factor in the hollowing out of US manufacturing decades ago was that capital for manufacturers disappeared during the fiber boom. Credit that might have been extended for one purpose was extended for another, at least at the margin. In this context, where is the money flooding into AI capex coming from? What newly "risky" investments are not able to get credit? Manufacturing? Solar? Others? Money flows on this scale have consequences. We should know and care.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.compactmag.com/article/money-by-vile-means/" source="Compact" author="Peter Ryan">Money by Vile Means</a> <bq>[...] rather than lifting up ordinary citizens, crypto has become a new means of expanding elite power and wealth.</bq> <bq>In the years since, the speculative frenzy around cryptocurrencies has only continued to gather steam, to the benefit of private actors who have reaped massive profits from the industry’s growth and are exercising a growing influence over the state. In the process, Bitcoin’s founding goal of fighting unconstrained government spending has been inverted, as crypto is increasingly serving as a means of enabling more deficit spending, an agenda the Trump administration has all but explicitly embraced. Today, crypto is merely the latest ruse to persuade the public to surrender democratic freedom and financial sovereignty to oligarchs.</bq> <bq>Miners can and do censor Bitcoin transactions. As the Princeton computer scientists Malte Möser and Arvind Narayanan have shown, because Bitcoin addresses are akin to bank accounts inside the Bitcoin system, miners can create blacklists of addresses to exclude from each new block. This possibility did not go unnoticed by early Bitcoiners, who debated and warned about the possibility that miners might refuse to process transactions under pressure from regulators.</bq> <bq>In November of 2020, US-based Blockseer Mining Pool launched with the overt aim of censoring transactions from blacklisted addresses using the OFAC guidelines among others. In May 2021, US-based Marathon Digital Holdings’ mining pool created its first “sanctions-compliant” block of Bitcoin using the same OFAC standards. As CEO Fred Thiel noted, the blacklisting was necessary to be compliant with US government oversight. His message was simple: For US-based Bitcoin mining to be increased, US-based Bitcoin miners had to censor.</bq> <bq>By one estimate from Hashrate Index, Foundry USA and Singapore-based AntPool control more than 50 percent of computing power, and the top ten mining pools control over 90 percent. Bitcoin blogger 0xB10C, who analyzed mining data as of April 15, 2025, found that centralization has gone even further than this, “with only six pools mining more than 95 percent of the blocks.”</bq> <bq>[...] today, Bitcoin mining is more costly than ever for new entrants. The only way to have a decent probability of winning a block is to join a pool. Once he has joined, the new miner becomes an appendage of the pool operator. Only those who can raise large sums of capital to create industrial-scale Bitcoin mining farms can effectively compete. Upstart miners, in other words, have turned out to be far less autonomous and less powerful than Nakamoto thought.</bq> <bq>When Nakamoto and other early developers originally set the block size limit, it was a temporary solution to avoid spam transactions.</bq> <bq>Although almost all miners had signaled their support for the big block side, with much of the businesses and user community in agreement, a concentrated small group of special interests, who never documented any definitive measurement of majority support, coordinated an online campaign to distort perceptions and exert pressure.</bq> <bq>University of Texas finance professor John M. Griffin and his doctoral student Amin Shams detailed Tether’s activities in a 2018 paper. For the period of March 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018, Griffin and Shams found plausible evidence to conclude that a few actors printed tethers without real dollar backing to artificially rescue Bitcoin (BTC) when its price fell and stimulate its overall growth. The trading activity was concentrated on Bitfinex with trading patterns not seen on other exchanges. Griffin and Shams also noted the dubious nature of Tether’s reserves and demonstrated unbacked issuance. So long as no one could tell the difference between a tether token and a real dollar, these unbacked tokens could be traded as if they were real dollars. Think of it as a cheat code in a video game for unlimited gold when every other player must grind quests to get them.</bq> <bq>When all these sources are digested together, the logical conclusion is that unbacked dollar-like tokens were printed to tilt prices on an exchange bottleneck. Bitfinex, an exchange with a clear small block conflict of interest, was in total control of what Griffin and Shams described as a pseudo-central bank.</bq> <bq>The promise of Bitcoin was that decentralization would create an alternative to the unaccountable elite control and corruption of fiat money. As it turned out, software developers held centralized control over the code and could alter it however they chose. As miners matured from hobbyists to industrial-scale server farms, they centralized, which led to the monopolization of the blockchain. In turn, social-media forums and sites dealing with Bitcoin censored speech, and the owners of crypto exchanges were able to pick winners and losers. Finally, these people had the power to print fake dollars in a way that utterly distorted the “market.”</bq> <bq>At most five software administrators were in control of 100 percent of the code. Forty-two software developers contributed 90 percent of that code. A few organizations fund those software developers. Six mining pools mined more than 95 percent of the Bitcoin blocks. A handful of exchanges gatekept the buying and selling. One money printer propped up the whole market. The top 1.86 percent of Bitcoin addresses controlled more than 90 percent of Bitcoin’s supply. By comparison, the top 1 percent of America controls just 31 percent of wealth. How is Bitcoin decentralized, again?</bq> <bq>The cryptocurrency trading market, which is reliant on stablecoins denominated in dollars, provides a strategic avenue to reverse the de-dollarization trend. This is because, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tweeted on June 17, a “thriving stablecoin ecosystem will drive demand from the private sector for US Treasuries, which back stablecoins.” This phenomenon is an evolution of what the economist Michael Hudson calls the Treasury Standard. Instead of other countries buying Treasuries with their surplus dollars generated out of the US balance of payments deficit, stablecoin backers would do so. The US government is now pursuing a Stablecoin Standard.</bq> <bq>[...] the effect of the Scaling War was to split off Bitcoin’s function as a medium of exchange from its function as a store of value. According to the small blockers, Bitcoin would continue to provide a store of value, but “layer 2s” would serve the medium of exchange function, enabling transactions between users. In 2018, economist Saifedean Ammous argued in the book The Bitcoin Standard that Bitcoin, like gold, could be used by governments to back their fiat currencies. Bitcoin could now serve as a tool of the government and central banks as opposed to a weapon of radicals who rejected them.</bq> The Bitcoin Standard is one of the stupidest books I've ever read. <bq>To whatever degree poor residents of the developing world use stablecoins, as high-minded crypto advocates suggest, to enjoy the stability of a dollar-based financial infrastructure they could never otherwise access, they can only do so because stablecoins don’t provide the same level of regulatory scrutiny that the traditional financial infrastructure does.</bq> This is a fancy way of saying that the entire market's purpose is to fleece the poors for the pennies in their pockets. And os it goes. <bq>US monetary policy and Treasury rates thus become a function of not just the Federal Reserve nor even market forces, but the centralized discretion of stablecoin issuers like Tether. If stablecoins are unbacked, then the effects on Treasury yields are not only sizable but artificial. Tether has still never undergone a professional audit.</bq> They probably can't believe their luck in getting this level of integration. They're characterizing these new laws as "more than they'd hoped for" and the "whole X-Mas list" and it's unclear to what degree the administration understands just how bad the deal is that they got. Like representatives who sell billion-dollar deals for $20K, which simultaneously sell millions of lives down the river, it's shocking and depressing to watch it happen nearly unopposed. A few scam artists know exactly what's happening and know exactly what to do to profit from it. The representatives see only as far as their personal profit. The people have no idea what's going on. <bq>However noble their intentions were at the outset, they have given rise to something far worse. Bitcoin and its Frankenstein’s monster of stablecoins are the latest phase of the longer neoliberal trajectory of privatizing public services and responsibilities.</bq> <bq>For all its faults, the fiat system is still a [democratic] state-run system…the state giving up [the control of money]...would be to give the private sector control over the most potent substance in the state’s armory.”</bq> <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/we-live-like-royalty-and-dont-know-it" source="The New Atlantis" author="Charles C. Mann">We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It</a> <bq>[...] when I mentioned how remarkable it was that a hundred-plus people could parachute into a remote, unfamiliar place and eat a gourmet meal untroubled by fears for their health and comfort, they were surprised. The heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their dinner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.</bq> <bq>Jefferson lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages, blazing fireplaces, and yellow fever. But what most separates our day from his is not our automobiles, airplanes, and high-rise apartments — it is that today vast systems provide abundant food, water, energy, and health to most people,</bq> <bq>[...] the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-electricity-system-works" source="The New Atlantis" author="Charles C. Mann">What Keeps the Lights On</a> <bq>Alternating current has a major advantage over direct current. Just as a moving magnetic field produces a flowing electric current, a current that shifts back and forth produces a magnetic field. That magnetic field can be used to create secondary electric currents with lower or higher voltage than the initial current. With transformers, a single power installation can power many different types of devices.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-how-energy-hungry-algorithms-are-fueling-the-climate-crisis/" source="ZNetwork" author="Sharon Kumar">The Hidden Cost of AI: How Energy-Hungry Algorithms Are Fueling the Climate Crisis</a> <bq>As AI technologies become more prevalent, understanding and mitigating their environmental impact is crucial for sustainable development. A typical AI data center, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), uses as much power as 100,000 households right now, but the largest centers currently being constructed will consume 20 times that amount.</bq> What kind of a unit is a household? A U.S. household? A wealthy one? Or a poor one? I understand the desire to move away from a more abstract, though precise, measure like KWh but a "household" is just too vague. <bq>In 2022, global data center electricity consumption reached 460 terawatt-hours (TWh), positioning data centers as the 11th largest electricity consumer worldwide, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In fact, projections by the IEA indicate that by 2030, electricity demand from data centers could more than double to around 945 TWh—more than Japan’s current annual electricity use.</bq> That's a good comparison, much better than "10,000 households" above. <bq>[...] the emissions from in-house data centers of major tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple, may be over seven times higher than officially reported. This underreporting underscores the need for increased transparency and accountability in evaluating the environmental impact of AI technologies.</bq> <bq>Consumers also play a role in reducing AI’s energy footprint. By closing apps when not in use, choosing less resource-intensive tools, and supporting companies that demonstrate environmental responsibility, individuals can contribute to the collective effort, notes The World Economic Forum.</bq> Of course the WEF puts the onus on the consumer. It probably also recommends eliminating regulation. Why not? Companies will continue to pursue efficiency while consumers restrict their usage to what makes sense. JFC. Why does something as stupid as the WEF even exist? Well, it's not for the purpose of providing useful or actionable advice to the world; it's to massage the egos of its participants, telling them that their unending plundering of the rest of the world is for their own good. <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <a href="http://theconversation.com/how-conspiracy-theories-about-covids-origins-are-hampering-our-ability-to-prevent-the-next-pandemic-261475" source="The Conversation" author="Edward C. Holmes">How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic</a> <bq>In early 2020, the case for a zoonotic origin was already compelling. Much-discussed features of the virus are found in related coronaviruses and carry signatures of natural evolution. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 showed no signs of laboratory manipulation. The multi-billion-dollar wildlife trade and fur farming industry in China regularly moves high-risk animals, frequently infected with viruses, into dense urban centres. It’s believed that SARS-CoV-1, the virus responsible for the SARS outbreak, emerged this way in 2002 in China’s Guangdong province.</bq> <bq>The amplification of conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID has promoted a dangerously flawed understanding of pandemic risk. The idea that a researcher discovered or engineered a pandemic virus, accidentally infected themselves, and unknowingly sparked a global outbreak (in exactly the type of setting where natural spillovers are known to occur) defies logic. It also detracts from the significant risk posed by the wildlife trade. In contrast, the evidence-based conclusion that the COVID pandemic most likely began with a virus jumping from animals to humans highlights the very real risk we increasingly face. This is how pandemics start, and it will happen again. But we’re dismantling our ability to stop it or prepare for it.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/08/01/the-white-blouse-of-sandra-mozarowsky/" source="The Paris Review" author="Clara Usón">The White Blouse of Sandra Mozarowsky</a> <bq>“One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus concludes at the end of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” having compared the absurd man—the man who knows, who’s conscious of his mortality and of the futility of pursuing transcendence—to the Homeric hero condemned by the gods to eternally roll a boulder up a mountain. Century after century, Sisyphus ascends the mountain, bearing the weight of the rock, which will roll to the bottom when he’s about to achieve his goal, and down he goes, up, down, up, down—and Camus wants us to imagine him happy! He writes, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (he doesn’t speak of women’s hearts). “It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. ‘I conclude that all is well,’ says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-20th-century-is-the-only-century" source="Hinternet" author="Mary Cadwalladr">The 20th Century Is the Only Century</a> <bq>[...] the century in between was characterized both by real constraints and new potentialities at once —“Remember, it’s ‘Click — 50 cents’, ‘Click — another 50 cents’,” my dad used to say every time I made an ill-advised shot with my Kodak Disc, seeking to instill in me a sense of the wastefulness, now entirely forgotten, of overdocumentation—, which together ensured that what that century left us cannot but appear as a perfectly curated and proportionate display of human creative expression at its most excellent.</bq> <bq>Sometimes it seems to me that my true life’s calling is to unpack all of this material, to lay it out and inspect it, and to put it into language that might help to secure some kind of future for it. I rely for convenience on external prostheses, such as YouTube, and all those other media repositories I have called the Great Archive, but only as the geometer relies on ruler and compass — to show you, sensually, what I am anyhow carrying around inside me.</bq> <bq>Little Richard’s climactic verbal explosion at the end of this interview, in which he absolutely wipes the floor with the absent Chuck Berry, upon being reminded that this old frenemy of his is going to headline an upcoming concert at Wembley Stadium, is one of the funniest routines I’ve ever seen — part crazed preacher, part kayfabe wrestler, and so much more besides. Plainly, only a record-company suit would ever seek to install the middle-class Berry on Little Richard’s throne — as out of place there as some alt-Dalai Lama selected by the Central Committee.</bq> <bq>[...] just watch, as late as 1989, when Joan Rivers attempts to coerce him into identifying with the label “gay”, to which he can only reply with confusing non-sequiturs and a plain and sincere desire to just get back to the music already. It’s not that he’s in the closet; but neither is he in the clutches of the ideological frame that has by now fully swallowed up the likes of Joan Rivers, and imposed on us the identitarian microtaxonomies that are still being refined today. Gay or straight? Jewish or Baptist? Sacred or profane? Who the hell knows! All that can be said with certainty is that he “makes your big toe shoot up in your boot”, to quote another high-point of this interview, and it’s that power that is the entire basis of his claim to sovereignty.</bq> <bq>I can remember the last time I was in Paris, visiting JSR, in 2023 or so. I went into a Franprix in the 19th arrondissement, a supermarket chain known for its astoundingly well curated playlists, and in truth the only place I ever insist JSR take me when I’m in France. Michael’s “Wanna Be Starting Something” was on, that part where there’s a pseudo-Swahili chorus singing something like “ma-ma-se ma-ma-sa ma-ma-ma-ko-sa”, and the African man at the cash register, who for some reason was wearing Ray-Bans, declared to me: “Ah oui, c’était le roi”. Then he lowered his shades and looked up at me with his bare eyes, and repeated: “Le. Roi."</bq> <bq>[...] on closer inspection the arc of his life fits within a very familiar template, which numerous Black American artists were constrained to follow before him — of tremendous talent, a taste for glory and power, and ultimately of such ruthless exploitation and consistent public misunderstanding as to drive him into a form of self-presentation that is all too easily dismissed as insanity.</bq> <bq>[...] often recall something JSR observed about this same question — of who may be permitted to write about what. “Look,” he wrote, “when you’ve lived outside the US long enough, it’s impossible not to see, from your distant perch, that everyone in that country has been cooked up, and is currently simmering, in the same stew.”</bq> Oh, amen. It's infuriating. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/02/through-the-eyes-of-lee-miller/" source="CounterPunch" author="Jeffrey St. Clair">Through the Eyes of Lee Miller</a> <bq>Miller sent back to New York from that scene of unspeakable horror some of the most disturbing photographs to come out of World War II: pictures of cruelty and retaliation, survival and compassion, life and death amid the ruins of a Europe gone mad. The images derive power not only from the shocking content, but also from the craft of their composition, which recall scenes from the crueler fantasies of Bosch. The images seemed otherworldly, fantastical, a cruel dream. At the same time, there was no denying their reality. When the images appeared in (of all venues) Vogue magazine, they ran under the headline “Believe It!”</bq> <bq>Lee Miller was better equipped than most war photographers of her generation to capture the strange incongruities of this scene. After all, before World War II Lee Miller was one of the leading figures in the surrealist movement. She was the lover of Man Ray and had invented the solarization technique that made him famous. She was friends with Dali and Picasso and starred in Jean Cocteau’s first film, the surrealist classic Blood of the Poet. Later, she married the British surrealist painter Roland Penrose.</bq> <bq>Miller soon became the surrealist’s favorite model. Man Ray photographed her obsessively, often in darkly erotic poses. He even photographed her lounging on the lap of her stiff father in a portrait infused with an unsettling subtext, hinting at incest, longing and steaming hatred. You can see how the dissipated beauty of Miller’s face in this strange portrait appealed to Jean Cocteau, the man who would write Les Enfants Terribles.</bq> <bq>Miller was the most sexually and artistically uninhibited American woman to hit the streets of Paris since Josephine Baker. Notoriously, she drove her car topless through the streets of Paris. She posed nude for dozens of painters and sculptors and allowed a mould to be taken of her breast, which was transformed into the most popular champagne glass in Paris.</bq> <bq>Slowly, Penrose has begun the hard work of reassembling his mother’s astonishing legacy of work, first in a book, The Lives of Lee Miller, then in a small museum in East Sussex, and now in an online archive. The work is far from complete, and Miller is yet to receive the kind of critical assessment that she is due. But even so what has been released so far is nothing less than a dramatic reemergence of a buried history of the 20th century as recorded by one of the most unflinching eyes to ever aim a camera lens</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/on_our_discontents" source="deadSimpleTech" author="Iris Meredith">On our discontents</a> <bq>As much as I'd like to say that starting one's own business or consultancy is a way out of this trap, it just isn't. First off, you usually need capital of some kind to start a consumer-facing business: that, of course, is only made available to you if you have wealthy parents or are able to persuade a bank or some investors to put up the money. At the very first stage, then, the task already shifts from "do something and do it well" to "persuade someone with wealth, likely unearned, to share some of it with you because it means they'll make more money".</bq> <bq>When the first and most important skill for survival in a society is persuading some very wealthy, very stupid people, it completely fucks the whole incentive structure of the global economy. Certainly, it starts off fine: you just have to tune your communications to the people you're targeting a bit more, pander a little more, be a little more corporate. But that, of course, has a reinforcing effect. The people in power huff their own farts more and more, become increasingly convinced of their own moral goodness and intellectual smarts and demand increasing levels of brown-nosing from the plebs. And before you know it, you're where we are: essentially the only things that the people in power will give you money for are scams, things that make them feel good but that are useless, and occasionally things that are just outright evil.</bq> <bq>Literacy is freedom, education is freedom and both of them are influence. We know that this works, and we know it precisely because so many powerful people, who care about their ability to dole out success and failure on a whim, are trying to undermine it. Constant, brutal cuts to public education can only be read in this fashion: the plebs don't need to know how to think, so we'll just give them the bare minimum that they need to do work. The incessant stream of video slop that we get through social media has a similar effect: who has time to read or write when we're all watching or recording shit for Instagram, after all? And then, of course, there are the LLMs. The LLM is a technology precisely tuned to destroy the value that education brings to the table and make people, in the end, just not bother.</bq> <bq>So, how do you become free in 2025? Fight that shit with every fibre of your being. Read. Write. Learn how to do the things you do as well as you possibly can, and keep learning new things. Write. Get to know people who are doing the same things as you. And position yourself, when things eventually wear down, to come down like a tonne of bricks on the people who brought us to this pass.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://slavoj.substack.com/p/sex-today-the-noise-behind-quiet" author="Slavoj Žižek" source="Žižek Goads and Prods">Sex Today: The Noise Behind Quiet Relationships</a> <bq>When I am asked by friends to mention a truly intense sexual experience—real or imagined—what pops into my mind is always a scene from John Huston’s Night of the Iguana (1964), based on a play by Tennessee Williams, a scene that I already interpreted in one of my books. Despite the sexual tension between Shannon (played by Richard Burton) and numerous other women in the decrepit Mexican hotel, the scene that steals the show is the chaste Hannah’s (Deborah Kerr) delicate description to Shannon of what she calls her “love experience” with an Australian underwear salesman:<bq>HANNAH: I noticed that he became more and more... SHANNON: What? HANNAH: Well... agitated... as the afterglow of the sunset faded out on the water. Well, finally, eventually, he leaned towards me... we were vis-a-vis in the sampan... and he looked intensely, passionately into my eyes. And he said to me: “Miss Jelkes? Will you do me a favour? Will you do something for me?” “What?” said I. “Well,” said he, “if I turn my back, if I look the other way, will you take off some piece of your clothes and let me hold it, just hold it?” SHANNON: Fantastic! HANNAH: Then he said, “It will just take a few seconds.” “Just a few seconds for what?” I asked him. He didn't say for what, but... SHANNON: His satisfaction? HANNAH: Yes. SHANNON: What did you do—in a situation like that? HANNAH: I... gratified his request, I did! And he kept his promise. He did keep his back turned till I said ready and threw him... the part of my clothes. SHANNON: What did he do with it? HANNAH: He didn't move, except to seize the article he'd requested. I looked the other way while his satisfaction took place.</bq>We should note details in this story: the event was an intense experience (a “love experience”) also for Hannah, who didn't know the salesman closely. This is how sexuality works: a rather ridiculous scene in which there is no physical contact can be experienced in a much more intense way than even the most hardcore bodily interaction—what sexualizes bodily movements is their fantasmatic context, and this fantasmatic context that regulates my sexual life is something that has to be learned, constructed through hard work.</bq> <bq>I think that the level at which Hannah’s and the salesman’s brief interaction occurs is something that gets lost in the digitalization of sex—there, sex is just sex in all its vulgar brutality. Instead of the banality of evil, we get the banality of sex.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2025/08/06/kids-dont-want-screens-they-want-freedom/" author="Lenore Skenazy" source="Reason">Kids Don't Want Screens—They Want Freedom</a> <bq>[...] kids want to meet up in person. No tutus, no trophies, no internet—and no adults! Basically, our kids want an old-fashioned, free-range childhood. But the survey also told us that this is almost an impossible dream, because kids are rarely allowed any free, unsupervised time. We found that:<ul>Most kids are not allowed to be without an adult in public spaces (streets, parks, playgrounds, stores). Most kids have rarely or never walked around without an adult. Fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds have been to another aisle at the grocery store on their own. More than a quarter of the 8- and 9-year-olds—and 1 in 5 of the older kids—aren't even allowed to play in their own front yard alone.</ul>Our kids are growing up on lockdown. Their childhoods are strangely adult when it comes to tech, and infantilized when it comes to real life. The poll found that more 8- and 9-year-olds have talked to an artificial intelligence chatbot than have ever used a sharp knife. Perhaps unexpectedly, we don't blame parents for this. We blame the fears, social norms, and laws that have made micromanagement seem like a wise way to raise kids. But is it? Kids are more depressed than ever, according to the surgeon general. The same is true for parents. Today's childhood isn't working well for anyone.</bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://zed.dev/blog/container-use-background-agents" source="Zed.Dev" author="Jeremy Adams">Container Use for Locally Sandboxed, Background Agents in Zed</a> <bq>Since Dagger containers have native support for ephemeral services and terminal debugging, it's easy to ask for a url to connect to a service running in an environment via the prompt – you'll get a tunnel from localhost to the sandbox container, plus you can run container-use terminal <env> to be dropped into an interactive terminal session to poke around and run commands.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/28/twiddlehazard/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">How twiddling enshittifies your brain</a> <bq>[...] remembering those phone numbers wasn't cognitively useless. I cultivated all kinds of clever mnemonics based on the spatial relationships of the phone buttons, their alphabetical equivalents, the tones they made, and the arithmetic relationships between sequential digits, all of which constituted a kind of cognitive workout. But after the Great Telephone Number Forgettering, I retasked all that cognitive capacity to memorizing and thinking about stuff that's much less arbitrary and far more consequential than phone numbers.</bq> <bq>I keep hearing about millennials who can't read an analog clock, a skill that has as much objective utility as knowing how to interpret a slide-rule or convert from Francs to Lire to Deutschemarks. Not actually useless, but entirely bound to a specific time and place and a mere historical curiosity at some later date.</bq> <bq>If you wanna know how I write 2-3 books per year, blame the cognitive prosthesis of blogging, which forces me to apply rigor to the notes I take, and rewards me with a searchable database of everything I've ever found important, while stimulating a constant mnemonic rejuggling of all those thoughts that crystallizes into an endless stream of novel synthetic insights and road-tested ways to express them.</bq> Can confirm. <bq>My blogging is self-hosted, and for good reason. An asset that important to my personal and professional life is too precious to entrust to any kind of third party service, especially in light of the collapse of discipline that prevents firms from enshittifying.</bq> <bq>Take the case of "Mike," a software developer whose infant son developed a UTI during the covid lockdowns. On advice from his pediatrician, Mike took a picture of his son's infected penis with his Android phone and sent it to the doctor using a secure telemedicine app, forgetting that his Android device would also automatically sync all his photos to Google's cloud. Google automatically scans all these photos, and it flagged this one as child sexual abuse material (AKA "child pornography"), which resulted in the termination of all of Mike's Google services. In an instant, Mike lost every family photo he'd taken since his son's birth, every saved email, all of his business and tax records in his Google Drive, his phone number (he was a Google Fi subscriber), his authenticator app, and his email address itself. Google handed his search history and many other sensitive records they held on him to the San Francisco Police Department, who concluded that everything was fine. But the cops couldn't tell Mike any of this because he had no phone and no email, and, lacking these, could not recover any of his online accounts. Eventually, an SFPD detective had to ring Mike's doorbell to tell him he was cleared of any wrongdoing. Despite this, Mike never got his accounts or data back.</bq> <bq>The web is a giant cognitive prosthesis, and early web tools put a lot of emphasis on things like bookmark management and local caching, so that the knowledge and cognition you externalized to the web were under your control. But Google Search was so goddamned magic – before they cynically destroyed it – that a lot of us switched from "not remembering things because you have a bookmark that takes you to a website that remembers it for you" to "not remembering things and not remembering where to find them, and just typing queries into Google." The collapse of Google into a giant pile of shit is like giving every web user a traumatic brain injury.</bq> I never did this because it's an objectively terrible and error-prone way of remembering how to find things. Even better than bookmarks is to keep a copy (as I roughly do with these notes). People who use AI for search are even worse off. Using algorithms for music or movies or shows means you'll only ever be able to remember that which you're allowed to remember. <bq>Google's got a 90% Search market-share – how can it possibly grow Search? It can't (just like Meta can't really grow social, and Microsoft can't grow office suites, etc), so it has to convince Wall Street that it has a shot at conquering some other market that the street perceives as unimaginably vast and thus capable of keeping the growth engine going. Tech has pulled a lot of sweaty tricks to create this impression, inflating bubbles like "pivot to video" and "metaverse" and "cryptocurrency," and now it's AI.</bq> <bq>For an AI-driven growth story to work, tech companies have to produce a stream of charts depicting lines that go up and to the right, reflecting some carefully chosen set of metrics demonstrating AI's increasing popularity. One way to produce these increasing trend-lines on demand is to replace all the most commonly used parts of a service that you love and rely on with buttons that summon an AI.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://etymology.substack.com/p/stay-on-your-phone" author="Adam Aleksic" source="Etymology Online">stay on your phone</a> <bq>All of our music and fashion aesthetics are either defined by or against the algorithm, which means that even the “countercultural” tastes of the No Phone People are necessarily influenced by it. Engaging with algorithmic media—in a limited, deliberate manner—is thus important to understanding your experience in society as a whole.</bq> Man, I don't know about that. I wonder whether Adam's not suffering from his own sphere. I'm in deep-upstate New York right now (Central New York) and the people I'm hanging out with don't seem to have heard of any of the stuff that Adam talks about. I think very online people are overestimating their influence on the world. <bq>If you have “reality privilege,” and you care about society, don’t just disengage; use your privilege. Educate yourself, and stay online strategically. Broaden your being-in-the-world so we can eventually fight back.</bq> This is much easier said than done. Overall, I think this is a bit of an odd an incoherent take. <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/happy-to-help" author="Ted Rall" source="">Happy to Help</a> <bq>Whether it’s a long-running horror like Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians or a public health menace like smoking, humans tend not to act to put an end to it before a certain tipping point. It comes as small comfort to the victims, of course, that their sacrifice is simply a matter of timing and psychological consciousness.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/27-notes-on-growing-older" author="Ian Leslie" source="The Ruffian">27 Notes On Growing Old(er)</a> <bq>Some days, ageing feels like a curse, only lightly mitigated by the knowledge that the curse is universal. [...] after a certain point - 35? 40? - growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.</bq> I don't know about this. I think that a lot of people stop trying. "Trying" is the thing that can counteract the biological indicators dipping every year. In your youth, everything just works, so you don't have to try. If you never learn to try, if you never learn to enjoy the application of discipline and rigor, then you'll have no tools with which to counteract the biological restrictions. Your ability to achieve biologically is a combination of your innate talent and strength and the amount of effort you put into it, the amount of discipline you exercise. It is also very much contingent on you being one of the lucky ones for whom effort and discipline are rewarded with improvement. When you're young, you have no process, no discipline, nothing but the application of raw talent, with very much of your energy squishing out in potentially profitable but largely wasteful directions. "Wasteful" in the sense that you're not working toward a goal of any sort...you're just kind of learning or moving through the world or gaining experience. This is wonderful but is very much dependent on your youth, your ability to either not get hangovers or to get through them by 10AM with a hearty breakfast. You don't have to stay fit because you already are fit, so you can do things that are stupidly hard for your experience and fitness level. You can read a ton of books because you have nothing but time but you're only vaguely learning; you're not retaining that much because you have no discipline, so you make up for it with volume. You can do this as long as you have a surfeit of energy and vigor that you can expend. When you don't, you have to get smarter about it, which offers its own reward. You become more disciplined about how you approach media, reading, learning. You become more disciplined about how you exercise, how you stay fit, what you can accomplish. You learn to do more with less---and, very often, you can do even more than the chaotic younger fool that you used to be could. When I was younger, I tried to stay fit but it was only with 28, when I started doing JKD, that I really started getting fit again, like I was when I was a teenager and could run a 5:50 mile. Just yesterday, two days before my 53rd birthday, I was stunned to see that I had ridden up the Ilion Gorge---a road I've been riding up for most of my life---one minute faster than I'd ever ridden it before. It's a rise of 250m over 13km and I went up at 27kph average that day, without a noticeable tailwind. <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/partner-with-ai-and-throw-away-the-code.html" source="MartinFowler.com" author="Matteo Vaccari">Partner with the AI, throw away the code</a> <bq>Eventually I felt ready to run all the old tests against the new implementation. And they mostly worked… sadly, some test cases were not passing, and Cursor had no idea how to make them pass. Another problem was that I still did not really understand the new implementation. I probably did not understand it because it was not right; in real LLM style, it looked plausible, and it mostly worked by accident, but did not really capture the correct algorithm.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy" author="Freddie deBoer" source="Substack">The Rage of the AI Guy</a> <bq>They’re saying, instead, take this weight from off of me. Let me live in a different world than this one. Set me free, free from this mundane life of pointless meetings, student loan payments, commuting home through the traffic, remembering to cancel that one streaming service after you finish watching a show, email unsubscribe buttons that don’t work, your cousin sending you hustle culture memes, gritty coffee, forced updates to your phone’s software that make it slower for no discernible benefit, trying and failing to get concert tickets, trying to come up with zingers to impress your coworkers on Slack…. And, you know, disease, aging, infirmity, death. Even in a world saturated with trillion-parameter models, the stubborn friction of daily life remains untouched. LLMs can’t fix the municipal budget shortfalls that delay trash collection. They can generate a poem about garbage day in the style of Wallace Stevens, but they won’t drag the can to the curb. This is the dissonance at the heart of the AI letdown: the loftiest promises bump up against the most mundane realities. That’s why I keep stressing the importance of old, sturdy, boring technologies like indoor plumbing, because they actually makes modern life possible. You can insist that ChatGPT is a bigger deal than fire or electricity, but your own lived experience is telling you that it’s just not that big of a deal. People were told they’d live in a world of digital assistants, robot lawyers, and synthetic creativity. What they got was half-correct emails, slightly better autocomplete, and a lot more spam. In the end, the dream that AI would lift us out of the ordinary gets buried under the ordinariness it can’t touch. Even in the AI age, someone still has to take out the trash. And it’s probably you.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/4/nick-turley/#atom-everything" author="Simon Willison" source="">Citing Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT, OpenAI</a> <bq>This week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4× since last year.</bq> Translation: we're proud to announce that we're now losing even more money per month than every before! <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/5/greyduet-on-rteachers/#atom-everything" author="Simon Willison" source="">Lazy people are perfectly happy with slop</a> <bq>I was just in a meeting with my team and one of the older teachers brought out a powerpoint for our first lesson and almost everyone agreed to use it after a quick scan - but it was missing important tested material, repetitive, and just totally airy and meaningless. Just slide after slide of the same handful of sentences rephrased with random loosely related stock photos. When I asked him if it was AI generated, he said 'of course', like it was a strange question. [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.vibechart.net/" author="" source="">Vibe Chart</a> The announcement of ChatGPT 5 included the following two examples of graphics deception. It is unclear whether the mistakes were made by the LLM being used, or deliberately introduced by humans trying to make ChatGPT-5 look better than it is, or, as hilariously and absolutely Stockholm-syndromed commentators at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44830684">Hacker News</a> tried to say, deliberately introduced by Altman for publicity, which, like, if you really believe that, then you have a mental illness. And, if he really did do that, then he has a mental illness. But, if it works, then our system has a mental illness. <img src="{att_link}vibe_charting_from_gpt-5_release.webp" href="{att_link}vibe_charting_from_gpt-5_release.webp" align="none" caption="52.8 is 40% more than 69.1" scale="75%"> <img src="{att_link}vibe_charting_from_gpt-5_release_2.webp" href="{att_link}vibe_charting_from_gpt-5_release_2.webp" align="none" caption="50 is only one third of 47.4" scale="50%"> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/ai-industry-horrified-to-face-largest-copyright-class-action-ever-certified/" author="Ashley Belanger" source="Ars Technica">AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified</a> <bq>In a court filing Thursday, the Consumer Technology Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association backed Anthropic, warning the appeals court that "the district court’s erroneous class certification" would threaten "immense harm not only to a single AI company, but to the entire fledgling AI industry and to America’s global technological competitiveness." According to the groups, allowing copyright class actions in AI training cases will result in a future where copyright questions remain unresolved and the risk of "emboldened" claimants forcing enormous settlements will chill investments in AI.</bq> These lawsuits against our criminal behavior will limit an entire industry's potential for future criminality. <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshittification-of-generative-ai/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's your Ed at?"> The Enshittification of Generative AI</a> <bq>OpenAI’s justification is an exercise in faux-altruism, framing “taking away all choice” as a “real-time router that quickly decides which [model] to use.” ChatGPT Plus and Team members now mostly have access to two models — GPT-5 and GPT-5-Thinking — down from the six they had before. This distinction is quite significant. Where users once could get hundreds of messages a day on OpenAI’s o4-mini-high and o4-mini reasoning models, GPT-5 for ChatGPT Plus subscribers offers 200 reasoning (GPT-5-thinking) messages a week, with 80 GPT-5 messages every 3 hours which allow you to ask it to “think” about its answer, shoving you over to an undisclosed reasoning model. This may seem like a good deal, OpenAI is likely putting you on the cheapest model whenever it can in the name of “the best choice.”</bq> <bq>OpenAI is far from alone in turning the screws on its customers. As I’ll explain, effectively every consumer generative AI company has started some sort of $200-a-month “pro” plan — Perplexity Max, Gemini ($249.99 a month before discounts), Cursor Ultra, Grok Heavy (which is $300 a month!), and, of course, Anthropic, whose $100-a-month and $200-a-month plans allowed Claude Code users to spend anywhere from 100% to 10,000% of their monthly subscription in API calls. This led to rate limits starting August 28 2025 — a conveniently-placed date to allow Anthropic to close as much as $5 billion in funding before its users churn. Worse still, Anthropic burned all of that cash to get Claude Code to $400 million in annualized revenue according to The Information — around $33 million in monthly revenue that will almost certainly evaporate as its customers hit week-long rate limits on a product that’s billed monthly.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/" author="Cory Doctorow" source="Pluralistic">Which jobs can be replaced with AI?</a> <bq>Over decades, Air Canada has merged with the majority of its competitors and has become so structurally important to Canada – a big, geographically dispersed country with many fly-in settlements – that regulators can't really threaten it with meaningful penalties, not without threatening Canada itself. They're too big to fail, thus too big too jail, thus too big to care. That's how Air Canada was able to turn its customer service department into such a joke that it just didn't matter anymore, and so it didn't matter if it replaced those purely ornamental customer service reps with chatbots. The rise and rise of overseas call-center outsourcing paved the way for AI replacement in the same way that Walmart paved the way for Amazon. Once Walmart destroyed your town center and vaporized all the businesses that served your community, why wouldn't you shop on Amazon? Likewise: once companies replaced their customer service department with immiserated overseas call-center workers who were required to recite rote responses from a three-ring binder and were given no agency or capacity to solve your problem, why not replace them with AIs?</bq> <h id="fun">Fun</h> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Åland" author="" source="">Åland</a> I had absolutely never heard of this place before but I noticed it in the list of "countries" that are included in the data-roaming package I'd purchased. Pronounced O-land, this is a collection of islands off of the southwest tip of Finland. <img src="{att_link}ahvenanmaa_in_finland.webp" href="{att_link}ahvenanmaa_in_finland.webp" align="none" caption="Ahvenanmaa in Finland" scale="50%"> <bq>[...] an autonomous and demilitarised region of Finland. Receiving its autonomy by a 1920 decision of the League of Nations, it is the smallest region of Finland by both area (1,580 km2 or 610 sq mi) and population (30,654[10]), constituting 0.51% of Finland's land area and 0.54% of its population. Its only official language is Swedish and the capital city is Mariehamn.</bq> <bq>Åland's autonomous status means that those provincial powers normally exercised by representatives of the central Finnish Government are largely exercised by its own government. The current demilitarised, neutral position of Åland dates back to the Paris Peace Treaty after the Åland War in the 1850s.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQBbHzypBro" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/VQBbHzypBro" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Naphthalenoff" caption="Lilly Yokoi, ballerina on bicycle / Kunstfahrrad / велофигуристка">