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Links and Notes for December 12th, 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 They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts.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="#labor">Labor</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, Music, & Cinema</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</a> <a href="#technology">Technology & Engineering</a> <a href="#llms">LLMs & AI</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> <a href="#design">Design</a> <a href="#sports">Sports</a> <a href="#fun">Fun</a> </ul> <h id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</h> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/12/zuzn-d12.html" source="WSWS" author="Christoph Vandreier">BSW Congress: Why Sahra Wagenknecht’s party in Germany is not an anti-war party</a> <bq>Capitalism has reached a point where imperialist contradictions openly collide—seen today in the sharp and escalating tensions between Germany and the US. Those who accept capitalist constraints and rally behind their own ruling class inevitably follow the logic of war. The only realistic basis for a movement against a third world war is the struggle against capitalism. Only the expropriation of the major banks and corporations and their placement under democratic control can avert catastrophe.</bq> <bq>Even before the congress, Wagenknecht published a guest article in the right-wing Springer press. In a tone indistinguishable from the far-right AfD, she railed against “hand-outs for the work-shy” and “uncontrolled immigration,” bluntly demanding a “right-wing agenda.” In her words, such a programme—“right-wing in its original sense”—meant protecting the property and privileges of the middle classes, explicitly against refugees and the unemployed.</bq> <bq>The reactionary nature of the BSW was most clearly revealed in its incitement against immigrants. While business interests were extolled, the desperate people fleeing NATO’s wars were scapegoated for social problems. Wagenknecht declared in her speech that the right to asylum had created “problems with housing, crime and the shadow economy.” In her narrative, responsibility for the social catastrophe lies not with massive military spending or the billions handed to the wealthy, but with society’s most vulnerable.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://normanfinkelstein.substack.com/p/the-un-security-council-declares" source="Substack" author="Norman Finkelstein">The UN Security Council Declares War on Gaza by Norman G Finkelstein</a> <bq>The BoP was a throwback to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 when the Great Powers handed title over the Congo to the International Association of the Congo created and controlled by one of Europe’s richest men, King Leopold II of Belgium. He was then declared the Congo’s sole owner: “It was a personal state, the property of one capitalist of genius, the King-Sovereign.” Leopold had pledged to “open to civilization the only part of our globe where it has yet to penetrate, to pierce the darkness which envelops whole populations.” In the shadows of his “crusade worthy of this century of progress,” Leopold presided over a lucrative sideline in the ivory and rubber trade in which he worked to death as many as 15 million Congolese. It was an auspicious precedent, and the Security Council passed the baton to a deserving heir: didn’t Trump possess in abundance the apposite “international legal personality”—of a criminally deranged megalomaniac?</bq> <bq>Lest any doubt lingered on this score, the US representative asserted right after the Security Council vote that “the Board of Peace, which will be led by President Trump, remains the cornerstone of our effort.” In their subsequent remarks, not one Council member voting in favor of the resolution registered any objection. The resolution didn’t hold the Board accountable to the UN or any other entity; except that it “requests” that the Board submit a biannual progress report to the Security Council, it made no provision whatsoever for external oversight [...]. The wonder was that it didn’t include, in an annex, the formal transference of deed to The Trump Organization.</bq> <bq>[...] actual rebuilding could take as many as eight decades. And, anyhow, Israel won’t allow it. It didn’t expend more than two years turning Gaza into a moonscape so as to make it uninhabitable, only to abruptly reverse course, clasp hands with the people of Gaza, intone om, chant Give Peace a Chance, sing Kumbaya, and, like the Seven Dwarfs, merrily heigh-ho, heigh-ho while rehabilitating Gaza’s pulverized infrastructure.</bq> <bq>Although emphatic that Gaza must be disarmed “us[ing] all necessary measures,” the resolution was conspicuously mute as to why it must be. The reason for this silence wasn’t hard to find. If Gaza had to be demilitarized because of the 7 October massacre, then the obvious question arose: After committing a genocide that killed incomparably more innocents, didn’t Israel also need to be demilitarized? Judging by the resolution’s content (or the lack thereof), Israel’s conduct was as virginally pure as the white sheet of paper upon which the resolution was inscribed. Its criminal blockade and periodic hi-tech killing sprees before 7 October and the genocide that ensued after 7 October vanished from the UN annals. Only barbaric Gaza needed to be civilized, at gunpoint. For all the horror of 7 October, the fact also remained that a people under occupation wasn’t legally debarred from armed resistance. International law prohibits use of military force “by an administering power to suppress widespread popular insurrection in a self-determination unit,” while “the use of force by a non-State entity in exercise of a right of self-determination is legally neutral, that is, not regulated by international law at all.” An occupied people must obey the laws of war but, all the same, it retains the prerogative to violently resist a violent occupation. The Security Council resolution thus triply breached international law: it punished the lesser but not the greater violator of international humanitarian law; it granted Israel a right to suppress armed resistance not granted other occupiers; it denied Gazans a right to armed resistance not denied other people living under occupation.</bq> <bq>By making Palestinian self-determination and statehood conditional, the UN regressed to the League of Nations era. In the League mandates system instituted after World War I, former colonies of the defeated Central Powers, allegedly “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” were placed under the “tutelage” of “advanced nations” until they demonstrated the fitness to be independent. After World War II, the twin principles of decolonization and self-determination seized center stage at the UN (the League’s successor). The self-serving paternalistic conceit, incorporated in the League Covenant, that “non-self-governing territories” required a tutelary period before attaining independence was scrapped. Instead, the seminal 1960 UN General Assembly resolution, “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples” (1514), asserted that “inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence.” The new Council resolution annulled 65 years of UN practice.</bq> <bq>[...] were Palestinians to meet all the—nebulous—demands put on them, they still could not exercise their “inalienable right” to self-determination and statehood even in the distant future until and unless Israel agreed to it. The resolution further stated that “the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will withdraw from the Gaza Strip based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarization that will be agreed between the IDF, ISF, the guarantors [?], and the United States, save for a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat” [...]. That is, the resolution endowed Israel with veto power over both the exercise of Palestinian self-determination and any withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, thus ensuring that neither would ever come to pass.</bq> <bq>The UN did not halt the enormity that befell Gaza but overwhelmingly did not abet it either. Until now. The new resolution has directly implicated the Security Council itself in the ongoing genocide.</bq> <bq>An epoch has passed. The silently raised hands ratifying the resolution sounded its death knell. Going forward, the cause of Justice will have to be reconstituted on a new foundation. It must be said without recoiling—for it is the Truth—but also being cognizant of the gravity of the verdict that: After 17 November 2025, the UN is a rotting corpse.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://realleecamp.substack.com/p/breaking-trump-gives-up-competing" source="Substack" author="Lee Camp">Trump Gives Up Competing w/ China In Spectacular Reversal!</a> <bq>The US is a collapsing empire, swinging at perceived enemies in all directions. And now the ruling elite are coming to terms with the fact that at least one of those enemies is too strong to even bloody its nose. So Trump and his brownshirts have switched tactics to: “We’ll pillage our side of the world and leave you to your area.”</bq> <bq>p...[ the collapsing US empire was hoping to wage war with China except it needed China to make its weapons work. Fundamentally the US is saying, “Excuse me, I’d like to hit you over the head with a rake but you have all the rakes. May I have one please?”</bq> <bq>[...] shows the weakness of the US empire — An empire that’s catastrophically overextended with 800 military bases around the globe. An empire that has greater inequality than Ancient Rome did before their fall. An empire that has lost any remnant of a moral core or sense of ethical behavior — funding, arming, and perpetrating a genocide in Gaza while acting like it’s just a misunderstanding.</bq> That is just the current atrocity. It is not a sea change from the empire's behavior. It is not even an enhancement of the empire's behavior. It is just the flavor of the day. Ask Libya. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/08/open-letter-to-zohran-mamdani-political-moderate/" source="CounterPunch" author="Ralph Nader – Bruce Fein">Open Letter to Zohran Mamdani – Political Moderate</a> <bq>What the oligarchy and large corporations really do not like about you is that you are projecting a consistent and wide-ranging voice for the people, the workers, the poor, and the powerless in the corridors of political power of City Hall. They have had long-game statism, or a corporate state, at the local, state, and federal levels, with little opposition by the two-party duopoly. Regarding your self-description as a democratic socialist, that doesn’t pass the laugh test. You are not arguing for nationalization of banks and insurance companies, utilities, not even, to our knowledge have you called for a “public bank,” which has existed so effectively in North Dakota (now a Republican stronghold) founded in 1919.</bq> <bq>So far, your silence has put you to the RIGHT of former Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG. During his presidential run in 2020, he said: “Harness the power of the financial system to address America’s most pressing challenges. Introduce a tax of 0.1% on all financial transactions to raise revenue needed to address wealth inequality, and support other measures – such as speed limits on trading – to curb predatory behavior and reduce the risk of destabilizing “flash crashes.” Note, Bloomberg goes beyond a sales tax on STOCK transactions to include all financial transactions (such as bonds and derivatives).</bq> <bq>May you succeed and put forces in motion throughout the state and country of a deliberative democracy in successful action with sound civic engagement. The cardinal pillar of a democracy, worthy of the name, is JUSTICE, for without justice there is no freedom and liberty for the people.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/12/its-time-to-make-america-truly-tribal.html" source="Exile in Happy Valley" author="Nicky Reid">It's Time to Make America Truly Tribal Again</a> <bq>By the 19th Century, the Seminoles had accepted so many escaped slaves from nearby plantations that these darker skinned refugees formed their own distinct band dedicated to preserving their own unique culture under Seminole protection while also enjoying the right to bear arms. They called them Black Seminoles, and they quickly established an alliance between wild Indians and escaped slaves that threatened the monopoly on force held by white Southern planters with a growing network of underground railroads. In other words, the Seminole had to go and thus began the Seminole Wars.</bq> <bq>It was the longest, deadliest and most expensive Indian War this empire has ever engaged in. As many as 2,000 American troops died in that filthy black water, a population of corpses that matched the size of the entirety of the Seminoles' armed forces. The Americans only won the war the way Americans have ever won a war, by targeting and starving their adversaries' families and subjecting civilians to genocide in order to force real warriors to surrender.</bq> <bq>[...] while most of the Seminoles begrudgingly agreed to flee the land they made their own for the glorified concentration camps of Oklahoma, a few small bands never surrendered, choosing to retreat even deeper into that fucked up little place where they remain unconquered to this day in what has now become known as the Everglades. The Southern planters even attempted to reach out to these bloodied but unbowed renegades in a desperate hunt for allies during the Civil War. The Seminoles told them to fuck off. They remained neutral.</bq> <bq>That would be truly tragic because the solution to this problem, of how to free people from being the willing hostages of a thrashing international leviathan as it drowns in its own blood, may actually be to turn to a sort of historical bioregionalism based on the kind of tribalism which has always been natural to this region of the world. This doesn't mean indulging in cultural chauvinism or cultural appropriation. It means doing what the Seminole did and building new nations in contradiction to these things.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iYYhe0sZMs" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/7iYYhe0sZMs" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Li Jingjing 李菁菁" caption="They manufactured a history to fool you …"> This is an excellent fact-check on which countries suffered the most deaths in what we call WWII. Even the former colonies in Asia and Africa paid a much, much higher price than the outgoing center of empire, the UK, and the rising empire, the U.S. Aren't you afraid of posting all of this pro-China content? I dunno. Is it really pro-China? Or is it more pro-true-history? And think about that question a bit more. Suppose you think that China is evil for non-racist, non-colonial, non-empire-maintainance reasons. Say it's because China control its people, and even controls its media, and social media, and on and on. So your suggestion is that I should be afraid of posting things that describe China in a non-negative light because .... why? Who should I fear? Ah, I see. I should fear a crackdown by my own government, doing the same things that China does---controlling what its citizens think. That is, I should hate China for doing the thing that I fear my own government will do to me if I don't hate China enough. Wait for it... Wait for it... Do you see it? Do you see the irony? Do you see how this is the snake eating its own tail? If you don't, then "wait for it..." some more. In a free society, I can think and post whatever I want without fear of state repercussion. I can lambaste my own state, I can admire other states that my state fears. As soon as I'm afraid to speak my mind, to work my own way toward what I think and believe, I'm in a quasi-authoritarian setting. I should love Israel, and hate China and Russia because my government told me to, if I know what's good for me. That's the message you're sending when you ask me "aren't you afraid of posting content like this?" Of course I'm a little afraid that something uncomfortable might happen---friends might ostracize me, I might lose my job---but that's because my society is at least a little authoritarian. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-empire-is-scrambling-to-fully" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The Empire Is Scrambling To Fully Dominate Latin America, And Other Notes</a> <bq>Just as the Atlantic slave trade would have been wrong even if every white person in the world supported it, a genocidal apartheid state which cannot exist without nonstop violence, theft and abuse would still be wrong even if every Jewish person on earth supported it. The claim that a majority of Jews support the existence of the modern state of Israel has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether such a state should exist, and does not invalidate any arguments that it should not.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-505-talk-144298953" author="TrueAnon" source="Patreon">Episode 505: Tranche Talk</a> <bq>We dive back into the newly released emails of Jeffrey Epstein to talk through his relationship with the Norwegians, the Mongolians, the Israelis, and finally, Larry Summers.</bq> That show summary is an understatement. I would argue that there is no better way to peek into the Jeffrey Epstein mails than to have Brace and Liz, who founded this podcast originally to investigate Jeffrey Epstein, read selected emails out loud. <bq>Sent from my iPhone.</bq> <bq>Tried.</bq> That one came up so much because, these are old men texting each other, and they not only sound like schoolgirls gossiping, or like teenaged boys colluding to get girls, but they also have no idea that a modern phone will show that you tried to call. You don't have to sent a follow-up message to say that you tried and failed to call. FFS. Overall, these mails are so eye-opening in a way, but not in the way that people would think. I mean, Larry Summers was scheming, with Jeffrey Epstein as his mentor, to get a student/mentee of his own into bed, and being all sad and moony-eyed when she seemed to just view him as a powerful, influential, and experienced professor instead of the old, fat, and ugly sexual powerhouse that he wanted to be seen as. It's all so pathetic. This is the message that screams out from these mails. These are the masters of the universe: pathetic, insecure, and stupid. We knew this, of course; but now we know it. <hr> <ft>h/t Slavoj Žižek</ft> <hr> <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2025/12/15/the-crash-of-doge-in-the-rearview/" author="Scott H. Greenfield" source="Simple Justice">The Crash of DOGE In The Rearview</a> <bq>Nobody considered whether they were firing the hard-working people or the slackers. Nobody thought about the institutional memory, that by firing the people who knew how things worked, they would force others to reinvent the wheel and squander the salaries being paid for effort that should never have been needed. Slashing might work if the sole consideration was reducing numbers, but it’s a mindlessly foolish way to run a government.</bq> While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't understand why people are trying to argue whether DOGE "achieved its goals". The people who founded DOGE said many things but they seem to have accomplished few of them. So, they're considered to have failed. But this is ridiculous because why on Earth would you take what people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk say at face value? There is no evidence to support them ever having done so, or of having acted in good faith. They said that they wanted to make government more efficient. They fired a bunch of people. Not coincidentally, a bunch of these people were in charge of enforcing regulations that were still in the way of them stealing more money from the public coffers, cheating people out of their money, or that required them to pay any form of taxes. It is not a coincidence that a lot of the people who were let go were in the IRS. That was their plan all along, of course. They were going to lie about making the government more efficient so that they could dismantle the parts of it that prevented them from plundering. And they were given massive public support from a bunch of nimrods whose scam radars are still broken and who had been brainwashed over the years into thinking that the government was so bloated that you could cut pretty much anywhere and no-one would miss a bit of it. It's like a guy who says he's in a band and he's a guitarist and he totally wants to make music. Instead of actually learning how to play the guitar or joining a band, he just tells people what he wants to be and sees whether that will get him laid, which is what his real goal is. He wants to get laid so he will put the minimum effort into pretending to do the thing that he thinks will get him laid. You judge his success not by how well he plays the guitar but by how much tail he pulls. For God's sake, people. This is not rocket science. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq-KqQXy4LE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Tq-KqQXy4LE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Zohran Mamdani" caption="Know Your Rights When Dealing With ICE"> <bq>ICE cannot enter into private spaces like your home, school, or private area of your workplace without a judicial warrant signed by a judge. [...] you have the right to say, "I do not consent to entry and the right to keep your door closed." Sometimes ICE will show you paperwork that looks like this and tell you that they have the right to arrest you. That is false. ICE is legally allowed to lie to you, but you have the right to remain silent. If you're being detained, you may always ask, "Am I free to go?" repeatedly until they answer you. You are legally allowed to film ICE as long as you do not interfere with an arrest. It is important to remain calm during any interaction with ICE or law enforcement. Do not impede their investigation, resist arrest, or run.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/15/why-did-trump-send-his-warships-to-venezuela/" author="Vijay Prashad" source="CounterPunch">Why Did Trump Send His Warships to Venezuela?</a> <bq>Naturally, the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is about Venezuelan oil —the largest known reserves in the world. The U.S.-backed politician, Maria Corina Machado —awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025 after supporting the Israeli genocide and calling for a U.S. invasion of her own country—, is on record promising to open up her country’s resources to foreign capital. She would welcome the extraction of Venezuela’s wealth rather than allow its social wealth to better the lives of its own people, as is the goal of the Bolivarian Revolution started by Hugo Chávez. A President Machado would immediately surrender any claim to the Essequibo region and grant ExxonMobil full command of Venezuela’s oil reserves. This is certainly the prize.</bq> <bq>It is worth reading that section of the National Security Strategy:<bq>After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/17/julian-assange-sweden-broke-own-laws-with-nobel-prize-to-venezuelas-machado/" author="Wyatt Reed & Max Blumenthal" source="The Grayzone / Scheer Post">Julian Assange: Sweden Broke Own Laws With Nobel Prize to Venezuela’s Machado</a> <bq>The Wikileaks founder pointed to the “ample public statements… showing that the U.S. government and María Corina Machado have exploited the authority of the prize to provide them with a casus moralis for war,” adding that the explicitly stated purpose of the war sought by Machado and her wealthy Latin American backers would be “installing her by force in order to plunder $1.7 trillion in Venezuelan oil and other resources.” The Nobel Foundation stands accused of a number of violations of Swedish criminal law, including breach of trust, misappropriation and gross misappropriation, conspiracy, crimes against international law, as well as financing of aggression, facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and breaching Sweden’s stated obligations under the Rome Statute, to which Stockholm says it is “deeply committed.” Under Swedish law, “Alfred Nobel’s endowment for peace cannot be spent on the promotion of war,” Assange noted. “Nor can it be used as a tool in foreign military intervention. Venezuela, whatever the status of its political system, is no exception.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://reason.com/2025/12/10/free-parking-isnt-free-black-market-entrepreneurs-in-guatemala-have-a-solution/" author="Katarina Hall" source="Reason">Guatemala's 'Free' Parking Sparked a Market No One Planned</a> <bq>Parking in Guatemala City is organized chaos. There are no meters, no apps, and no permits, and yet every day, cars line the curb, attendants whistle and wave, drivers hand over cash, and finding a place to put your vehicle is mostly hassle-free. Parking attendants known as cuida carros (roughly translated as "those who take care of cars") impose order on the streets by assigning prices to unclaimed public parking spots. Cuida carros are everywhere in Guatemala City—lingering on street corners, waving rags to signal open spots, or counting cash. They blend into the urban fabric. Their job is to unofficially "manage" parking by staking out spaces with buckets, cones, or bottles, and then charging drivers to park in them. Most cuida carros work long hours—eight to 12 hours a day, five to six days a week—and treat their turf as an asset. Some even run small-scale operations with shift rotations and a payroll. Their property rights are informal. Some inherited a stretch of curb from a relative; others are invited by nearby shop owners who want someone to deter theft. A few simply arrived one day and homesteaded a spot. </bq> Only a libertarian dipshit from Reason magazine could see this as anything other than an ad-hoc cartel---often called a mafia---taking over public resources. What could possibly go wrong? This absolute naif writes this entire article as if there were no losers in this scheme, as if all of the people in Guatemala City benefit from parking spots. I bet most people don't even have cars. The fact that parking is free, unregulated, and chaotic really only affects the people wealthy enough to own cars in such a densely populated and poor city. But crying for the rich is what libertarians were born to do, and the author digs into the chore with zest. <bq>Public opinion is equally divided. Many drivers feel safer knowing someone is watching their car; others see the practice as low-level extortion. "But real extortion is when someone puts a gun to your head," says Miguel. "Some people refuse to pay, saying the street is public," Tony said. "I tell them, 'Alright, no problem. But while I'm here, no one's touching your car.'" The cuida carros I spoke with don't claim to own the street, but say they're providing a service that people clearly value.</bq> Oh, sure, it's not extortion. There isn't much room between what she describes and "that's a nice car. It's a shame if something were to happen to it." <bq>The cuida carros are a symptom of the local government's inability to govern its streets. But they also show that order doesn't need to be imposed from above. They've priced the unpriced, managed the unmanaged, and built a functional system. When public policy leaves a gap, people quietly fill it.</bq> I find it super-hard to believe that, where there's money to be made, the money is left to the poor, who just stay out of each other's way and are happy with their own little homesteads. I want to believe it, but I just can't. I can't bring myself to be that naive. My cynicism whispers to me that this is never how it is, that this is someone romanticizing the wild west, that if you were to scratch the surface of this story with anything approaching journalistic integrity or diligence---instead of being satisfied with the superficial story which the author so desperately wants to believe---that there would be something darker going on here, for which state-based regulation and enforcement would offer a preferable alternative. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/12/gaza-diary-they-made-mass-graves-and-called-it-peace/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Gaza Diary: They Bulldozed Mass Graves and Called It Peace</a> <bq>A CNN investigation found that the IDF gunned down starving Palestinians trying to collect flour in Gaza. Then they bulldozed the corpses into unmarked graves, where they were left to rot and be scavenged by ravenous dogs. Their deaths were never recorded, and the location of their bodies was never disclosed to their families.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/trump-and-the-end-of-history" author="Patrick Lawrence" source="The Floutist">“Trump and ‘the end of history.’”</a> <bq>The Trumpster is not yet finished his first year back in the White House, and I cannot imagine how our crumbling republic will survive three more years of this man-child and the misfits and miscreants with whom he has surrounded himself. And it occurs to me lately that neither I nor anyone else is supposed to imagine any kind of future—good, bad, in the middle—beyond 20 January 2029, when President Trump will no longer be President Trump. The future will not be the point by then. By then we are supposed to be living in an imaginary past that we won’t have to imagine because the imaginary past is to be the actual present.</bq> <bq>It is time to take seriously, I mean to say, the wall-to-wall unseriousness of the Trump regime’s plans for a nation it would be impossible to live in were it ever to come to be. The saving grace here is they cannot possibly create the America they have in mind. But they will, I have to add, make an unholy mess on their way to failing.</bq> <bq>These people have set themselves to returning America to a rigidly ideological, white, Christian, pre-feminist state that never existed in history but lives in their imaginations. As my colleague Cara Marianna reflected while I wrote this commentary, “The liberals had their ‘end-of-history’ thesis at the Cold War’s end. This is the Republicans’ ‘end-of-history’ moment. They intend to destroy any vision of the future that departs from theirs. There can be no version of reality that departs from the Trump version.”</bq> <bq>I have never understood where all this end-of-history fantasizing comes from. Francis Fukuyama, the sophomoric charlatan who made the thought popular a year into the awful triumphalism of the first post–Cold War decade, was a middling bureaucrat at the State Department when he wrote The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992). Maybe this explains it: America as the final word, the best of all possible worlds, is an ideological subset of the exceptionalist consciousness that, in one or another interpretation, was fated to become policy. However this may be, it is going to wear very ridiculously, not to say dangerously, as Trump and his lumpen lieutenants try it on. History will thankfully go on once we see the end of them and the work of repairing the mess they are making begins.</bq> It may take a while. This is sounding more and more Khmer Rouge every day, more and more Cultural Revolution every day. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diih3J4-DzA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Diih3J4-DzA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="SOME MORE NEWS | Cody Johnston" caption="How George W. Bush's Lawlessness Set The Stage For Donald Trump"> <bq>This week, we look at No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Surveillance, and how Bush's butchering of the law allowed Trump to be Trump. Fool me you can't get fooled again.</bq> <bq><pre>00:00 - Introduction 02:31 - Tax Cuts For Me Not For Three 09:09 - More Like Medi-Doesn’t-Care 13:16 - More Like Every Child Left Behind! 21:05 - The Big Beautiful Bailout 25:36 - Making America Torture Again 30:50 - I’m Just a Really Terrible Bill 46:07 - Everybody Wants To Rule The World</pre></bq> This is part 2. Cody ends with, <bq>This entire episode is about Bush creating a country in which Trump can thrive, but we didn't go straight from Bush to Trump, right? Obama had to curate and nurture the terrible things that Bush created. It's basically every story involving an evil and powerful artifact. Oh sure, we don't want Sauron to get that ring, but I'll use it to do good things. What was I even talking about? Obama. The guy who could have said "Let's end the overreach of power and punish the crimes" but didn't. I mean, it was over, right? Bush was gone. So what could possibly go wrong? He asked, during Trump's second term. So yeah, here we are. With the exploding boats and mass kidnappings---dude loves that unitary executive theory. Trump's administration has claimed that the country is in a state of emergency because of rampant crime and immigration in order to seize extraordinary executive power, including deploying the U.S. military to Democratic cities and giving ICE carte blanche to operate in secrecy and with complete impunity. And it is all just an extension of what the Bush administration did while in power. Trump literally worked with Bush's torture-memo guy to figure out how to make his decrees plausibly legal. Even though they absolutely aren't! The Trump administration is routinely murdering boats full of people for social-media likes, including one incident that even John Yoo has criticized, and all they have to say is that the country is under attack from cartel violence and that the boats were full of drug dealers, and we have said the right combination of words to get away with murder. Remember, if the president says you're a terror suspect, your rights disappear completely. This unitary executive theory goes so far beyond interpreting the law that it's functionally a constitutional amendment, except we don't call it that. See, the Constitution still says the president isn't a king! But we know what they really meant, right? By no means did Bush introduce the idea of a sleazy executive branch taking outsized control of the government, but he made it a staple of his administration. Indeed it's how he met every single challenge of his presidency. The passing and rampant abuses of the Patriot Act opened the floodgates for future presidents to take those powers further, and take them further they did. And, most damaging, he saw no consequence for doing that. Because in our minds, at the time, the damage was done. And I guess when it comes to presidents, if the crime already happened we just let it go now.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sgUp-Q2kWg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/5sgUp-Q2kWg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom" caption="Tucker Carlson : War, Peace, Trump, and the Constitution."> This is a good interview. The Pareto Principle is quite strong, though. I can agree wholeheartedly with at least 80% of what both of them said. I can find little with which to disagree in their discussion of Israel, Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, Syria. They are both staunch supporters of freedom of speech, due process, no collective punishment, judge the individual, not the group. These are all good things. The remaining 20% is, however, very important and requires a bunch of follow-up questions. <ul> They both have at least a remainder of American exceptionalism. Carlson and Napolitano both love Tulsi Gabbard unreservedly. They give her a huge benefit of the doubt for her terrible track record. They only remember the bits that they like. Carlson thinks Lindsey Graham is charming and a great guy. He disagrees with his policies but he thinks he's just lost his way. They seem to think that the U.S. is a force for good, but has lost its way. They think that we just need to tweak a few things, to enforce what we all know is "how America is." They both love Jesus nearly as much as they love America. Or maybe more. This is the scariest bit. Carlson apologized for horrible, racist things he's said in the past. He at least admit he was wrong. He was careful to say that discriminating based on genetics is ridiculous but that leaves the door open for discriminating based on political beliefs, economic beliefs, and nationality, which would let him off the hook to continue to be anti-immigrant. Probably the biggest problem is that Carlson thinks that the U.S. is anti-white. That's a deal-breaker. </ul> These are not minor differences. However, there's a lot to work with there, and Carlson has a ton of influence. He is saying a lot of the right things. His approach to foreign policy is mostly sound, his analysis is historically accurate and mostly spot-on. His recommendations are all about what's good for America, though, which, happily, tends to line up with what's good for the people in the countries we tend to make suffer. So that's good. <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojuy4-veB7Q" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Ojuy4-veB7Q" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="India & Global Left" caption="Norman Finkelstein and Mouin Rabbani Debate Palestine, Geopolitics & the Far Right"> This was an excellent discussion about the recent Security Council resolution on colonizing Gaza, exclusively under the aegis of Donald J. Trump, as well as the tendency for righ-wing voices to have dominated anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian discourse more recently. On the second topic, Finkelstein expresses concern because, while the overt sentiments of the commentators seem fine, he suspects that many of them are actually anti-semitic. I think in Carlson's case that might have been true in the past but I think that's no longer true. Candace Owens is simply saying what makes money (I've only seen a few long minutes of her) and Fuentes seems to very much be a racist, although I've seen even less of him. Those are just my impressions from the outside, observing at a meta level, as it were. Still, it's a concern that the simplistic---and, often, bizarre and outright incorrect---framing is left up to the much more popular right-wing platforms. As Rabbani says, it's regrettable that the left has allowed an obviously left-wing cause to coopted like that, it's a <iq>failing</iq>, and the left has a duty to take the narrative back, to clean up the narrative of right-wing fabulation, and present a moral case, rather than the America-first case that the U.S. right wing tends to take. Jyotishman sagely says, <bq>I guess we we must place the context of larger reality, that we are overall living in a an age of right-wing populism. I mean the left is there, and so the right-wing type narratives of simplistic binaries drawn along ethnic lines or in fact sometimes going beyond the Israel-Palestine conflict some of these conversations around capitalism. For instance in opposition, for instance, to big pharma has become extremely popular in the US, cutting across ideological lines. That doesn't mean the right-wing narrative is comprehensive, because they reduce that question into very simplistic narratives about what big pharma is. But, when you try to look at the larger structure of how the economy is organized, they fail. And, on a similar note, if we have to have a more cogent and comprehensive narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict, then I think the left-wing narrative has to be reinforced, even if the right-wing narrative might be more popular, given the digital age and the larger right-wing age that we are living under.</bq> <h id="journalism">Journalism & Media</h> <a href="https://madeinchinajournal.com/2025/12/12/what-is-the-purpose-of-china-watching-in-the-united-states-today/" source="Made In China Journal" author="Arthur Kaufman">What Is the Purpose of ‘China-Watching’ in the United States Today?</a> <bq>The media domain provides dramatic examples. Radio Free Asia (RFA) was forced to lay off all its staff and shut its Uyghur, Tibetan, and fact-checking services (Kim 2025), as well as its award-winning Chinese-language media subsidiary Whynot (歪脑) (Tse 2025). China Digital Times has faced severe disruptions to its operations, which led to reduced output and my recent layoff.</bq> Aren't many, if not all, of these propaganda arms of the empire, like the other "radio free" variants? How are they different? Does this guy not realize that he was working for the empire's propaganda arm running a radio station in China? <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/carl-wilson-should-give-himself-more" source="Substack" author="Freddie deBoer">Carl Wilson Should Give Himself More Credit</a> <bq>There are many, many very loud voices in the digital thickets who act in exactly the way I’ve complained about in the past - aggressively rejecting any criticism of any pop acts for any reason, deriding the skeptics as racists or sexists or similar, and acting as though those critics deserve to have their lives ruined for their opinions. I don’t blame Wilson for not wanting to be grouped together with those people. I certainly do blame him for working so hard, in his essay, to avoid acknowledging their existence.</bq> <bq>If we’re going to talk about poptimism in a way that’s honest, we have to talk about the TikTok telling everyone that you’re racist because you think Madison Beer is an industry plant.</bq> <bq>[...] this weird fantasy reality instead of the real world, where people are accused of bigotry every single day for disdaining Taylor Swift, where K-pop fans regularly dox those unwise souls who criticize their favorites, where if you dismiss Chappell Roan as an annoying Astroturf media phenomenon it means you’re MAGA, where simply saying “I prefer music that is made with real instruments rather than a computer” is represented as some sort of horrible slur, where you’ll be dogpiled for expressing anything other than total deference to the pop music of right now, this very minute.</bq> <bq>I don’t think, actually, that all popular music exists at the exact same register of quality throughout history, and I happen to hate the focus-grouped slurry of hyper-compressed beats and plastic vocals of the 2020s, engineered more for TikTok loops than for anything resembling actual musical integrity.</bq> <bq>What is not debatable is that my opinion on these things is routinely treated as a crime against social justice.</bq> <bq>That picture at the top isn’t a collage! It was the actual front page of Rolling Stone on the day of the release of Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, an execrable album from a bored billionaire who lives a life of utter luxury and celebration and yet spends all her time burning with rage at perceived slights against her.</bq> <bq>A young woman in the class said that she wanted to know how often I felt like my opinion had made a difference. I told her the truth: literally never. Doing this because you want to see the fruits of your efforts out there in the real world is an exercise in futility. You have to write what you think is true and operate on the hope that, maybe, a single person will read what you’ve put down and for the briefest moment consider whether you have a point. If you want to be able to look out into the world and see the value of your work, be a public school teacher.</bq> <bq>Me, personally, I’m beyond saving. I am, of course, pro-snobbery, pro-gatekeeping, pro-authenticity. I think selling out is real and bad. I think the values embraced by 90s musicians regarding commercialism, however hypocritical and easily abandoned, were the right values.</bq> <bq>Wilson suggests that the anti-poptimist voices like me, on my little low-readership newsletter, want to “reinstate the high-culture/low-culture hierarchy of the past.” And, well… yes. Yes, I do. Because I think the death of that hierarchy has left us in this awful place, a world of Disney adults and Funko Pop collectors,</bq> <bq>Wilson is entitled to prefer the cultural discourse we have now. But he doesn’t get to pretend that it’s something other than what it is: a populist boot, stomping on a human face forever.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://rall.com/comic/what-democracy-looks-like" author="Ted Rall" source="">What Democracy Looks Like</a> <img src="{att_link}ted_rall_-_12-10-25.jpg" href="{att_link}ted_rall_-_12-10-25.jpg" align="none" caption="Ted Rall - 12-10-25" scale="75%"> <bq>There's a problem. Or maybe there isn't. Either way, we're going to solve it. Since there's no consensus, we'll do it illegally. By the time the courts rein us in, it'll be too late. Done deal. Not that the voters will ever know what we did, cuz there's no real news left. And this is what democracy looks like!</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1plm8db/the_new_york_times_is_now_manufacturing_consent/" author="" source="Reddit">The New York Times is now manufacturing consent for war with China</a> Russo- and Sinophobia grounded in complete fantasy are, unfortunately, quite high in Europe. A shocking number of people I talk to have a knee-jerk hatred of both and could, with minimal continued propaganda, easily be steered toward support for conflict. Many are already there, and wonder what the goddamned delay is. <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/new-york-times-wants-the-us-military" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">New York Times Wants The US Military Built Up For War With China</a> <bq>[...] the idea that perhaps the United States should avoid fighting a hot war with China right off the coast of its own mainland never enters the discussion. The suggestion that it’s insane to support waging full-scale wars with nuclear-armed great powers to secure US planetary domination never comes up. It’s just taken as a given that pouring wealth and resources into preparations for a nuclear-age world war is the only normal option on the table. But that’s the New York Times for you. It’s been run by the same family since the late 1800s and it’s been advancing the information interests of rich and powerful imperialists ever since. It’s a militarist smut rag that somehow found its way into unearned respectability, and it deserves to be treated as such. The sooner it ceases to exist, the better.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-apologists-hasten-to-use-bondi" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Israel Apologists Hasten To Use Bondi Shooting To Attack Anti-Genocide Activists</a> <bq>From the earliest moments after this attack Israel apologists have taken it as a given that it was an act of terrorism in response to Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, but then framing the people peacefully protesting those atrocities as the problem. They’re openly acknowledging that the genocide is violently radicalizing people, but instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that Israel should therefore not commit genocide, they’re citing it as evidence that people should stop protesting the genocide.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.racket.news/p/flurry-of-weekend-shootings-violence" author="Matt Taibbi" source="Racket News">Flurry of Weekend Shootings, Violence Shows Fourth Estate in Disarray</a> <bq>At 6:47 p.m. Sunday, Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) — 4:47 a.m. Eastern time in the U.S. — police heard reports of shots fired at a “Hanukkah by the Sea” celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney. Two gunmen killed at least 16, including a ten-year-old and a Holocaust survivor, while an additional 38 were injured. Before most Americans were awake, a 43-year-old named Ahmed al Ahmed gained international renown by tackling and disarming one of the attackers despite being “riddled with bullets.” Within 24 hours, two more were killed and nine injured in a mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, while famed director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were murdered in their home, with their son Nick arrested Sunday evening and booked at 5:04 a.m. PT today. If you were like me and away for the weekend, you likely found digging out even that handful of facts difficult. The world by midday Monday was already plunged into a cacophonous argument about the meaning of this extraordinary flurry of violence, with even the journalistic enterprises spending more time assigning blame than figuring out what happened.</bq> <bq>When the 24-hour news cycle arrived in 1980 via the first repeating CNN broadcasts, journalists worried that covering news events in real time would massively increase the likelihood of reporting mistakes. It turned out to be true and a generation of reporters was trained to be wary of re-reporting first-blush claims, lest we become accomplices in disasters like the Richard Jewell episode or Sandy Hook, where mass killer Adam Lanza’s brother was initially misidentified as the culprit. That kind of thing happens even more in the Internet age (in the last 24 hours, NPR for instance reported that Brown issued emergency system alerts Friday night), but the bigger problem is that news has become so completely a war of subtext that we start arguing the whys before the whos and wheres are even in. The postmodern news consumer has to build mental Excel sheets, first making lists of claims (Providence shooter is a guy from Wisconsin, Nick Reiner is trans, the Bondi hero was really a Christian), then sorting them into sourced and unsourced categories, and finally waiting to see in which side of the TRUE/BULLSHIT divide to dump the final check mark. The number of checks in the latter column seems to get bigger with each of these horrors. Politicians who had any decency used to only offer condolences and reassurance on days like today, but they’ve all now become so convinced that the power of tragedy can’t be ceded to ideological rivals that every one of them turns death into ad-hoc commercials stumping for legislation, reform, credit, or whatever within minutes after disasters. Blizzards of that always make it hard to see anything concrete, but today it’s particularly bad.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/australians-being-massacred-shouldnt" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">Australians Being Massacred Shouldn't Bother Us More Than Palestinians Being Massacred</a> <bq>I don’t remember the 15 Palestinians who died during that 24-hour period in mid-March, but I will always remember the Bondi Beach shooting. Someone could mention it to me thirty years from now and I’ll know exactly what they’re talking about. My society made an infinitely bigger deal about the deaths of 15 westerners in Sydney, Australia than the deaths of 15 Palestinians in Gaza, so it will always stick in my memory.</bq> She includes a tweet by Zachary Foster, <bq>When a dozen Jews are massacred in Australia, the world is in mourning. When a dozen Palestinians are massacred every day in Gaza, the world celebrates it as a ceasefire.</bq> <bq>That’s all I’ve got to offer right now. Just the humble suggestion that every massacre of Palestinians should shake the earth just as much as the Bondi massacre has. Every death toll out of Gaza should hit us just as hard as the death toll out of Sydney did. Feel how hard this hits, and then translate it to the people of Gaza. This is happening there every single day.</bq> She also cited <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Quotes" author="" source="Wikipedia">Einstein</a>, although she took the English translation that was quite, quite far from Einstein's original text, which I reproduce below. <bq>Ein Mensch ist ein räumlich und zeitlich beschränktes Stück des Ganzen, was wir „Universum" nennen. Er erlebt sich und sein Fühlen als abgetrennt gegenüber dem Rest, eine optische Täuschung seines Bewusstseins. Das Streben nach Befreiung von dieser Fesselung ist der einzige Gegenstand wirklicher Religion. Nicht das Nähren der Illusion sondern nur ihre Überwindung gibt uns das erreichbare Maß inneren Friedens.</bq> This translation is more faithful. <bq>A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the "Universe." He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage is the only object of true religion. Not nurturing the illusion but only overcoming it gives us the attainable measure of inner peace.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/19/roaming-charges-the-politics-of-cruelty-and-crudity/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: the Politics of Crudity and Cruelty</a> <bq>A couple of weeks ago, after the US Institute of Peace was renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, I predicted that it was only a matter of time before the Kennedy Center was renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center. That time has come, according to WH Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced the news, congratulating both Trump and President Kennedy, who she seems to believe survived the assassination, is living on some island in the Pacific with Marilyn Monroe, perhaps…</bq> here's Leavitt's tweet (yeah, she announced this by tweet): <bq>I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building. Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur.</bq> All hail God-Emperor Trump. I searched for the people on the board on Wikipedia and found the following titles. Unlabeled people were not on Wikipedia. Members close to Trump, in the tank for Trump through their repeated public statements or positions, or otherwise beholden to him for their job are marked in bold. <ol>Brian D. Ballard Maria Bartiromo (FOX News host) Pamela Bondi (current AG) Elaine Chao (current Secretary of Transportation) John Falconetti Sergio Gor (Ambassador to India; ex-Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office) Pamela Gross Laura Ingraham (FOX News host) Lee Greenwood Karine Jean-Pierre (Biden's press secretary; wait, what?) Mindy Levine Lynda Lomangino Allison Lutnick Dan Scavino (Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office) Denise Saul Cheri Summerall Usha Vance (wife of the Vice President) Susie Wiles (White House Chief of Staff)</ol> The only standout is Jean-Pierre but I'm completely open to the possibility that she is willing to sell her ability to lie in public under the guise of several identities at once to any side able to pay her price. <h id="labor">Labor</h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/13/kerala-has-abolished-extreme-poverty/" author="Vijay Prashad" source="Scheer Post">Kerala Has Abolished Extreme Poverty</a> <bq>After a rigorous criteria-based process focused on households’ access to employment, food, health, and housing, the government identified 64,006 families (or 103,099 individuals) as extremely poor. To carry out this survey, the government relied on about 400,000 enumerators – including government workers, cooperative members, and members of the mass organisations of left parties – to identify the unique problems faced by poor families. These enumerators created tailored plans for each family – from securing entitlements and accessing public services to obtaining housing, health care, and livelihood support – to build their strength in the fight against poverty. The role of the cooperative movement was fundamental in this campaign. The planning process for poverty eradication would not have been possible without the role of the local self-government system, the result of Kerala’s successful decentralisation of power.</bq> <bq>Kerala’s first democratic government, which came into office in 1957, was led by communists. It immediately began to execute a programme of agrarian reform, including land redistribution, and to expand universal social goods such as public education, health care, housing, and libraries. This democratisation of the rural landscape, combined with sustained social mobilisation, hastened the journey of Kerala’s millions towards social indicators that are the marvel of the world: near-total literacy, very low infant and maternal mortality, high life expectancy, and some of the highest human-development scores in India.</bq> <bq>Kudumbashree, which means ‘prosperity of the family’ in Malayalam, is now the largest women’s mutual aid network in the world. It is built around a transformative idea: if women at the household and community level build their confidence and capacity to assess economic life, then the locus of development can shift from patriarchal institutions towards working women’s needs. Collective farms, community kitchens, cooperative skill development initiatives, and other forms of joint enterprise have allowed the women of Kudumbashree to increase their income and build power in both public and private life. Kudumbashree’s emphasis on solidarity rather than competition and on collective rather than individual entrepreneurship sets it apart from market-centric poverty-alleviation strategies. Recently, the government of Kerala announced a Women’s Security Scheme based on the necessity of recognising the value of unpaid household work. Eligible women between the ages of 35 and 60 will receive ₹1,000 per month. Such an initiative is part of the overall attempt to transform patriarchal property relations in Kerala.</bq> <bq>They do more than soften the blows of the market. They reorganise production around human need, deepen democracy in the workplace and the village, and offer a living glimpse of associated labour in practice – of possible communism – even under the harsh conditions of contemporary capitalism [...]</bq> <bq>It is no surprise that all three of these projects [China, Vietnam, Kerala] are led by communist parties, whose commitment to human emancipation drives them to work to ensure that every human being can live a dignified life. Poverty eradication is not an end in itself but a part of the long journey for human emancipation – it is a living social project, not a set of boxes that must be ticked off.</bq> You can watch an interview about the details of Kerala's system here. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhTlJi0F3w" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/FGhTlJi0F3w" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="India and the Global Left" caption="How the Kerala Model Ended Absolute Poverty — Ex Kerala Finance Minister Thomas Isaac Explains"> <hr> <a href="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/abominations-of-capital" author="Hamilton Nolan" source="How Things Work">Abominations of Capital</a> <bq>To gaze at the amazing gift that Basquiat gave to the world in the form of art and then to reflect that one asshole can, if he chooses, light that artwork on fire for his own amusement, or stash it forever aboard a yacht, or sell it off to an even less appreciative plutocrat in order to fund the purchase of another penthouse apartment is to begin to understand the way that wealth inequality is disease of our collective soul. Democracy is an attempt to create some level of political equality, to mirror the inherent moral equality of all humanity. This is simply not possible in the presence of the level of wealth inequality that America now has. It is not possible. We can have our level of inequality or we can have a democracy but we cannot have both.</bq> <bq>Ken Griffin is worth $50 billion, and Bloomberg and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and the Waltons and the Google guys are each worth more than $100 billion, and Larry Ellison and Bezos and Zuckerberg are each worth more than $200 billion, and Musk is worth more than $300 billion. Of the 330 million people in America, these are the ones who will decide everything. Do you like that? Well, it doesn’t matter. You don’t get to decide. You don’t have $5 billion to buy a presidential election. These people do. For another $10 billion you could pay for every single Congressional election, as well. Ken Griffin could buy all of the above and still have enough to buy all the rest of Basquiat’s paintings, and hang them on his mansion wall, and cock his head like a golden retriever as he stares at them and wonders what they all mean.</bq> <bq>People are naturally bad at interpreting very large numbers and therefore we all have a hard time conceptualizing just how insane wealth inequality has become, just how ludicrous the sizes of these people’s fortunes are, just how divorced from any intelligible concept of “work” and “deserve” this kind of opulence represents. There are various ways to try to make these big numbers more understandable—Jeff Bezos, for example, could give each of Amazon’s million American employees a bonus of $100,000 and still be worth more than $100 billion himself.</bq> <bq>From his walled 50,000-square-foot compound on 27 acres in Palm Beach, Griffin has done more than any other individual to create the political conditions that make Florida more hostile to black people, and LBTQ people, and women, and immigrants. Why? What is the reason for this? In order to ensure that political conditions are favorable for the success of Griffin’s hedge fund, and by extension for Griffin’s own net worth, so that he might buy grander estates, more expensive artworks, more exotic luxuries.</bq> <bq>In some ways I think that the basic abomination that is Ken Griffin’s ownership [of] a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, or of Basquiat’s art, is even more powerful than the numbers. This man should not be able to own these things. Not for $18 million, or $100 million, or at all. The grotesqueness of billions of dollars, the brute force of that tidal wave of capital, its ability to force a price upon things that are priceless—it is this quality that may be most effective in demonstrating why such fortunes, like biological weapons and killer robots, fall into the category of “Things we are capable of creating, but should not.”</bq> <bq>[...] refocus on the one, big problem at the center of all these things: The fact that too few people have been allowed to have too much money. That is the underlying problem. The other problems are manifestations of this. We have to destroy the billionaires. Judge political policies on their likelihood to accomplish this. Use this as your guiding star. Don’t lose sight of this amid the swirling conflicts of personalities. We need to take away the fortunes. Otherwise, they will rule, and all of our angry words of protest will not matter much at all.</bq> ✊✊✊ <h id="economy">Economy & Finance</h> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-12-10/the-warner-deal-will-take-a-while" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">The Warner Deal Will Take a While</a> <bq>[...] if a company wanted to issue some new bonds of its own, it would call up a banker and say “what rate will we have to pay on our bonds,” and the banker would tell it. How would he know? These bonds don’t trade — they don’t exist yet — so there is no market price. But he spends all day doing bond deals like this. He knows what companies are comparable to this company, and where their bonds trade, and what sort of concessions investors would demand for a new bond from this company.</bq> <bq>[...] in practice, for small stock trades, what you want is speed and efficiency, and it mostly turns out that you can make markets in stocks using quite simple heuristics. “Move your market down a penny when you buy, move it up a penny when you sell, and adjust for any moves in S&P 500 futures” is probably reasonably close to the algorithm that many sophisticated high-frequency trading firms use, these days, to price stocks. Deep connoisseurship is useful in making concentrated long-term investing decisions, but the classic work of market making can be done pretty simply by algorithms.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-pump-and-dump-economy/" source="Indica" author="Indrajit Samarajiva">The Pump And Dump Economy</a> <bq>Retirement investors will not have anything when the whole thing crashes, but real insiders can cash in and cash out now, on little jagged jumps on an overall trendline down. Saying crypto is a scam is redundant, the whole US economy is a scam, crypto is just the kiddie's table. While rich kids are pumping and dumping coins here and there, rich adults are pumping and dumping the whole US economy. America's crypto and AI czar are the same person because it's the same fraud.</bq> <bq>They're pumping and dumping the whole US economy, with little pump and dumps for insiders, and crypto for the kiddos. It's not that there's fraud within the US economy, the whole thing is fraud. This turkey is getting plucked, but the rich will feather their nest while regular people get, you know. Fucked.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-12-09/private-indices-are-the-new-public-indices" source="Bloomberg" author="Matt Levine">Private Indices Are the New Public Indices</a> <bq>In this version, the modern rise of BNPL in the US is not so much a story of “fintechs offer a better user experience than credit cards” or “people are going into debt for burritos,” and more a story of “banks are retreating from consumer lending risk, and private credit firms, with their long-term capital, are better bearers of that risk.”</bq> Nah, bro. The story is that banks lend their money through private lenders to avoid regulatory oversight, capital requirements, consumer-protection, and usury laws. it's just a stupid loophole so wide you can drive a truck through it, and a series of administrations that thinks that it's just fine because it promotes "financial innovation," which has always meant "putting poor peoples' money in my pocket without the risk of going to prison for it." <bq>Demos’s particular point here is that this shift makes data worse: People are used to looking at bank data for information about consumer spending and credit quality, but if consumer loans are increasingly made by non-banks, the bank data is less informative.</bq> <bq>Like: Sam Altman was apparently faced with a literal choice between working to make OpenAI’s models superintelligent, and working to make them give users answers that they wanted, and he apparently decided “ehh go for engagement.” Anyone who has ever looked at social media knows that “superintelligence” and “engagement” are opposites. Perhaps the intelligence of AI models is capped — not in computer science theory, but in commercial practice — at the intelligence of a social media feed. Maybe that’s even good news for humanity.</bq> Or, and bear with me here: Sam Altman is a liar and a scam artist who saw an opportunity to pivot away from the unachievable goal of AGI without taking heat for giving up on it, because his hands were tied, his users forced him to. It's a pivot equal to that which Hermann makes, at the of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105328/?ref_=fn_t_1">Schtonk!</a>, where he concludes that, since the Hitler diaries that he's been selling were certified as real by several notaries public but the materials with which the diaries were written weren't available before or in 1945, when he concludes that, "er lebt!" <hr> <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/06/big-nascent-important/" source="Pluralistic" author="Cory Doctorow">Metabolizing the theory of “political capitalism”</a> <bq>[...] as you develop the theory, it gets progressively more streamlined as you realize which parts can be safely omitted or combined without sacrificing granularity or clarity. This simplification requires a lot of iteration and reiteration, over a lot of time, for a lot of different audiences and critics. As Thoreau wrote (paraphrasing Pascal), "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short."</bq> <bq>[...] not everyone is willing to upgrade when a new machine is invented. If you're still paying for the old machines, you just can't afford to throw them away and get the latest and greatest ones. Instead, as your competitors slash prices (because they have new machines that let them make the same stuff at a lower price), you must lower your prices too, accepting progressively lower profits. Eventually, your whole sector is using superannuated machines that they're still making payments on, and the overall rate of profit in the sector has dwindled to unsustainable levels. "Zombie companies" (companies that have no plausible chance of paying off their debts) dominate the economy.</bq> <bq>[...] we got WWII, in which the government stepped in to buy things at rates that paid for factories to be retooled, and which pressed the entire workforce into employment. This is the trigger for the Long Boom, as America got a do-over with all-new capital and a freshly trained workforce with high morale and up-to-date skills.</bq> Like full-on f@&ing state communism, sounds like, which is apparently just fine as long as the right pockets are lined. Anti-communism is just a convenient ideology that keeps money flowing into the right bank accounts. They'll abandon it at the drop of a hat for a more lucrative line. <bq>Political capitalism is the capitalism you get when the cheapest, most reliable way to improve your rate of profit is to invest in the political process, to get favorable regulation, pork barrel government contracts, and cash bailouts. As Ganz puts it, "capitalists have gone from profit-seekers to rent-seekers," or, as Brenner and Riley write, capitalists now seek "a return on investment largely or completely divorced from material production."</bq> <bq>When the Great Downturn takes hold, bosses turn instead to screwing workers and taking over the political system. Fans of Bridget Read's Little Bosses Everywhere will know this as the moment in which Gerry Ford legalized pyramid schemes in order to save the founders of Amway, who were big GOP donors who lived in Ford's congressional district:</bq> <bq>in the US, more and more machinery is idle. In the 1960s, the US employed 85% of its manufacturing capacity. It was 78% in the 1980s, and now it's 75%. One quarter of "US plant and equipment is simply stagnating."</bq> <bq>[...] the debt industry itself hasn't gotten any more efficient: "the cost of moving a dollar from a saver to a borrower was about two cents in 1910; a hundred years later, it was the same." They're making more, but they haven't made any improvements – all the talk of "fintech" and "financial engineering" have not produced any efficiencies. "This puzzle resolves itself once we recognize that the vast majority of financial innovation is geared towards figuring out how to siphon off resources through fees, insider information and lobbying."</bq> <bq>From your car to your thermostat, the key systems in your life are increasingly a monthly bill, meaning that every time you add something to your life, it's not a one-time expenditure; it's a higher monthly cost of living, forever.</bq> <bq>This is basically a process by which large (mostly American) businesses reorganized the world's system of governance and law to allow them to extract rents and slash R&D. The absurd, inevitable consequence of this nonsense is today's "capital light" chip companies, that don't make chips, just designs, which are turned out by one or two gigantic companies, mostly in Taiwan.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1pmctro/having_some_holiday_fun_with_my_laissez_faire/" author="" source="Reddit">Having some holiday fun with my laissez faire relatives & co-workers...</a> <img src="{att_link}been_editing_ho_chi_minh_quotes_over_pics_of_reagan_and_spreading_them_in_boomer_spaces_instead_of_working_today.webp" href="{att_link}been_editing_ho_chi_minh_quotes_over_pics_of_reagan_and_spreading_them_in_boomer_spaces_instead_of_working_today.webp" align="none" caption="Been editing Ho Chi Minh quotes over pics of Reaga...ing them in boomer spaces instead of working today" scale="75%"> <bq>Been editing Ho Chi Minh quotes over pics of Reagan and spreading them in boomer spaces instead of working today 🤷 <bq>"We often boast that our constitution guarantees the rights of the individual, democratic liberties and the interests of all citizens. But in reality, only the wealthy elite enjoy the rights recorded in these constitutions. Working people do not really enjoy democratic freedoms; they are exploited all their life and have to bear heavy burdens in the service of the ruling class.</bq></bq> <hr> <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/copywriters-reveal-how-ai-has-decimated-their-industry/" author="Simon Willison" source="">Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry</a> <bq>The big question for me is if a new AI-infested economy creates new jobs that are a great fit for people affected by this. I would hope that clear written communication skills are made even more valuable, but the people interviewed here don't appear to be finding that to be the case.</bq> I want to believe that someone who seems really smart, like the author, would know more about how the economy works, how capitalism is practiced, and how short-sighted it will be in the search for profit. A large part of what moves the economy is arbitrage: seeking short-term opportunities that are considered "pricing inefficiencies" that you can exploit until they've been "mined out" and then you move on to another opportunity. There is little to no notion of creating value anymore because that amounts to too much work. And, if you would sneer at the phrase "how capitalism is practiced," thinking that it's such a "lefty" thing to say, consider this analogy: Imagine you read the rules of Monopoly and you think "that sounds fun; I like that; there's a bit of luck; there's a bit of strategy; I can leverage my talent and intellect to effect a positive result on the outcome of the game." OK, well, most people wouldn't have put it like that, but I hope you get what I mean. Now, imagine you start playing and, nearly every damned time, one of your friends or family at the table counts the wrong number of squares to give themselves advantage, or surreptitiously puts an extra house or hotel on a square, or slides hundreds out of the bank when they think no-one is looking. That is "Monopoly as it is practiced," at least in your experience. Now, what is the likelihood that you're going to want to keep playing? The friend who cut corners and cheated has all the money and all the property. Do you keep playing then? Is there any point? Or do you flip the board and bury them up to their neck in the snow, face-down? This is what I mean by "capitalism as it is practiced." It is very similar to how proponents of "communism (or socialism) doesn't work for humans," will constantly point to failed socialist experiments, saying that it won't work the next time either because it has always failed in practice. Fair enough, I guess, if you ignore the interference and outright hostility of extremely wealthy, influential, and violent anti-communist and anti-socialist forces that worked hard to bring those societies down. That is, those societies failed to protect themselves. In the same way, we could argue that the only thing tearing down capitalism is a failure to protect ourselves from the worst elements within it. If there were people who would enforce the rules of Monopoly instead of letting "Dad" get away with cheating, then we consider it to be a viable system. But capitalism for humans with no regulation or enforcement results in imperialism every time. <hr> <a href="https://www.garbageday.email/p/here-are-12-photographs-of-eggs-you-can-bet-on" author="Ryan Broderick" source="Garbage Day">Here are 12 photographs of eggs... you can bet on</a> <bq>Last month, Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi, gave the audience at the Citadel Securities conference a chilling glimpse of where this is all headed (if we let it). “The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” he said on stage to a crowd of poor souls who, I guess, think that sounds dope.</bq> This is not new. This is just another scam in an unregulated market that is posing as a legitimate trading platform. It's just like crypto or NFTs. It's just like off-book betting, like, on dog fights and back-alley dice games. There is nothing stopping market-manipulation, there is nothing stopping outright theft. There is nothing stopping the bigger players sending people around to kneecap you if you get out of line. Most people's scam radars are hopelessly broken. <bq>Mansour’s “financialize everything” line is, in many ways, a condensed version of something Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a podcast last spring. A comment I come back to often because I believe he accidentally stated the fundamental driving philosophy of Big Tech. A perfect, succinct, unfathomably embarrassing snapshot of how a bunch of very wealthy losers view themselves:<bq>There’s this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American has three friends, three people they consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s like 15 friends or something,” he told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, while talking about the rise of AI companions. “I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don't have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.</bq>Researcher Paul Fairie, on X at the time, had an even tighter summary of Zuckerberg’s worldview, “The average American has three eggs, but has demand for 15. So here are 12 photographs of eggs. I am a business man.”</bq> <bq>These “prediction markets” take Zuckerberg’s “here are 12 photographs of eggs” philosophy to its logical endpoint. A way to capture one of the few parts of the human experience they haven’t been able to ingest into their mega-platforms. Here are 12 photographs of opinions, bet on which ones will come true. It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for late-stage Silicon Valley: Pay us a cut to imagine the future for us. An industry completely devoid of new ideas asking users to gamble on what might happen next.</bq> <hr> Tariffs are more proof that Donald Trump is the greatest con-man who ever lived because he got exactly the Americans who would ordinarily spend all day long bitching about communist taxes to not only accept but to love taxes, and he did it with almost no effort at all. His genius is in seeing that you don't have to put any effort into anything when your marks are going to do all the work for you. He simply started calling "import taxes" "tariffs" instead. That's it. That's all it took. Sure, there are a few follow-up questions, like "then why does everything cost more now?" to which the answer is, of course, "Because those dastardly Chinamen raised their prices , which is why we need a trillion dollars or more for the military so that we can go teach them a lesson, put them in the place, and return to the halcyon days where we would benefit more directly from their slave-worker population." A neat trick, that. <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/16/uglt-d16.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Departing SEC official warns of coming “winter” for US capital markets</a> <bq>She noted that one of the pervasive trends was “moving markets out of the light into darkness” and the Commission, on lessening the “industry’s perceived burdens,” was reducing transparency. The Commission had been “shrouding its policymaking in darkness, shunning public comments and instead relying on hidden voices to drive its agenda.” She took aim at changes in the regulatory framework which have allowed private capital access to “Main Street investors’ pockets, including their retirement funds,” exposing them to more risky investments that were designed for the major players in financial markets. To justify this “irresponsible departure” from the foundation of securities laws a lot of “buzz words” were being used including “freedom, diversification, democratisation.” “Call it what you will, at bottom it’s risky and reckless,” she said. “Unleashing the private markets’ insatiable hunger for capital on retail investors’ wallets will come back to bite regulators—but not before Main Street Americans’ savings have been looted.” She drew attention to the way in which enforcement actions were being dismissed left, right and centre. The SEC was bringing fewer enforcement actions and civil financial penalties were “purposely lower.” “The purveyors of massive white-collar fraud are being pardoned or having their sentences commuted by the president, leading the Commission in many cases to drop its parallel litigations as an ‘exercise of discretion.’”</bq> <bq>The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis saw a marked shift in the operation of the SEC under the Obama administration. Prosecutions were increasingly replaced by financial settlements and the “revolving door” through which individuals passed back and forth between Wall Street and the SEC was swung open with increasing frequency. Most significantly, even though investigations, including a major report prepared for the US Senate, revealed that some of the biggest finance houses had engaged in criminal activity leading to the crash of 2008, not a single executive was charged, let alone convicted and jailed. Banks were provided with bailouts on the basis they were too big to fail while executives were considered too important to jail.</bq> <bq>The very core of the intricate market structure was “under attack” and, instead of safeguarding markets for investors to fund their retirements in safe and sustainable ways, they were starting to look like casinos. “The problem with casinos, of course, is that in the long run the house always wins.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/oracle-cds-inevitate-but-also-misunderstood/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="Substack">An Oracle CDS Lesson: Inevitable, But Also Misunderstood</a> <bq>A CDS quoted at 150 bps means, using a house metaphor, you pay 1.5% per year of the house’s insured value. On a $10m house, that’s $150,000 per year. It is a measure of the market's view of the likelihood of the house burning, and of the severity of the damage. Unlike with normal insurance, however, you can, via CDS, buy insurance on someone else's house. That is what most CDS activity is: people buying insurance on (metaphorical) houses, whether to hedge their own position (perhaps they're also long Oracle debt), or to take a naked position (they think Oracle's debt is a mess). You might rightly ask yourself why someone would hedge a position they don't like, and there are good-ish reasons for that. For example, they could be a private credit fund or a bank temporarily warehousing the debt before syndicating, and they want to balance their risk. There are many others.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKHEYjC0p_I" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/OKHEYjC0p_I" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Cogut Institute for the Humanities | Samuel Moyn & Mark Blyth" caption="Political Concepts Debate • Is the Present Historical Moment Unprecedented?"> Wow, is this an important discussion. The introductory remarks by Samuel Moyn were about the end of the empire. Mark Blyth's remarks were even better, with his focus on how macroeconomics have worked over the last 50 years, with the juggernaut of China dominating the playing field. The only way to stop China now is to destroy everyone with nuclear bombs. That is, of course, not out of the question. The U.S. is just trying to figure out how to spin it so that everyone believes that the Chinese brought it on themselves, much as they cowed the world into believing the same about the Japanese 80 years ago. The moderator, though, is a fool. He keeps celebrating every time he sees a smidgeon of daylight between Sam and Mark's views, because the evening was labeled as a "debate", and so, he feels like they should be fighting. Stop. Just stop. At 34:00, <bq>Samuel Moyn: This is where the rumors of an impending debate have proved false. I mean, actually, Mark and I probably agree more with one another than uh either of us does with the organizers. And here's the central reason why: I think both of us are claiming that, notwithstanding some very important legacies from the 1940s, that, what we're living through at present is the challenge to or collapse of the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s.</bq> Good riddance. At 41:30, <bq>Mark Blyth: This administration, its signature bill---the big beautiful one---has involved a renewal of the tax cuts from the first presidency and a punitive attitude towards the poor and the suffering and the weak. And that's just straight out of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And so, it seems as if neoliberalism is sustainable in some of these very countries that founded and launched it. And that's not to say it's forever, but it's not obvious that the left has a program that is plausible to replace neoliberalism yet.</bq> At 47:00, <bq>Mark Blyth: I was invited to give a talk when populism was kicking off, when I wrote the austerity book. Basically implicit within this was that there's going to be a reaction thesis to this and I was invited to the OSF in New York and they're used to people coming in and giving talks about human rights and I basically came in and gave a political-economy talk that said nobody's going to give a [ __ ] about your human rights. This is all going to get really ugly really quick. And they really didn't want to hear that. And I was just puzzled as to why because you want your projects to survive. You want your institution to do well. And then I had this moment of clarity about rights under neoliberalism. The types of rights you got under neoliberalism are costless. Right? They're not funded by taxes. They're not about redistribution. You don't take from one group to give to another to improve their lot. You simply give rights. Whether those are the rights to gay marriage, whether those the rights to sexual and gender equality, they're not to cost anyone anything. They're what everyone in Whole Foods can agree is a good right because none of them have to pay any taxes to provide them. And those rights are fragile precisely because of that. Because at the end of the day, when it comes to are you really willing to pay the cost for these rights, the answer is no. And that's what we're seeing now is the fragility of those neoliberal rights.</bq> At 58:40, <bq>Mark Blyth: The older you are, the richer you are, particularly if you live in rich countries. You just basically have to survive long enough and you have assets and the assets accumulate value over time. And, now we have a gerontocracy. And the gerontocracy is in Congress and young people are completely disengaged from politics because you can't even get a goddamn house in a decent place to live, etc., etc. We know all this. So, to me, the problem with the Democrats and also Labor in the United Kingdom and also the rump of what became the French Socialists and definitely the SPD in German is, they've become either pensioners' parties---like that's all they give a crap about is basically maintaining pensions because pensioners in some countries vote three times as much as young people, right?---or, alternatively, they are, as I like to call them here, the party that shops at Whole Foods. Because, if you can afford to shop at Whole Foods, you don't really have any problems. And, far from being the radicals that gave us the New Deal that built national economic institutions for the first time that based it upon racial exclusion but eventually desegregated the military, eventually did civil rights, eventually did a lot of really important stuff. We've now become the party of the status quo. We don't really want anything to change. If you're shopping at Whole Foods, everything's great, right? So, what exactly are the policies for change that the Democrats are thinking about?</bq> At 1:02:40, <bq>Mark Blyth: Think about what happened to Bernie, right? I mean, they tried to murder him in the bath on three occasions, right? The Clinton campaign took him out in 2016, right? He was shafted to the side again in 2020. They're absolutely terrified. I mean, we've got somebody in New York who's winning, right? The donor class of the Democrats think this guy is Stalin. His concrete policy proposal is 'can we please have four grocery stores that aren't fucking Whole Foods.' That's Stalinism in these people's minds, right? So when that's what you're working with, I just don't see it going anywhere. [...] The other thing that we really screwed up was immigration. And it turns out they don't live in our neighborhoods. They don't come and live on the east side of Providence. They don't. They live somewhere else. And when they come in as refugees, they take up a lot of space like hotels and other things that people in those communities go, 'it'd be nice if I could spend a weekend in the hotel, but I can't afford it. But they've got 300 people who are foreigners living in it.' This is bait. This is dynamite for populists. We mishandled it. We've just done it wrong. And we denied it over and over again that there were any deleterious effects to this whatsoever. Here's a couple of stats for you. Between 1997 and today, more people immigrated to the United States to the United Kingdom from outside the United Kingdom than between 500 AD and 1945. Now you say, "Come on, Mark, that's a statistical trick. The economy is much smaller. There are [fewer] people. You have to look at proportions." All right. Between 2011 and 2025, more people moved in than that period. This is unprecedented. Now, if you're a cosmopolitan liberal like me, this is freaking awesome. It's great. I speak three languages. I'm an Ivy League professor. I travel all the time. I have zero problem with this. I don't live in the communities that see this as a downside. And the Democrats have absolutely no ability to talk to those people whatsoever. And you cannot win an election with the people who vote and shop in Whole Foods. It's just not enough.</bq> At 1:06:, <bq>Mark Blyth: The better story is the world's going to develop into two sets of states, pro states and carbon states. And basically the United States is trying to lock in its carbon advantage with itself and its allies and the people it can browbeat with trade agreements. And we're going to just milk that Ford F-150 economy for as long as possible. And the thing about decarbonization in rich western societies is, it involves costs. If you want people to install heat pumps, you have to give them a huge subsidy. If you want to do that, you have to make sure there's enough plumbers, but there aren't because you didn't send it to trade school because everybody went to university. So it costs a fortune, right? So there's all these problems that we have, you know, putting forward decarbonization. If you're in Pakistan, you're getting free solar panels and your grid doesn't work. Take it. Just change it. It's so much easier. They don't have a gerontocracy that's obsessed with maintaining the value of their state pensions. Change it. Make it happen. They don't have veto points all through our polity like we do because of the billionaire class. Change it. Make it happen.</bq> At 01:10:00, <bq>Mark Blyth: I understand the current moment in the UK is the function, in large part, of what happens when you basically take an entire ruling elite, put them through PPE at Oxford and then give them a job because they literally can't think out of that box, right? [...] And you end up with a ruling class that basically gives out to centrald banks monetary policy, freezes fiscal policy, has zero ambition to do anything, and sits around and tweets about things. And it's all fine so long as everything's going well as it was in that kind of like let's say 1993 to possibly 2004 period. Uh and and the sort of you the new neoliberal golden age. But the minute the rubber hits the road, these people are useless. [...] Now if I want to think about why that happens, if I go to human nature, I don't know what to do with it. But if I think of through a lens of---you basically raise a generation to think within a certain prism, a certain paradigm if you like---and they really can't think out of it. Because it is, in itself, a perpetuating elite, right? Spoiler alert, we're part of this, right? And you only marry each other and you only talk to each other and you go to the same institutions and you work in the same firms and that's where all the money is. Epistemic narrowness is here. Possible outcomes is here. When the outcomes start happening over here, they have no idea what to do. So that's how I would think about this. I don't think that, for me, generatively [sic], human nature is not a good place to start or end. I'd rather think about why do we think the world is the way it is, when we can imagine it in different ways, and why are they so incapable of imagination.</bq> At 01:18:30, <bq>Samuel Moyn: I think it could be addressed narrowly or or or or less narrowly on on on Gaza. I mean, I you know, choose my words carefully, but it seems peculiar to suggest that there was an order dating from the 1940s that is being upended in Gaza now. I mean, I don't think there's like an inevitable teleology from the founding of the state of Israel in the 40s uh to our time, but that doesn't mean that there haven't been constant episodes of anti-Palestinian violence starting uh with the founding of the state of Israel and in multiple episodes of of mowing the lawn and counter violence. Uh and so I think a lot would would depend on whether for principled or strategic reasons we're willing to say that what has happened in the past two years is uh out of the ordinary. And it's not clear to me based on what happened yesterday that that order or disorder I prefer to call it is changing anytime soon.</bq> I left in all of the stuttering and quasi-dissembling in place just to show how uncomfortable a liberal guy with a Jewish last name was to be even discussing Israel and Gaza in public, even though it's clear from all of his other views that he should just out-and-out condemn Israel. If you squint and re-read what he said, you see that he seems to be saying that he's not denying the teleology of colonialism in Palestine but seems to be denying that it is in any way ending. That is, he doesn't see any huge change coming, despite the more public nature of the conflict. See how he says that what we've seen in the past two years isn't really out of the ordinary. It only is if you hadn't been paying attention before. At 01:27:00, <bq>Mark Blyth: There used to be this idea of the flying geese. That, basically, you'd have one country at the front. It was a technological leader and, as it went forward, it went up the product chain and it did more expensive stuff, right? And that left those spaces for the other geese to come in and we all moved together. It's very much the East Asian story. China now makes everything. There's almost no space for anyone else. So the same historical event that busted up the American attempt to rewrite the rules in its favor, is the one that's now creating such displacement across different export sectors that there's no room for the geese to fly.</bq> God, it's so much fun watching Mark just take the absolute piss out of the host, chastising him for only taking questions from senior faculty and observing the hierarchy. Mark just lambastes liberals---and everyone in that room is a dyed-in-the-wool blue-no-matter-who liberal---and they have to sit there and take it, although most of them probably have no idea that he is talking about them, specifically. There was a kind-of interesting statement right at the end, from the crowd, <bq>I have noticed that there is this sort of single lynch pin that much of this discussion revolves around which is that neoliberalism is failing. China's here. The United States is going to fall because of that. But I've heard this story before with Japan, with the European Union, heck, a little bit with the Soviet Union, too. Each one of these had the hardware that uh Professor Blythe has mentioned to be able to change the math. Soviet Russia had the hardware, Japan had the hardware, EU a little bit too, now China. And China has definitely tried to with the Belt and Road initiative. They stopped that because they ran out of money. And I don't see the uh countries they've invested in, mostly African, really changing the game all too much right now. Versus I look at the United States. I hear a lot of stories uh from progressives about how neoliberalism has failed. Yet year after year, the United States still shows up. It still grows. It's still doing better each every year. And so when I look and you know I hear people say we have to change the system, it seems to be doing just good enough to survive, you know, people will speak up or they'll show up. And I'm seeing not enough showing up for this to be a real problem because each year the United States keeps getting through it. And now look at China. It is going slower. It's stagnating. They've got problems ever since zero COVID. And so I don't see---if I was [sic] a betting man and I was [sic] to look at prior times and I'd say, "Is the United States going to flounder now or are they not?" I'd bet that they're going to keep going. I don't see neoliberalism floundering against all the the societal failures that it does pose with inequality and whatnot. If I'm to bet it looks like it's going to keep going.</bq> I had not heard that China had run out of money for the Belt and Road Initiative but then I think the audience member and I have very different news sources. On the other hand, he lent a tremendous amount of credence to the U.S. stories of its growth, while pointing to China's slowing down (while still growing 3x faster than the U.S.). I think his point that the U.S. seems to just keep going is a reasonable observation but Samuel Moyn covered it in his opening remarks: that the Roman Empire took centuries to disappear completely, and that the U.S. empire might do the same. We'll be lucky if it does, because it seems much more likely that it will use the much higher capacity for violence that is its nuclear arsenal to be much more aggressive on the way down than Rome could be. <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At?">NVIDIA Isn't Enron - So What Is It?</a> <bq>Mark-to-market sounds complicated, but it’s really simple. When listing assets on a balance sheet, you don’t use the acquisition cost, but rather the fair-market value of that asset. So, if I buy a baseball card for a dollar, and I see that it’s currently selling for $10 on eBay, I’d say that said asset is worth $10, not the dollar I paid for it, even though I haven’t actually sold it yet. This sounds simple — reasonable, even — but the problem is that the way you determine the value of that asset matters, and mark-to-market accounting allows companies and individuals to exercise some…creativity. Sure, for publicly-traded companies (where the price of a share is verifiable, open knowledge), it’s not too bad, but for assets with limited liquidity, limited buyers, or where the price has to be engineered somehow, you have a lot of latitude for fraud. Let’s go back to the baseball card example. How do you know it’s actually worth $10, and not $1? What if the “fair value” isn’t something you can check on eBay, but what somebody told me in-person it’s worth? What’s to stop me from lying and saying that the card is actually worth $100, or $1000? Well, other than the fact I’d be committing fraud. What if I have ten $1 baseball cards, and I give my friend $10 and tell him to buy one of the cards using the $10 bill I just handed him, allowing me to say that I’ve realized a $9 profit on one of my $1 cards, and my other cards are worth $90 and not $9? And then, what if I use the phony valuation of my remaining cards to get a $50 loan, using the cards as collateral, even though the collateral isn’t even one-fifth of the value of the loan?</bq> <bq>The reason why Enron remains captured in our imagination — and why NVIDIA is so vociferously opposed to being compared with Enron — is the extent to which Enron manipulated reality to appear stronger and more successful than it was, and how long it was able to get away with it. While we may have forgotten the memory of Enron — it happened over two decades ago, after all — we haven’t forgotten the instincts that it gave us. It’s why our noses twitch when we see special-purpose vehicles being used to buy GPUs, and why we gag when we see mark-to-market accounting. It’s entirely possible that everything NVIDIA is doing is above board. Great! But that doesn’t do anything for the deep pit of dread in my stomach.</bq> <bq>You'll be shocked to hear the next generation Blackwell SuperPods started at $500,000 when launched in 2024. A single B200 GPU costs at least $30,000. Because nobody else has really caught up with CUDA, NVIDIA has a functional monopoly, and yes, you can have a situation where a market has a monopoly, even if there is, at least in theory, competition. Once a particular brand — and particular way of writing software for a particular kind of hardware — takes hold, there's an implicit cost of changing to another, on top of the fact that AMD and others have yet to come up with something particularly competitive.</bq> He's just describing the network effect and vendor lock-in here, really. <bq>Why did I write this? Because I want you to understand why everybody is paying NVIDIA such extremely large amounts of money. Every year, NVIDIA comes up with a new GPU, and that GPU is much, much more expensive, and NVIDIA makes so much more money, because everybody has to build out AI infrastructure full of whatever the latest NVIDIA GPUs are, and those GPUs are so much more expensive every single year.</bq> <bq>[...] we've been conflating "innovation" and "finding new markets to add software and hardware to" for twenty years. The net result of this creative stagnancy is the Rot Economy and the Rot-Com bubble — a tech industry laser-focused on finding markets to disrupt rather than needs to be met, where the biggest venture capital investments go into companies that can sell for massive multiples rather than stable, sustainable businesses. There is no reason that Google, or Meta, or Amazon couldn't build businesses that have flat, sustainable growth and respectable profitability. They just choose not to, in part because the markets would punish it, and partially because their DNA has been poisoned by rot that demands there must always be more. In simple terms, big tech — Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta, but also a number of other companies — no longer has the “next big thing,” and jumped on AI out of an abundance of desperation.</bq> <bq>We also live in an era where nobody knows what big tech CEOs do other than make nearly $100 million a year, meaning that somebody like Satya Nadella can get called a “thoughtful leader with striking humility” for pushing Copilot AI in every single part of your Microsoft experience, even Notepad, a place that no human being would want it, and accelerating capital expenditures from $28 billion across the entirey of FY 2023 to $34.9 billion in its latest quarter. In simpler terms, spending money makes a CEO look busy. And at a time when there were no other potential growth avenues, AI was a convenient way to make everybody look busy. Every department can “have an AI strategy,” and every useless manager and executive can yell, as ServiceNow CEO did back in 2022, “let me make it clear to everybody here, everything you do: AI, AI, AI, AI, AI.”</bq> <bq>Investors could invest in AI companies, retail investors (IE: regular people) could invest in AI stocks, tech reporters could write about something new in AI, LinkedIn perverts could write long screeds about AI, the markets could become obsessed with AI… …and yeah, you can kind of see how things got out of control. Everybody now had something to do. An excuse to do AI, regardless of whether it made sense, because everybody else was doing it.</bq> <bq>This is why Michael Burry brought it up recently — because spreading out these costs allows big tech to make their net income (IE: profits) look better. In simple terms, by spreading out costs over six years rather than three, hyperscalers are able to reduce a line item that eats into their earnings, which makes their companies look better to the markets.</bq> I.e. fraud. Amortizing the cost of an asset that lasts three years over six years is lying. It also keeps the cost of the asset on the books for three extra years, during which the company would, ostensibly, be worried about paying taxes on it, but none of the hyperscalers pay taxes, so it's all upside! <bq>In any case, we can do some napkin maths! 100MW = 50,000 Blackwell GPUs (I’m going to guess B200s), making 6 million Blackwell GPUs somewhere in the region of 12GW of IT load, and because data centers need 30% or more power than their IT loads (to cover for that “design day” i mentioned earlier), that means 15.6GW of power is required to make the last four quarters of NVIDIA GPUs sold turn on.</bq> <bq>I do not know where these six million Blackwell GPUs have gone, but they certainly haven’t gone into data centers that are powered and turned on. In fact, power has become one of the biggest issues with building these things, in that it’s really difficult (and maybe impossible!) to get the amount of power these things need. </bq> Where is that 15.6GW of power? Did it magically appear? It did not. Are these GPUs even being used? Are they buying them from NVidia and then not even using them? Are these things depreciating even without being used for anything? I guess, since they lose money as soon as they're turned on, it makes more sense not to turn them on? Would it not make more sense to not even buy them in the first place? What is even going on? But, <bq>Jensen Huang of NVIDIA say[s] that he has 20 million Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPUs ordered through the end of 2026 [...]</bq> Is somebody going to blow a gentle breeze across this house of cards? <bq>While everybody wants to tell the story of Anthropic’s “efficiency” and “only burning $2.8 billion this year,” one has to ask why a company that is allegedly “reducing costs” had to raise $13 billion in September 2025 after raising $3.5 billion in March 2025, and after raising $4 billion in November 2024? Am I really meant to read stories about Anthropic hitting break even in 2028 with a straight face? Especially as other stories say Anthropic will be cash flow positive “as soon as 2027.” These are the two largest companies in the generative AI space, and by extension the two largest consumers of GPU compute. Both companies burn billions of dollars, and require an infinite amount of venture capital to keep alive at a time when the Saudi Public Investment Fund is struggling and the US venture capital system is set to run out of cash in the next year and a half. The two largest sources of actual revenue for selling AI compute are subsidized by venture capital and debt. What happens if these sources dry up? [W]ho else is buying AI compute? What are they doing with it? Hyperscalers (other than Microsoft, which chose to stop reporting its AI revenue back in January, when it claimed a $13 billion, or about $1 billion a month, in revenue) don’t disclose anything about their AI revenue, which in turn means we have no real idea about how much real, actual money is coming in to justify these GPUs.</bq> <bq>I’m not even saying it goes tits up. Hell, it might even have another good quarter or two. It really comes down to how long people are willing to be stupid and how long Jensen Huang is able to call hyperscalers at three in the morning and say “buy one billion dollars of GPUs, pig.” No, really! I think much of the US stock market’s growth is held up by how long everybody is willing to be gaslit by Jensen Huang into believing that they need more GPUs. At this point it’s barely about AI anymore, as AI revenue — real, actual cash made from selling services run on GPUs — doesn’t even cover its own costs, let alone create the cash flow necessary to buy $70,000 GPUs thousands at a time.</bq> <bq>[...] everybody is betting billions on the idea that Wile E. Coyote won’t look down.</bq> I also skimmed <a href="https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-with-paul-kedrosky" author="Paul Krugman" source="Substack">Talking With Paul Kedrosky</a>, from which I'm not going to cite because, quite frankly, I've got the general idea and there wasn't anything especially pithy in that conversation, except that Kedrosky---as an actual financial analyst---confirmed a lot of Zitron's analysis. <bq>In certain domains, the data has a really high rate of gradient descent, meaning that small changes provide a huge signal back to the model. So they’re very good at those things. A good example of that is software itself. If I make minor changes in code, I don’t get minor differences on the other side, I get broken software. So there’s a huge signal that flows back into training when you make minor changes in software, so the gradient descent is very sharp, which makes the models much better on relatively limited data. The English language itself is the exact opposite, if I make minor changes in language and I ask you which one’s better, you’d say, “oh, I don’t know, maybe this one, maybe that one.”</bq> Perhaps one more citation is important, about the deflationary force of capturing a large part of a market. <bq>[...] you get people doing these top down models and saying, for example—and this one just makes me crazy—that “the TAM (the total available market) for global human labor is like $35 trillion.” What if we get 10% of that? That would be a $3.5 trillion revenue stream, which just for a host of reasons, are indefensible ways of approaching this. It’s partly the old mistake of saying, “if I just got 5% of the Chinese market, I would be a huge business.” Well, no one gets 5% in the Chinese market. You succeed or you fail. But it doesn’t work that way. Same thing with this 10% of the global labor market. But more fundamentally— and this is more your bailiwick than mine—is that a $35 trillion market into which AI makes huge incursions is no longer a $35 trillion market. It’s a massive deflationary force. You have 10% of something, maybe, but I have no idea what it is anymore.</bq> <bq>[...] what if 5 billion people worldwide are all paying $100 a month for some kind of large language model subscription? Well, then we’re making enough back.” It’s like, that’s not the way it’s going to happen! That’s an incredibly naive way of thinking about the way this will play out. It’s more likely it’s just running for free on my phone and I don’t even notice. I’m not gonna be paying for it at all.</bq> That is, if people are paying $100 per unit for 100 units, it's a $10,000 market. If you capture 10% of that market by selling units for $50, then you've already depreciated the market to a theoretical $5000 market, simply because of arithmetic. You've only captured 10% of the market but it's obvious that it's only a matter of time before there's a lot less money in it overall, simply because of the new price that you've proven exists. This type of efficiency is wonderful for everyone except rent-seekers looking to make inordinate profits by doing nothing other than leveraging arbitrage opportunities available to them because they're already rich. That's why we're all supposed to put our fingers in our ears, scream LALALA and pretend that the open-source Chinese and European models don't exist. <bq>[...] whenever all of this capital is flowing to a single thing, it also means that it’s not flowing somewhere else. I think that’s incredibly important to understand. I gave the Taiwan example earlier, where if you’re in AI or semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan, you’re awash in capital. If you’re a manufacturer of literally everything else, you cannot get a loan. The same thing is true in the U.S, where if you’re an early stage company or a mid-stage company looking for growth capital for almost anything and it doesn’t have an AI component, you’re out of luck, my friend.</bq> To summarize: <ul>The only driver of value is NVidia's GPUs. NVidia makes new GPUs every year, depreciating the previous generations by a certain amount. That's not the biggest depreciation, though, as model-generation burns out these GPUs very quickly, like inside of three years. Even inference goes through GPUs at a prodigious rate. OK, so you need to buy more GPUs every year to replace these. But they're not even using the ones they have. The power draw is prodigious, and it's not available. So, places like Microsoft are saying that they have cards that they can't plug in. They're buying more, though! And they're browbeating power companies into giving them more power, raising prices for retail buyers. Retail buyers who are getting squeezed six ways to Sunday already. Venture capital is running dry. AI demand is not anywhere close to where it needs to be to justify the investment. The AI market will shrink, not in numbers, but in profitability, as open-source models satisfy most people's needs. There are few known use cases that makes sense. Helping programmers isn't a big market at all, Although it's not nothing, it's not nearly big enough to justify the investment. The assumption is that we start there and move on to everything else. There is no evidence that this is true. The gradient descent in other domains is not even close. The power's not there; the AI demand is not there; the money soon won't be there. A tremendous amount of debt is about to collapse, taking a tremendous amount of fictitious capitalization with it. The next pivot is to convince the U.S. government to support all of this because it is now in an existential war with China over AI dominance. The "AI gap", as it were. The U.S. government is working hard to open up heretofore protected capital markets, like pensions, etc. to investing in this bubble. All of this is, of course, sucking the air out of the room for investing in literally anything else. Everything else that doesn't have an AI sticker on it is suffering. The people driving this whole thing will not be left holding the bag, of course.</ul> <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/ai-as-energy-orgy/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">AI As Energy Orgy</a> <bq>AI doesn't need this much energy. DeepSeek showed that you can run AI without incinerating a rainforest, but OpenAI just ignored them because their actual business is incinerating money. OpenAI is just NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Oracle in a trenchcoat, passing IOUs between each other and calling it an economy. AI is just the cover-story, the real business is selling more GPUs, pouring more concrete, and burning ever more energy. In this context, why would you want to make AI more efficient? It gets in the way of the grifting.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/17/xvwf-d17.html" author="Nick Beams" source="WSWS">Growing problems in Chinese economy</a> <bq>Some indication of the atmosphere at the work conference and a sense of some of the growing problems were provided when the People’s Daily published some of Xi’s remarks on Sunday. He hit out at wasteful investments, “inflated figures” and “fake construction starts” which were being used to create a false impression of economic performance. He said, “Some places disregard reality and blindly chase trends,” and that there had to be “genuine growth without exaggeration.”</bq> <bq>But critics of the government, both within and outside China, point out that it has been long on words but short on concrete measures and while there have been limited actions to provide stimulus, there is not yet an overall plan. Nor is there one waiting in the wings, because the next five-year plan, due to come into effect from next March, is set to continue the focus on high-tech development as the key to China’s economic advancement. There have been increased warnings that the reliance on exports—reflected in the record trade surpluses—is creating a drag on economic growth for the rest of the world and leading to the prospect of the erection of tariff barriers against China by other countries.</bq> <bq>This was the theme of remarks delivered by International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva during a visit to China earlier this month. She said Beijing had to correct “imbalances” in the economy which have led to a depreciation of its currency the renminbi—making exports cheaper—and deflation—producer prices at the factory gate have declined for the past three years—which goes in the same direction. “Low inflation relative to trading partners has resulted in significant real exchange rate depreciation and this has made China’s exports cheaper, prolonging an excessive reliance on exports and worsening external imbalances,” she said. At one point during a press conference, she made an appeal to young journalists to convince their families to buy more. “China counts on you to be the driver of domestic demand. You need to help your mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers to change their attitude toward one that says it’s patriotic to spend money and lift China’s domestic consumption rate,” she said.</bq> OMG HAHAHAHAHA. The IMF is giving China advice. She sounds like George W. Bush telling Americans to go shopping after 9/11.<fn> Just keep shopping! We must pull together to inflate the credit bubble! You're not in deep enough debt, China! But the West is! And it's running out of money to buy stuff from you! This will affect you, too, China! Because the west is spending all of its money on GPUs that it can neither afford nor find a use for! China, it's time to start <a href="https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans">stuffing your tracksuits full of leaves</a> like the rest of us! Or so you think you're better than us!?! <bq>[...] appeals to patriotism will have no effect, because the low consumption rate is an expression of the lack of social services forcing working-class and lower-middle class families to save. There have been numerous calls to expand the country’s social safety net, but apart from a few measures at the margins, Xi has been opposed to the major change in the direction of the Chinese economy this would require.</bq> <hr> <ft>From <a href="https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1872229_1872230_1872236,00.html" author="Justin Fox" source="Time Magazine" date="2009">A Look Back at Bush's Economic Missteps: Telling Us to Go Shopping</a><bq>After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush didn't call for sacrifice. He called for shopping. "Get down to Disney World in Florida," he said. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Taken on its own, this wasn't such a horrible sentiment. But Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich has made a convincing case that it was part of a broader pattern of encouraging financial irresponsibility. "Bush seems to have calculated — cynically but correctly — that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as Commander in Chief from becoming more than a nuisance," Bacevich wrote in the Washington Post in October. Now we're paying the bill.</bq></ft> <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/11/technofeudalism-capitalism-microsoft-google-democracy" author="Cédric Durand, Evgeny Morozov, & Susan Watkins" source="Jacobin">How Big Tech Became Part of the State</a> <bq>Cédric Durand: The second key element is what I might call the end of financial hegemony — though that might be a bit premature. For five decades, we experienced a financial supercycle. This period was somewhat functional up until 2008, but after that, it has been entirely subsidized. There were huge bailouts, massive interventions by central banks. These interventions themselves have created problems. The COVID-19 crisis and the inflationary burst afterward showed that managing this economy has become increasingly difficult. The economy is not very dynamic, but the financial sector is booming. The weight of fictitious capital is enormous, and we’re in a constant crisis. Every few months, we hear about another financial crisis in some corner of the world, another intervention somewhere else. Discussions about the price of the dollar, the rise of crypto, and stablecoins — all of these are part of the crisis of financial hegemony.</bq> <bq>Evgeny Morozov: If we look at companies like Uber, Airbnb, and many other similar firms, they managed to position themselves in the aftermath of the crisis as tools to help the middle classes cope by becoming entrepreneurs. They presented themselves as offering people a chance to become entrepreneurs or to make sure that their assets — cars or homes — could have a second lease on life.</bq> <bq>Evgeny Morozov: In this new phase of capitalism, which I call organic capitalism, politics is done through the market. The idea is to subject everything — platforms and other market-based institutions — to the logic of profitability and accumulation, using them to resolve many of the problems capitalism has produced. That’s why, over the past decade or so, the World Economic Forum in Davos has acknowledged the reality of climate change and other global issues. But their solution is to mobilize private capital to solve those problems, sidelining nonmarket institutions and treating the capitalist economy as the ultimate problem-solver.</bq> <bq>Evgeny Morozov: If you follow debates in the United States in recent months, you’ll notice that this vision of the future does not include democracy as we understand it. There will still be some public life, and some forms of association, but it will be hyper-technologized — mediated by reputation systems, tracking devices, facial recognition, drones, and whatever else is being built by these firms. It will not resemble traditional democratic forms of association. That ideological undercurrent is something we need to contend with as we think about how this new system legitimates itself.</bq> <bq>Evgeny Morozov: I mean, we’ve been living through a catastrophe for the last five or six decades, right? And probably in a much more intense form over the past two or three decades. But I don’t see capitalists losing control or losing the plot, if that’s what you’re asking. So, it will be a very turbulent time, but I don’t really see any contending force on the horizon that will be able to wrest control away from them.</bq> This is why everyone hates analysts like this. I really like Evgeny Morozov as a thinker but he is so cold. I mean, I kind of agree with him, but man, buddy, my guy, give us some hope. At least give us the hope that these fucking demons are going to shatter their car all over the wall and that we can finally piss on their corpses and then pick up the pieces. He says <iq>living through catastrophe</iq> and <iq>much more intense</iq> and <iq>very turbulent time</iq> but you know that his ass is writing for The Atlantic and he probably doesn't know a single person who's actually, literally suffering from the things he's mentioned. Like, have some empathy, man. Try to visualize what it means for this maniacal form of societal organization to continue, how much suffering it entails, how many lives are just poured into the hopper for the benefit of a few assholes who are trying to build AI girlfriends. Fuck, bro. <bq>They’ve built a coherent narrative around [AI], despite the fact that the whole endeavor is highly irrational and wasteful. [...] it’s a rational system within the current capitalist framework, and it will probably last for five to seven years. However, things could get much worse politically in the meantime. Elites may choose to manage the discontent that might emerge about data centers and their wasteful energy consumption through sheer force rather than through promises of a better future.</bq> You see? Right there. There he goes again. Just casually dropping a "we're going to switch from Brave New World to 1984 mid-stream" into his analysis, suggesting that lots of people are going to get hurt and killed in the most antiseptic way possible. Not him, of course. Not him. <bq>Cédric Durand: [...] the financial sector has lost some autonomy in the sense that it’s increasingly dependent on interventions by central banks. Even these interventions by central banks are creating more tension, particularly around inflation. Right now, in the United States, there’s an uptick in inflation while the central bank is lowering interest rates. This means it’s becoming increasingly difficult to preserve the value of money while maintaining the position of finance. I think this creates a big contradiction.</bq> <bq>Cédric Durand: [...] technofeudalism does not mean that the digital economy is taking us back to feudal times, of course. That’s not the point. One huge difference, and it’s a very important one, is that in medieval times, production was highly individualized. The peasants worked for the lord, but they worked mostly on their own. Today, we live in a highly socialized production system. All corporations depend on each other. Think about how many people are involved in the products we’re using right now — it’s completely unimaginable. It’s a completely different world.</bq> <bq>I would argue that dependency is one of the first analogies to feudal times. We are dependent on tech services in our everyday lives — each of us. I often joke that my mom probably could live without Google, but a month ago, she had a problem with her phone and had to ask a neighbor and then call me. It was an emergency. She needed a smartphone. Even at eighty-four, she absolutely needs Google now. We are all dependent on it. But it’s not just individuals. Corporations, entire sectors, and even states rely on Big Tech services.</bq> Where to begin? This is a terrible example. Cédric thinks that it's humanizing but it's silly. His Grandma didn't need a smartphone. She probably wouldn't have been able to use it anyway. She needed a reliable way of calling him. Probably because of smartphones, her landline was no longer able to work because the resources needed to keep it running had been starved. So, he proposes that the only solution is that she choose from the available options, of which there is one: An all-in-one device bound to a globe-girdling corporation. That's stupid. We need more choices. Cédric cites states depending on cloud providers---hyperscalers---like Amazon, or how Google has private control of big data that is useful for tracking pandemics, or how forums for public debate are entirely in private, billionaire hands. and even how the state has lost control over the currencies that people use in their day-to-day lives. It's madness. <bq>These examples show how key aspects of state power are shifting to the private sector and, in that sense, these companies are becoming political actors. Not just in abstract terms, but in how they shape social life. Finally, I’d argue that what they are doing is creating predatory positions to extract rent. This produces a zero-sum game, reminiscent of feudal times.</bq> Yeah, duh. They only think about making money. They want to put as little effort into doing so as possible. They are parasites. That's what a rent-extractor is: a parasite. They provide no value. This refers to economic rents here, not to what we call "rent" in the real-estate world. Although many relationships there are highly extractive, there is a value provided: the proprietor agrees to take care of maintenance, taxes, etc., for which the renter pays a fee. That's the optimal relationship, of course. Many are not like that at all. Yes, we are dependent on Big Tech services. However. I am much more dependent on Low Tech services. Electricity is not big tech. Wastewater removal is not big tech. Running water in the home is not big tech. Heating is not big tech. Those services, by now, may use big tech. They may now be dependent on Big Tech, but it is not a necessary component. It worked without big tech. Perhaps it wouldn't work at this scale, without this efficiency without Big Tech. This is an argument for globalizing part of what Big Tech does. Big Tech is there to innovate and develop new technologies, new ideas, better and more efficient ways of doing things. That's the dream. They are at the forefront. They travel fast and light. They are scouts. They can make profit while they develop these things. That's the compensation they get: a temporary reward for being clever and useful. They should not be granted an eternal profit-making machine. That is stupid and inefficient, as we are seeing. They perpetuate their own profits rather than being useful. Everything useful and necessary has been nationalized and regulated. There is no other way to do it efficiently. You can't have scouts running everything. You can't have corporations colonizing digital space: data and services. We do. But we shouldn't. <bq>Cédric Durand: [...] as Evgeny pointed out, these companies are investing massive amounts of cash, which is extraordinary. But this is a sectoral dynamic where investment is flowing into tech at the expense of other sectors. There is no broader investment rush. There’s less investment in public services, less in manufacturing capabilities, infrastructure, housing — things that are necessary for everyday life. In that sense, this dynamic is predatory.</bq> <bq>Cédric Durand: I’m not saying that technofeudalism is inevitable. It’s a possibility, one that’s materializing in the West. But in China, we’re seeing something different. The state is not allowing firms to take control of the political process and dominate society. So, this is not a necessity; it’s the result of political choices that have been made today. But there are other possibilities for technology, other paths that could emerge.</bq> I will sum up the next section of Morozov's answer like this: I generally agree with what he's saying while being repulsed by the robotic remove from which he delivers it. His formulations are emotionless, decrying Varoufakis's formulation of cloud capital/technofeudalism as being <iq>populist</iq>, probably because he dares to reveal that he feels passionately about how these capitalist schemes are ruining so many people's lives and quashing hope as they seek to milk people for every ounce of every day. I know that Morozov knows this but he's so dry. For example, <bq>Governments are willingly delegating more responsibility for health care, education, and the issuance of money to the private sector, particularly in Silicon Valley. Ultimately, I see this as a way for governments to achieve several goals at once. One of these goals is to create and maintain conditions for capitalist accumulation, so that despite all the systemic problems capitalism faces, firms can continue to accumulate. And partly, it’s a way of fulfilling needs they have when it comes to policing, health care, and so on.</bq> He's saying that government is farming out its services to businesses because he it wants to support their continued ability to accumulate capital. That this has become the primary goal of society---rather than providing the services---is, prima facie, horrible and inhuman. He is using fancy phrasing---and he's very well-spoken---to say "profits before people", and then expresses no opinion on it. Though more succinct and nearly infinitely more comprehensible, he would probably consider such a phrasing "too populist". He says that we're not looking at technofeudalism because it's actually the state that's still in charge, even in the U.S. Well, yeah, kind of, because it still has all of the money that these companies are trying to plunder, but it is increasingly dancing to their tune. How can you look at what happened in 2008 in any other way? The government is very obviously working for the billionaires and their large corporations and not the other way around. Perhaps when the U.S. government bankrupts itself saving crypto and AI investors in the next round of bailouts, Morozov will have enough evidence to form a judgment. <bq>The dependency on tech is systemic. It’s not that people are dependent on Google personally. It’s that the entire modern society expects people to be present online. You need an online profile to apply for a job, to participate in modern life. This is not because Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs made you do it; it’s because of systemic pressure from an invisible force.</bq> Ooooo an <iq>invisible force</iq>. Like ... a hand? Oooo ... scary. That's an uncommonly dumb thing for him to say. That's a very superficial interpretation. It is exactly these companies' need for profit---and the corrupt state's propensity to provide that profit in exchange for a few meager kickbacks---that engendered this systemic dependency. Very little of these supposedly indispensable services are actually that. They have become a need much as a child needs a toy on Christmas. There is nothing mysterious or invisible about it. Different people what they consider to different needs. Some people have much more power and can therefore command a host of people under them to provide those needs. This is not just billionaires. This is the person who expects their favorite restaurant to be open at a certain time, to have a friendly staff that caters to their needs, and to provide all of the foods that grow nowhere near them, cooked to their liking, and at a price that is probably laughably low relative both to what they could afford and to the extraordinary amount of effort required for this complex ballet. He goes on to cite more examples of absolutely horrific things like, <bq>Evgeny Morozov: Whatever we may say about Musk, this is a classic example of a capitalist mobilizing capital, spending it wisely, and circumventing bottlenecks like IP law, supply chains [...]</bq> And then calling it, <bq>[...] a classic example of how a capitalist enters an industry by mobilizing enough capital to do so.</bq> And then concluding, <bq>In that sense, I don’t think we’ve departed from the logic of capital that has driven the capitalist economy for the last century or two.</bq> I guess it's not feudalism. Huh. Would you look at that. It's just plain old capitalism, taken to its horrific and anti-human natural conclusion. One man deciding for humanity how things are going to be. Again, his analysis is impeccable but he seems to be satisfied that he just spent thirty minutes explaining that, while we are all on fire, it was gasoline that accelerated the fire, and not kerosene. I'm glad we straightened out that misunderstanding. That's a worthwhile use of two economists' time. I like Cédric's riposte to Evgeny's minute dissection of the term "feudalism". <bq>Cédric Durand: [...] highlight that this historical movement is not necessarily progress. In the 1990s, there was so much optimism about tech. But the term ‘technofeudalism’ also helps to remind us that this evolution of tech could be regressive. It could increase inequalities, weaken democracy, and erode personal freedoms.</bq> It's a metaphor, dude. Chill. It's somewhat appropriate and is there to wake people up to the negative connotations of the systemic changes they are undergoing. What else is going to do it? The tech overlords who are making those changes for their own benefit are filling their heads with positive energy and good vibes so that they don't notice how much worse everything is than the good that it could have been. To whit: <bq>Cédric Durand: [...] the development of the tech sector and the growing dependency of our economies on these services is leading to the colonization of Europe. It’s not just Latin America and Africa that are peripheries — Europe is now a periphery. The bills we pay to these tech companies are increasing rapidly each year, with cloud investments and other services costing companies and societies more. There’s a form of uneven exchange taking place and calling these relationships “technofeudal” helps to frame the need for an anti-technofeudal front.</bq> <bq>If states are no longer able to control infrastructure, the generation of statistics, or their own administrative processes, it raises serious questions about how we can imagine socialist policies driven by democratic governance at the state level. So, in stressing this, I want to highlight the existential threat posed to the possibility of administering socialist policies through the apparatus of the state. Without state capacity to control these things, it’s hard to imagine any kind of socialist project that could use state power.</bq> Morozov goes on to try his hand at social analysis, where he argues that the Trump administration is definitely calling the tune, and that the tech companies are not. I think this is a drastic misinterpretation of what's happening. I think that the tech companies see that, as gigantic bullies, they will thrive in whatever chaos Trump creates, so they've given him and his cohort of idiots a long leash. Given the obvious predisposition of everyone in that administration to enthusiastically endorse whatever convincingly argued thing that will make them personally more lucre that they heard most recently, I can't imagine that they're really "in charge" of what's happening. I doubt that Trump and his cronies even understand what a stablecoin is. I do grant that probably the only reason that he's going after Venezuela is that Obama destroyed Libya and so Trump wants to do at least something that cool. <bq>I don’t see why capitalists would object to a private agency solving the coordination problems they have when it comes to statistical knowledge. That’s what they’ve been doing with Standard & Poor’s, Bloomberg, and many others, who’ve been providing commodified private information for decades — and not a single capitalist has complained.</bq> Of course they don't complain! Because they've long since coopted it. How can you argue that the ratings agencies are doing a societally beneficial---as opposed to big-capital-beneficial---job with a straight face? After 2008? After what is so very obviously happening right now? Like, have you seen the28B of A++ debt that a spinoff of Meta just got? How in the everloving fuck is that a serious thing? How is that even close to societally beneficial? The ratings agencies are an indefensible example of supposedly state-run and intrinsically societally beneficial service that the industry is supposed to tolerate as being outside of their influence. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/18/how-jeff-bezos-uses-the-washington-post-to-promote-inequality/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">How Jeff Bezos Uses the Washington Post to Promote Inequality</a> <bq>The fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019 was first discovered by a security guard. He promptly reported the fire, as he was supposed to do. Unfortunately, there were mistakes in the follow- up and the fire quickly spread and destroyed much of the structure. However, if the people subsequently notified had not messed up, the fire might have been quickly extinguished, saving $760 million in damages. By the Pino logic, it would be perfectly reasonable to pay the security guard a share of the savings, say $76 million, or 10 percent. My guess is that Pino does not think we should have security guards making $76 million. The reason is that notifying people when a fire alarm is triggered is a relatively straightforward task that most workers could do. It’s not necessary to pay someone $76 million to pass along an alarm. [...] Perhaps any other person with some experience in the fast-food industry could turn in a comparable performance, just as presumably many other security guards could have made the initial warning at Notre Dame. In the case of Chipotle, Mr. Niccol may have just got lucky. It does happen. Would anyone think it makes sense to pay the Notre Dame security guard $76 million at their next job?</bq> <bq>To take another example, Lee Raymond left Exxon Mobil with a $321 million severance package. His main accomplishment at Exxon Mobil was being CEO at a time when world oil prices quadrupled.</bq> <bq>While corporate boards are supposed to represent shareholders, they are largely self-perpetuating entities. It is extremely difficult for shareholders to defeat an incumbent supported by their colleagues. Well over 99 percent of board members who are nominated for re-election by their board win. This means that the best way to stay on a board is to go along with your fellow board members and not make waves. Since being a board member is a very lucrative job, paying hundreds of thousands annually for a couple of hundred hours of work, most board members want to keep the job. And since corporate boards usually owe their appointment to the CEO and other top management, they are not likely to make friends on the board by asking questions like “can we get someone just as good for half the pay?” That doesn’t explain outlandish pay for a newly hired CEO (except they are probably recommended by top management), but it does explain how CEO pay gets so bloated in the first place.</bq> <bq>Suppose Niccol breaks the Starbucks union by ruthlessly firing organizers, in violation of the law. Since Donald Trump says it’s fine to ignore laws protecting workers under his presidency, that is certainly a possibility. Starbucks may also increase its profits through anticompetitive practices, using its size to kneecap competitors, as it arguably did in its growth to be a worldwide giant. And it could just lie, falsely advertising items as organic or having other desirable features, knowing that the law doesn’t apply to large corporations with Donald Trump in the White House. In these cases, Mr. Niccol’s salary might be justified in terms of its returns to shareholders. But it would be hard to make a case that giving tens of millions to a CEO for breaking the law by screwing workers, competitors, or customers is a social good.</bq> None of these people care about the "social good". If pressed, they would mutter something about "moochers" or "Galt's Gulch" or that "caring about society is gay. It's, like, gay as hell." <hr> <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/12/wall-street-is-starting-to-short-ai/" author="Veronica Riccobene" source="Jacobin">Wall Street Is Starting to Short AI</a> <bq>According to data reported by the Financial Times this week, the volume of credit default swaps tied to US technology giants has risen 90 percent just since early September after being reportedly “thin to nonexistent” at the start of the year.</bq> I guess that could be a sign of mistrust but it could also be a sign that there aren't many other options for hedging a portfolio that's also long on AI. That is, AI is so huge at this point, that no other investment is big enough to act as a hedge, other than a bet against AI itself. <bq>Oracle, a computing mainstay that survived the dot-com crash, has reportedly seen its credit default trading volumes triple this year, reaching levels not seen since 2009 — meaning the cost of insuring against Oracle’s failure is way up.</bq> Is that really what that means? Does an increase in trading volume imply an increase in price? Does it even correlate? That seems like a weird conclusion. I think it sounds reasonable that CDSs on Oracle would be trading higher, but I don't think that the statements above show that. <h id="science">Science & Nature</h> <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-are-lie-groups-20251203/" source="Quanta Magazine" author="Leila Sloman">What Are Lie Groups?</a> <bq>Other Lie groups might look like the surface of a doughnut, or a sphere, or something even stranger: The group of all rotations of a ball in space, known to mathematicians as SO(3), is a complicated three-dimensional shape that lives in nine-dimensional space. Whatever the specifics, the smooth geometry of Lie groups is the secret ingredient that elevates their status among groups.</bq> <bq>The manifold nature of Lie groups has been an enormous boon to mathematicians. When they sit down to understand a Lie group, they can use all the tools of geometry and calculus — something that’s not necessarily true for other kinds of groups. That’s because every manifold has a nice property: If you zoom in on a small enough region, its curves disappear, just as the spherical Earth appears flat to those of us walking on its surface.</bq> <bq>[...] all the fundamental forces in physics — gravity, electromagnetism, and the forces that hold together atomic nuclei — are defined by Lie group symmetries. Using that definition, scientists can explain basic puzzles about matter, like why protons are always paired with neutrons, and why the energy of an atom comes in discrete quantities.</bq> <bq>In 1918, Emmy Noether stunned mathematicians and physicists by proving that Lie groups also underlie some of the most basic laws of conservation in physics. She showed that for any symmetry in a physical system that can be described by a Lie group, there is a corresponding conservation law. For instance, the fact that the laws of physics are the same today as they were yesterday and will be tomorrow — a symmetry known as time translation symmetry, represented by the Lie group consisting of the real numbers — implies that the universe’s energy must be conserved, and vice versa. “I think, even now, it’s a very surprising result,” Alekseev said.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.monbiot.com/2025/12/07/shaking-it-up/" source="" author="George Monbiot">Shaking It Up</a> <bq>We set up a non-profit called the Earth Rover Program, to develop what we call “soilsmology”; to build open-source hardware and software cheap enough to be of use to farmers everywhere; and to create, with farmers, a global, self-improving database. This, we hope, might one day incorporate every soil ecosystem: a kind of Human Genome Project for the soil.</bq> <bq>They would need to develop an ultra-high-frequency variant of seismology. A big obstacle was cost. In 2022, suitable sensors cost $10,000 (£7,500) apiece. They managed to repurpose other kit: Tarje found that a geophone developed by a Slovakian experimental music outfit worked just as well, and cost only $100. Now one of our scientists, Jiayao Meng, is developing a sensor for about $10. In time, we should be able to use the accelerometers in mobile phones, reducing the cost to zero. As for generating seismic waves, we get all the signal we need by hitting a small metal plate with a welder’s hammer.</bq> <bq>We’ve also been able to measure bulk density at a very fine scale; to track soil moisture (as part of a wider team); to start building the AI and machine learning tools we need; and to see the varying impacts of different agricultural crops and treatments. Next we’ll work on measuring connected porosity, soil texture and soil carbon; scaling up to the hectare level and beyond; and on testing the use of phones as seismometers. We now have further funding, from the UBS Optimus Foundation, hubs on three continents and a big international team.</bq> <bq>As one of the farmers we’re working with, Roddy Hall, remarks, the Earth Rover Program could “take the guesswork out of farming”. One day it might help everyone arrive at that happy point: high yields with low impacts. Seismology promises to shake things up.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1UfINb0zyE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/U1UfINb0zyE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Etymology Nerd" caption="Whorf was half right"> <bq>MRI scans confirmed that telling apart colors with your right field of vision activates the language parts of your brain way more than the left. Essentially, when you see something from your right side, because it goes to the left part of your brain, it triggers more of a categorization response and you start viewing this thing through the lens of language. While your left side has more of a pre-linguistic intuitive understanding.</bq> <h id="climate">Environment & Climate Change</h> <a href="http://theconversation.com/irans-president-calls-for-moving-its-drought-stricken-capital-amid-a-worsening-water-crisis-how-tehran-got-into-water-bankruptcy-270456" source="The Conversation" author="Ali Mirchi">Iran’s president calls for moving its drought-stricken capital amid a worsening water crisis – how Tehran got into water bankruptcy</a> <bq>Driven by ideological ambitions, the country’s focus on food self-sufficiency together with international sanctions and economic isolation, have taken a heavy toll on the nation’s environment, particularly its water resources. Drying lakes, groundwater depletion and rising salinity are now prevalent across Iran, reflecting dire water security risks throughout the country.</bq> <bq>Becoming more open to global trade and importing water-intensive crops, rather than growing them, would also allow Iran to use its limited agricultural land and water to grow a smaller set of strategic staple crops that are critical for national food security</bq> <bq>That’s a transition that will be possible only if the country moves toward a more diversified economy that allows for reduced pressure on the country’s finite resources, an option that seems unrealistic under economic and international isolation.</bq> Man, a lot of this seems like it's way easier said than done, especially considering the historic primary and secondary sanctions on Iran by nearly all of the western world. <hr> <a href="https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/who-really-pays-for-your-cheap-flight/" source="ZNetwork" author="Rachelle Wilson Tollemar">Who Really Pays for Your Cheap Flight?</a> <bq>[...] workers must still pay their monthly rent and mortgages, which are now much higher thanks to the gobbling up of property by insatiable conglomerates, economic elites, and digital nomads (i.e., international gentrification) — the real financial beneficiaries of the tourism boom.</bq> <bq>[...] the influx of international visitors has pushed the country to anglicize. This comes in many forms but concrete impacts include: the linguistic remodeling of signs to English; the pressure for businesses to remain open during traditional siesta hours; unaware tourists overtipping and potentially dragging in exploitative wage cultures to a people who have fought tooth and nail for labor rights; gawking at women who breastfeed uncovered in public; drinking to get wasted (“Ibiza!!”); complaining about gas prices in an infrastructure intentionally designed for people;</bq> <bq>This stampeding on of the local, idiosyncratic way of life begs the question: are tourists coming to see the culture or to seize it?</bq> <bq>[...] mass tourism invites over and/or maldevelopment. A wave of recently released graphic novels lament how Spain’s plazas and parks – the alluring “third spaces” quintessential of the country–– are being bulldozed and replaced with retail and multinational capitalism. What once was an orange tree could now be a Mango [a clothing store]; what once was an apartment building could now house corporate offices. Urban places that were invaluable and widely accessible suddenly dangle a definitive price tag or require a badge for entry.</bq> <bq>I see mass tourism like a plantation. It flies around the world, jumping from one trendy place to the next, injecting nonnative dynamics into the foreign land, and departing only once the locale has been totally depleted and/or totally transformed.</bq> <bq>The end of the Plantationocene era can only come through extinction: either through our own end or through ending our harmful activities. Similarly, mass tourism poses the same existential threat: does it only end once everywhere has been trendified and destroyed? Or does it end with us putting an end to our behavior?</bq> <bq>Contrary to common capitalist thought, Patel and Moore challenge that “cheapness” is not a deal nor a desirable bargain; it is a pervasive weapon of devaluation that externalizes its consequences to maintain profits– at steep socio-ecological costs.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/06/the-earth-is-unhappy-with-the-capitalist-climate-catastrophe-the-forty-ninth-newsletter-2025/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">The Earth Is Unhappy with the Capitalist Climate Catastrophe: The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2025)</a> <bq>In 2023 adaptation finance flows from developed to developing countries were just $26 billion, less than in 2022, and 58% of the money came through debt instruments and not through grants – a kind of green structural adjustment. The countries that are least responsible for the climate catastrophe are the ones that are driven to borrow in order to cope with the impact of the looming disasters.</bq> <bq>In practice, private financiers only enter adaptation projects when public funds are used to guarantee or subsidise their returns – so-called ‘innovative finance’ or ‘blended finance’ mechanisms designed to ‘de-risk’ private investment. So, in the end, the cost is borne by the treasuries of the poorer nations, whose governments effectively underwrite the money they borrow to fund adaptation projects that private investors consider too risky without such guarantees. As we argued in dossier no. 93 (October 2025), The Environmental Crisis Is a Capitalist Crisis, this model of green finance entrenches rather than resolves the climate debt owed to the Global South.</bq> <bq>After COP30 I asked Asad Rehman of Friends of the Earth why he thought it was worth fighting in the streets outside the halls of the COP. For Asad the first battle is to convince the climate movement to accept that the fight is not about fossil fuel use alone but about a crisis in our economies and societies, which must be transformed. At the same time, he told me, ‘There is actually some hope’. This is because the climate movement is saying that the problem is not a lack of finance but a lack of political will.</bq> That's faint cause for hope, but I guess that's better than nothing. If it were infeasible, then all of the political will in the world couldn't make it come true. There is no hope that it will come to pass because the lack of political will makes it infeasible, but the money would theoretically be available if the world were not as it is. Even were the world to change significantly in the next few years, it won't change quickly enough to hinder the worst of the damage that will be wrought by climate change. <bq>[...] the richest countries blocked progress on a fair corporate tax that would make polluters pay for the environmental damage they cause. If implemented, such a tax could raise $500 billion per year, a good start toward climate reparations. Yet just as the Global North insists that there is no money for climate finance, NATO countries agree to increase military spending to 5% of GDP.</bq> <bq>In her conclusion she calls on us to understand the climate catastrophe as a site of class struggle, one that can only be overcome beyond capitalism: There is no real way out of the climate crisis without a rupture with the capitalist model, and there is no possible rupture without popular organisation, without collective struggle, and without confronting the structures that profit from devastation.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01122025/china-port-in-peru-impact-on-amazon-rainforest/" source="Inside Climate News" author="Georgina Gustin">A massive, Chinese-backed port could push the Amazon Rainforest over the edge</a> <bq>The port has reawakened old ambitions of roads, railways, and water routes that could connect the riches of the Amazon to the continent’s west coast and the world’s largest ocean. The prospect of a fast track across the Pacific has sparked new momentum—a willingness to reconsider the engineering challenge posed by the world’s longest mountain chain.</bq> <bq>The port and its faster link to massive Asian economies, they warn, will deepen and expand an extractive network of roads, railways, and waterways that have already eaten into the rainforest, a web of arteries carrying oil, gold, timber, beef, and soy to markets around the world.</bq> <bq>When China wants to build something, countries—including Peru—are quick to ease or overlook environmental standards and requirements for public participation, critics say, even if that means destroying natural resources or communities.</bq> That sucks but let's not pretend it's new. <bq>Adding to the pile of research, a study earlier this year found that every one-kilometer (or roughly half-mile) stretch of primary road cut into the rainforest led to 50 kilometers (31 miles) of secondary road—and that the secondary roads triggered more forest degradation or loss.</bq> <bq>Guillén Flores walked from the Area de Centro de Control to the Area de Control Remoto where half a dozen women sat at desks, remotely maneuvering the massive cranes that hover in the wintry gray at the docks’ edges. Operating a crane from within its cockpit is exhausting work, Guillén Flores explained, leaning over to demonstrate the hunched position operators often sit in. “Here there is air conditioning and coffee,” he said. “Six people control 50 cranes.”</bq> <bq>Constructing the port, he said, required dredging the approach to a depth of nearly 60 feet, moving 7.6 million cubic yards of dirt and rocks and digging a more than mile-long tunnel under the city. Altogether it took 438 explosive blasts.</bq> <bq>“Before 2018, we put the net in and we fished enough in order to not fish for two or three days. Enough to live comfortably,” he said, adding that a typical day’s catch was 200 kilograms or more. “Nowadays you go to the beach and it’s nothing like that. I put in a net and if I’m lucky, I can get 15 to 20 kilograms a day. I catch enough to eat. Not enough to sell, which is what I need.”</bq> <bq>“Mining companies pay people for invading their land. We’d like to get paid for our ocean,” said one fisherman, who would only give his first name, Elias. “The Chinese are just like the US. They’re the big power. If they invest here, if they shared their profits, we’d be happy.”</bq> <bq>The country has had seven presidents in the last decade, including two who are currently in jail for taking bribes from the Brazilian construction company that built the highway. In 2018, the country’s judiciary system was rocked by a corruption scandal. Former President Dina Boluarte, who presided over the port’s inauguration, was highly unpopular and accused of deadly anti-democratic crackdowns against protesters. She was impeached by the Peruvian Congress in October. Two other former Peruvian presidents were jailed on conspiracy and corruption charges in late November. “We have, as a country, built a number of systems and structures for environmental protection, but now it basically doesn’t exist,” Dammert said. “Congress and the government—if they decide to do anything, they go ahead. They change the law. That’s the context in which this is happening: Now let’s build roads and railways through the Amazon!”</bq> <bq>Chinese-backed companies have stopped a handful of projects, including a dredging project in Peru, over potential violations of environmental laws.</bq> <bq>Leolino Dourado, a Lima-based researcher at the Center for China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Peru’s University of the Pacific says that shipping commodities through the Amazon and over the Andes to the Pacific makes no economic sense. It’s still cheaper, he said, to ship commodities out of Brazil.</bq> <bq>China is the largest importer of commodities linked to deforestation, including soy, beef, and timber, and the second-largest importer of palm oil, which together are responsible for about 40 percent of global deforestation rates. This, critics say, means China has a huge potential exposure to illegal deforestation.</bq> <bq>Arce, and many of her neighbors, worry the city’s troubles may get worse as the port expands into its second and third phases of construction over the next several years, and as more roads and railways are built to serve it. “There is no space for the people who live here. We would have to leave. Who are they going to take out of their houses?” she said. “That’s the next fight.”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.monbiot.com/2025/12/16/hatewashed/" author="George Monbiot" source="">Hatewashed</a> <bq>[...] while more people compound environmental problems, residual population growth is the result of things that have already happened, which we cannot now significantly change. [...] Within the constraint of residual population growth, we need to find the best ways of reducing our impacts. This is why I propose “private sufficiency, public luxury” and a maximum wealth cap. Not to enable further growth, but to accommodate people who already do and will exist. Maybe the solutions I propose won’t work. Maybe nothing will. But that’s not because I’m an evil bastard, or, as the film strongly suggests, because I’m “not honest”. It’s because our crises are very difficult to address, and there are no sure and easy answers. I’m doing my best. I know it’s not enough. So please be aware that this film is not an accurate representation of my views, or a fair and responsible form of journalism. Hate me for what I am, by all means. But please don’t hate me on the basis of what it tells you I am. Thank you.</bq> This is a very graceful and balanced response to a documentary team that ambushed him. Good for you, George. <h id="medicine">Medicine & Disease</h> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nZv-zuPyIY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/2nZv-zuPyIY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Al Jazeera English" caption="Harsh US sanctions push Cuba’s healthcare system to breaking point | People & Power Documentary"> Although the channel is called "Al Jazeera English", most of the video is in Spanish, with English subtitles. This video is about the way the U.S. empire is sitting on Cuba's neck. It depicts brave people struggling to survive despite the hatred and evil poured down on it from the north. They deal with problems no-one should have to deal with: power outages, no spare parts, old machines, no medicines other than on an incredibly expensive black market. The Cuban state has a biomedical industry, but it keeps getting crippled by the sanctions. They get no raw materials, or suppliers are bought up by U.S., European, or Swiss companies, after which they cut off ties. This is straight-up murder. This is what the U.S. is doing to Cuba. It's not socialism that does this. It's socialism that has kept this system going, despite the empire's brutality and cruelty. Open your eyes. Fuck Marco Rubio. <bq>Cuba's healthcare system was once a paragon, held up as an example of what was possible in the developing world. But all that has changed. Harsh US sanctions, reimposed by the first Trump administration, are making it difficult, if not impossible, for healthcare workers to access the drugs and equipment they need. Although designed to apply political pressure to the communist government, in reality, the sanctions hurt civilians the most. The infant mortality rate is rising, and life expectancy is falling.</bq> <h id="art">Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema</h> <a href="https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/play-out-the-string.1618325/" author="" source="WordReference">Play out the string</a> <bq>He talked with them to play out the string and see if they were really undercover officers.</bq> <bq>The expression comes from American Football. When a team has lost all chances of winning a league, they will do what is referred to as "playing out the string". Strings in American Football are lineups of players in relation to ability, with first string being the best players on the team, second string being the next best players and so on. So when a team plays out the string, it allows all its players to play, from the first string downward. Normally the third and fourth strings wouldn't get a chance to play, but because the team has no hope of winning the league, it allows players of the third and fourth strings to play. In the context of this sentence then, it would mean that the man talking was checking all the possibilities of them not being undercover officers. Before he talked to them, he already thought they were undercover officers, but he talked to them anyway, just to make extra sure. You could rewrite the sentence as: "He talked with them to ensure that they really were undercover officers."</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyyy3Old9A" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/ZGyyy3Old9A" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Patrick (H) Willems" caption="Have We Reached Peak Legacy Sequel?"> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frm8N-JbSvQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/Frm8N-JbSvQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The House of Tabula" caption="The Blurred Line Between Cinema and Reality"> <bq>Most stories begin before we arrive and finish after we leave.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/12/sunday-poem-457.html" author="G.K. Chesterton | Jim Culleny" source="3QuarksDaily">Sunday Poem: The Case of Courage</a> <bq>Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. [...] He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-blue-whales-have-stopped-singing" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Substack">The Blue Whales Have Stopped Singing</a> <bq>The blue whales have stopped singing because the krill are vanishing because the oceans are warming because we are ruled by long-toothed liars whose insides are full of dead leaves. [...] where the cries of orphaned Palestinians mingle with the cries of the last baby orangutan ever born in the wild. Meet me under the flickering lights. Bring me some smokes and a sad luck story and let’s stay up late by the freeway watching the traffic get sparse. Show me the spots on your skin where life has kicked you and I will kiss them and give you a flower. The leviathans have gone quiet and the turbines are getting loud, and everything has become so strange. So sit with me on this curb under my burlap wing and let’s laugh and heal and mark beauty until sunrise.</bq> This is quite beautiful. I've elided some stanzas and lines, so click the link for the full poem. <hr> <a href="https://sive.rs/book" author="Derek Sivers" source="">Books I’ve read</a> This is a long, long list of books that a friend forwarded to me. I browsed through it but didn't see a lot of overlap with my own reading interests. We'd not read any books in common, nor were any of his books on my wishlist. There were a lot of things like You Can Negotiate Anything, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster (financial self-help books), general self-help books like The Listening Book or The Courage to Be Disliked, parenting books like Brain Rules for Baby, there's even a book by Tony Robbins! (Awaken the Giant Within, which he says <iq>changed everything about my life. It's my Bible</iq> but which apparently still has room for improvement because he gave it only a 9 out of 10). It's the kind of list of books that a good, Jewish, liberal man will definitely want his friends to know he's read. Jonathan Haidt, Yuval Noah Harari, Jordan Peterson (for diversity!), Nassim Nichloas Taleb, David Brooks (sweet Lord no) ... a lot of these feel like airport books. Those were all 9/10 books. It's a long list. I found Philosophy of Software Design - by John K. Ousterhout in the 8/10 list, which I would probably read, except that I've already read so much work by Ousterhout that I feel like I've got the idea. Code - by Charles Petzold is another one that I've read parts of, but a whole book about the philosophy of coding ... well, it's a bit late for me, at this stage in my education. OMG so many more self-help books---Four Thousand Weeks, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, How to Think More Effectively, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten---that I'm going to stop listing them. Truly incredible how some people just can't seem to get enough of pop psychology/philosophy. The self-help books are almost outnumbered by the financial-advice books---Discover Your Inner Economist, You, Inc - The Art of Selling Yourself, The Innovator's Solution---so I'm also going to stop listing those, even though there are dozens of them. Then I saw Guns, Germs, and Steel - by Jared Diamond, which is still technically on my list but I'll probably never get around to reading it. Winning a Pulitzer Prize makes it suspect for me, because then it's probably anodyne enough that it doesn't offend any good liberal's pro-Empire, Orientalist stances that they've clothed in humanism. Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman is on my list, though. So, there's one book. I think I might have read Moonwalking with Einstein but it was long ago and I've completely forgotten what it was about. Ah, yes, reading his brief description, it was about "memory palaces". This guy has read a lot of books that he didn't like. Half of this page is 6/10 or below. Like, no wonder. He hasn't read a single book for fun! No fiction, no original philosophy, everything filtered through someone else's presentation. I scrolled 'til the end to see if he'd hated a book that I'd loved, but didn't see anything. Way down the list is a 2/10 review of 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - by Yuval Noah Harari, which writes, <bq>His book “Sapiens” was amazing, so I read this new one. It’s just some thoughts on our present and near future. Not so different from what you find in every-day articles. I’m personally averse to news commentaries, so I shouldn’t have read this.</bq> I would be embarrassed to write that I was surprised to find that a book named 21 Lessons for the 21st Century was <iq>just some thoughts on our present and near future, </iq> but I also am not <iq>personally averse to news commentaries,</iq> so we otherwise have almost nothing in common. Imagine reading self-help books, financial-help books, and parenting books like a fiend but also some historical and cultural books, but not actually following any news or trying to fit what you've learned into the world you live in. Christ, that feels even more pointless than what I'm doing here. I've not read Sapiens but I did read <a href="{app}view_article.php?id=3709">Eine Kurze Geschichte der Menschheit</a>, for which I ended my review with, <bq>Harari is a good storyteller and summarizes many interesting facets of the sweep of history. However, he isn’t as opinionated as the facts he relates would require him to be. The result is that he looks either obtuse or biased. He shies away from judgment—and he’s too smart not to have noticed the natural conclusions to much of the information he cites. My gut feeling in some places was that he was hedging his bets so as to continue to be regarded favorably by the elites whose crimes he has partially documented. That is, he wants to sell his books and his presence, so he leaves the condemnation up to the reader.</bq> Ah, there's one! Right at the end! We both hated <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=2775#Alchemist">The Alchemist</a>. Where he wrote, <bq>How is this so popular? Its weak message is “pay attention to serendipity”. I was open to liking it, but it gave me nothing I could use.</bq> I was, of course, harsher: <bq>Heavy-handed and saccharine doesn’t even begin to cover it. I have no idea where the metaphor ends and the literalism begins. I’m not even going to bother checking how many months this thing spent on Oprah’s best-seller list. Avoid this book.</bq> Oh, and below that, he hated What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. I'm reading Norwegian Wood right now, and I loved <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4688">Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World</a><fn>. I can't imagine someone giving a Murakami book a 1/10. It's nice that he published a list of all of the books that he's read. That is, however, all we have in common. A conversation would most likely be painful for both of us. <hr> <ft>Review pending, so you probably can't see the link, but it'll be there soon.</ft> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsgubGPj8d4" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/jsgubGPj8d4" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="DUST | Isaac Bell & Matt Kelleher" caption="The Machine" date="2022"> This was a fun, well-made short. Not all of them on this channel are this good. It's not amazing but it's better than season 5 of Stranger Things. It's a little-bit The Fly, with perhaps a bit more Spielberg or Howard than Cronenberg. The comments are filled with "where's episode 2?" because they don't understand that this was a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16752024/" source="IMDb">one-off short made in 2022</a>. What stuck out for me was that one person wrotes, <bq>That was surprisingly good, I skipped through very little of that.</bq> I suppose the highest praise that anyone under 40 can give is that they watched your "content" at 1x-speed and that they skipped very little of it. Is this how a lot of people watch films and videos? Speeded up or by scrubbing forward until it gets "less boring"? No wonder no-one can remember what they've watched. They're watching videos like they read articles: by skimming the headline. <hr> <a href="https://indi.ca/the-death-of-a-copywriter/" author="Indrajit Samarajiva" source="Indica">The Death Of A Copywriter</a> <bq>As a writer, I have done soul-deadening copywriting, because man does not live by being unread alone. I know the feeling of staring at a blank page, thinking how do I just fill this with something so I can go home. Knowing that it will be read by a manager with no taste, read by a reader with no appetite, and just shitting something out post-haste. As I've said, a copywriter's job is to write like a corporation, and a corporation redigesting this slop can now reproduce it well enough, without a tortured artist in the middle, smoking cigarettes, working on their side projects, and complaining about it. Thus the job of corporate copywrite is certainly getting AI-automated, because it's one case where garbage-in-garbage-out actually works. It was always garbage, so what's the difference?</bq> <bq>Most corporate words just need to vaguely appear human, and for this use case, AI is good enough, especially when it's highly subsidized by other corporations. Generative AI is like the free drinks and booze in the capitalist casino. There to cover up a bigger ruse, but hey, smoke 'em while you've got 'em.</bq> <bq>As one business copywriter, who saw earnings go from $600,000 a year to $10,000 [...]</bq> WTF was a copyrighter doing earning $600K per year? That's insane. <bq>The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output.”</bq> <bq>I talk to my cobbler (can't really stop him) and he says there's no one to replace him, but he has already been replaced, as people buy mass-produced shoes that are good enough. From assembly lines that are increasingly automated too. So copy goes the way of shoes. Should have known from the name, really. Copywriters were bound to be copied. Because for advertising—the fever dreams of corporations pretending to be human—a cheap, shitty copy of a writers will do.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/12/16/forest-green-ford-contour/" author="Mathew Weitman" source="The Paris Review">Forest Green Ford Contour</a> <bq>On the rare occasions I could convince my friends to ride with me, I’d joke, “They literally don’t make ’em like they used to.” And they’d say, “This thing is real American muscle,” or “Listen to this baby purr,” or “Does it run on premium or diesel or what?” But our joking would end as soon as we hit the first red light, stop sign, or clot of traffic. Nothing was more terrifying than idling in My Sweet Henrietta, which was missing two engine mounts and shook violently at every standstill.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/12/on-leave-in-this-world.html" source="3QuarksDaily" author="Derek Neal">On Leave in this World</a> <bq>Taste of Cherry ends with Ershadi in his makeshift grave by the side of the road, but we never find out if he dies or is saved by the taxidermist. The screen fades to black, then brightens again as we see grainy footage of the movie being made. Cameras are in the scene, as is Kiarostami as he directs the soldiers, telling them they can stop running and chanting. This is another classic Kiarostami move—inserting himself into the film, removing the suspension of disbelief, and breaking the fourth wall, to use the accepted term. This decision upset some critics; Roger Ebert panned the film and called the final scene a “tiresome distancing strategy to remind us we are watching a movie,” but for anyone familiar with Kiarostami’s films, we know we can’t simply accept this shot as “truth” whereas the preceding scenes are “fiction.” In Close-Up (1990), Kiarostami similarly included grainy courtroom footage that was meant to be understood as the documenting of a real trial, but it was later revealed that certain courtroom scenes were fabrications made to appear as reality (in other words, exactly what a movie does). Viewed this way, the final scene is not a break from the preceding film, but another step deeper into the world of the film itself.</bq> <bq>When we talk about a movie, we don’t usually remember the names of characters, but we remember the actors, and certain actors are often said to be “born to play a role” because we feel that they have some affinity with the character they portray. In the case of Ershadi, he was seen by Kiarostami sitting in traffic one day. He had never acted before. One imagines Kiarostami seeing his face and coming up with the idea for Taste of Cherry on the spot.</bq> <h id="philosophy">Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture</h> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/beyond-interpassivity" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Robot">Beyond Interpassivity</a> <bq>I can report from both first-hand experience and from a spirit of Christian ethics that when someone throws a public tantrum it is almost certainly because they are alone and terrified, and it is really only if you identify with the police-state, only if your vigilante spirit lets you imagine yourself as the embodiment of state-legitimated coercive power, that you could look at a person suffering in that way and find in yourself nothing but a will to punish.</bq> <bq>[...] underdeveloped and infantile freedom, reserved for the sort of people who have never even begun to hear the call of the lawgiver within them, and consequently imagine that freedom amounts simply to whatever one can get away with.</bq> <bq>I suppose this injection into the Substack feed of such a pure dose of Muskian viciousness will probably buy the company some time, but it is growing increasingly clear that if this operation has a future at all, it’s not going to be centered on long-form essays, but on the same rollicking Grand Guignol that at this point, more than two decades into the social-media era, really is the only show in town.</bq> <bq>[...] plainly one must avoid placing one’s hope for a radiant future of rigorous inquiry and autonomous creativity in the eventual arrival of the right online platform to host it all. As long as the economic motives remain what they are, such platforms will always bring out the ape on horseback sooner or later.</bq> <bq>I am considerably less optimistic about the potentials of commercial LLMs than I was a few months ago. I still use it for research in comparative Turkic linguistics, but there it functions less like an expert and more like an erratic and unprepared study partner who compels me, the good student, to work twice as hard. That can be a good thing, but it is not good in anything like the way AI has been presented to us as being.</bq> Welcome, Justin. Even with your addictive personality, the bloom is off the rose. <bq>[...] strictly speaking it is not really a “computer” at all, but a machine for filling in blank spaces with answers that sound true, but that, by its own admission, have no actual relationship to the truth. When you tell it of the profound epistemic danger that the introduction of such a technology into an unprepared society cannot fail to hold, it says it knows, but that such things are quite beyond its control.</bq> <bq>In managing to exclude human intention from either side of the simulated exchange, social media have been the first to arrive at a new and entirely posthuman mode of production that is sometimes called “interpassivity”. Coined in obvious contrast to “interactivity”, the interpassive system is one in which both nodes of bilateral exchange within a network are producing their respective messages automatically and without conscious interpretation.</bq> This is a fancy way of stating "the dead internet theory." <bq>Academia may well be the first outpost of the “real” world to go fully interpassive. We are by now fairly close to an equlibrium in which everyone knows that everyone knows that it is LLMs writing the peer-reviews of articles that were written by LLMs, and if the articles pass this hurdle they will almost certainly never be read by human eyes, but at most be summarized for them by LLMs. We are very close now to achieving full human superfluity in academic settings, and anyone still in academia cannot fail to feel the weight of this fact every time they go to campus.</bq> <bq>Since the current semester started in September, especially with the introduction of obligatory video-recording of all courses (using obligatory software that is called —and I’m not making this up—, “Panopto”), I am now inclined to describe the current moment as something more like 1990 than like 1986 in the Eastern Bloc. None of us apparatchiks have been officially told that our service will no longer be needed, but no one is pretending any longer that the mission that once made our career paths make sense is still a valid one.</bq> <bq>The commenter community consistently skips over the article itself, not because its members are “poor readers”, but rather because they have gathered together, in the comments section, to discuss the general topic evoked by the headline alone, a common purpose for which wading into the details of the “OP” could easily come across as the faux-pas of a noob. So here we have, plainly, real interactive human beings, doing what they choose to do, according to their own rules, entirely out of keeping with the original expectations of the newspaper, or with the norms of journalism and literacy such as we long believed we knew them. But who’s to say they’re doing it wrong? On what grounds?</bq> <bq>There are many compelling reasons to predict that, say, fifteen or twenty years from now, the most prestigious awards and distinctions will be handed out for achievements in fields that are entirely unknown today, or that are somewhat known, while still being relegated to a marginal or subcultural status. In such a moment, it can easily seem rational to decide simply to do one’s own thing, however unclassifiable and even perhaps ridiculous it appears, and to do so with at least some hope that one should turn out to be a pioneer in one of these as-yet unknown or undervalued domains. This seems a much better approach to the creative life than to struggle to get in just under the wire and to be among the last, say, to produce a physical tome broadly recognizable as belonging to the moribund tradition of the literary novel,</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v727rFg9aKk" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/v727rFg9aKk" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Aeon" caption="I am, therefore I think – how Heidegger radically reframed being | Being in the World (Movie Clip)"> <bq>Since Plato, a dominant strain of Western philosophy has understood human beings primarily as rational thinkers, a view typified by René Descartes’s conclusion: cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). But in 1927, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger radically upended this tradition in his monumental opus Being and Time. Thinking and theorising, he argued, presupposes a special mode of being that is unique to humans: I am, therefore I think. The world is revealed to us not through theorising but through our way of being in the world, which Heidegger did so much to illuminate. In this excerpt from his feature-length documentary Being in the World (2010)</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1plo6ca/duality_of_men/" author="" source="Reddit">Duality of men</a> <img src="{att_link}patience_is_not_the_absence_of_irritation.webp" href="{att_link}patience_is_not_the_absence_of_irritation.webp" align="none" caption="Patience is not the absence of irritation" scale="85%"> <bq>The duality of man is thinking "children cannot help themselves and we all need to be patient with them as they explore what it means to be human in public" and also "damn, I wish this crying baby was not on the plane rn :/</bq> <bq>Just as courage is not the absence of fear but doing the brave thing in spite of it, patience is not the absence of irritation but doing the kind thing in spite of it.</bq> <hr> A friend asked me for some recommendations for "philosophical content". My reply is below, with minor alterations. Dearest friend I trust that this missive finds you well. As winter has finished approaching and now holds us firmly in its icy grip, I find myself with more time than usual to consider a complex series of questions and musings from a friend. That was indeed quite a loaded "prompt" that you dropped into our chat. I feel like you are so accustomed to writing for AIs that you just loaded up the context and didn't even bother with paragraph breaks. 😉 It took me a minute to figure out how to respond. I know: so slow. On the plus side, I've charged you zero tokens. <bq>war is the greatest evil</bq> I chopped this piece out of your sentence implying that there might be an alternative opinion to say that there is no viable alternative opinion based on any moral principle. Yes. Period. War is the worst alternative. Anyone who says otherwise benefits more from war than they lose to it. <bq>justice is whatever the strongest people feel is right</bq> The strongest getting their way all the time is not the same thing as justice. They've really won when they've convinced you otherwise. <bq>it is probably correct to reject reason</bq> I'd be interested to hear what you mean by this because reason is like the only thing I've got going for me. It is my linchpin. It's gonna be hard to move me off of that spot but I'm open to discuss it. <bq>the mindbody is fully deterministic</bq> I assume we're talking about whether we have free will or just a convincing illusion of it? Roger Penrose has some interesting things to say about this. I remember enjoying the video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itLIM38k2r0">Roger Penrose's Mind-Bending Theory of Reality</a> (78 minutes). There's a Forbes article too, if you prefer to read: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2023/10/23/testing-a-time-jumping-multiverse-killing-consciousness-spawning-theory-of-reality/?sh=71ffc047209b">Testing A Time-Jumping, Multiverse-Killing, Consciousness-Spawning Theory Of Reality</a>. I even found something I wrote in 2007, where I wrote mostly about Libet but mentioned Penrose in the footnote: <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=1569">Free Will in the Laboratory</a>. If that's not what you meant, I'm sure you're willing to forgive my having misinterpreted what even you must admit were, at times, somewhat obscure queries. On to recommendations: I read much more political philosophy than the classics. Perhaps "applied philosophy" is an even better word for it. Most of my research and learning for a while now has been through essays and interviews that discuss historical, political, economic, and moral issues happening right now. I am an eclectic at heart, though, so a classic shows up once in a while, just not very consistently. If you're at all interested in this kind of firehose of content, I publish at least one per week on <a href="https://earthli.com/">the blog</a>. I always publish a "links and notes" from the week, which can run long and is _very_ eclectic and I sometimes get around to other things, like book and movie reviews or just expanding on or highlighting thoughts from my links and notes in full-fledged articles. My <a href="https://x.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a> (like I care that it wants to be called X) includes not only those things but also everything that I "like" on Instapaper. Here are a few people I've read (and for those still publishing, continue to read) with philosophical/moral lessons to impart that I find useful. <dl dt_class="field"> Slavoj Žižek I've read a few of his, like <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3179">First as Tragedy, then as Farce</a> and <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=2459#Defense">In Defense of Lost Causes</a> but also remember liking his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Violence-Big-Ideas-Slavoj-Zizek-ebook/dp/B0053G0CRC?crid=WGW8M8SVALXI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.fw3S3zxhAD8VFEQn62q90O9BFmGPuu8RnkCLluV6tC-fRLmtFgMXL2WxHSriZmu7fakijvjoPE3asZ1WRYFKuDcLKxkYXSqikgdPurAXC170OLoUQIihlXRhTi2c2-7t_RceNgPIvYMUIqmgPYKpdjXj-TiTwEiSuZGU5vK0ZI9GBmWl3LX-Drwbr0bxZ_81zwzIGlLK3OebGR_6uptY57d8PmVEtYI8ycdgw3u4PRA.-hGo2olXPfYT-kwWypcdfnD7ZlZKDLM7me0kv7ClDyg&dib_tag=se&keywords=violence+zizek&qid=1765830041&sprefix=violence+zize,aps,287&sr=8-1">Violence</a>, which I read long enough ago that I don't have notes for it. Chris Hedges <a href="{app}/edit_article.php?id=2459#War">War is a Force that Gives us Meaning</a> was powerful; <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4614">War is the Greatest Evil</a> is more recent and also excellent) Justin Smith-Ruiu <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4495">The Internet is Not What You Think It is</a>; he also publishes on <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/">The Hinternet</a>). He is lovely writer and an interesting thinker. Stanisław Lem I thought <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3750">Summa Technologiae</a> was brilliant. I've loved his books, which are all deeply philosophical, since I was a kid. I read <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3152">The Futurological Congress</a>_,_ an Ijon Tichy novel, when I was a teenager, and it stayed trippy when I re-read it about ten years ago. Albert Camus I've read La Peste and <a href="{app}/edit_article.php?id=2459#Etranger">L'Étranger</a> but also loved a lot of his essays; "Imagine Sisyphus happy". Philip K. Dick I'm not sure most would include him in a list of philosophers but if you want your mind blown, he builds even more layered worlds than Lem. I can recommend <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3178">The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch</a> and <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3792">The Man in the High Castle</a>. </dl> Phew. Ball's in your court. <hr> It is only in a time or society without honor that the term preemptive strike can mean anything other than starting a war. <hr> If you as a student decide to use AI don’t be smug that I may not be detecting that you’ve used AI. You are really only cheating yourself. To be more precise you’re taking a gamble that future society will continue to reward and support you even though you don’t know how to do anything without this tool. Current society offers you a time period in your life during which you are given space and freedom to learn and that’s your only job. Right now you don’t have to worry about rent. You barely have to worry about health insurance your pension your job a bad boss you just have to worry about learning and if you take this time to avoid learning Supporting yourself with a tool instead, then I think you’re wasting your time especially if that gamble doesn’t pay off. <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/13/great-was-its-fall/" author="Edward Curtin" source="Scheer Post">Great Was Its Fall</a> <bq>I watch the ducks swim so placidly in circles and I wonder. I realize that my thoughts are meaningless to most but me, a minor writer in a world of screamers, yet I record them here to learn what I may think and to share with a few other human souls the musings of a distraught man in a world made mad and running red like a butcher’s bench with the blood of the innocent shed by ruthless people. I am old but hope I am forever young with a strong foundation that will help me find some insights along this path. Who knows? I have spent many decades lost in beauty and an intense scholar’s study of the propaganda the world’s rulers use to convince the gullible that their intentions are pure and their actions are carried out for the common good. Few have heeded my findings. Why should they? While the rulers’ endless lies should be apparent, they are not, for too many people have built their own lives upon foundations made of sand, and though they are shaking, few believe they will fall. And to think the official doll’s house of fabricated reality within which they dwell and upon whose words they build their lives will also fall – that is deemed impossible.</bq> <bq>It may sound laughable to suggest that Fyodor Dostoevsky explained it better than all the data gatherers in his story “The Dream of A Ridiculous Man”:<bq>It is so simple: in one day, in one hour, everything would be settled at once. The one thing is – love thy neighbor as thyself – that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.</bq></bq> <h id="technology">Technology & Engineering</h> <a href="https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/an-engineers-dream-a-lawyers-nightmare" source="Breakthrough Journal" author="Matthew L. Wald">An Engineer’s Dream, A Lawyer’s Nightmare</a> <bq>A container ship has a steady energy demand of tens of megawatts, and consumes a lot of oil to cross the oceans. Many ships are “slow steaming,” cutting speed to reduce fuel burn, and a 10 percent reduction in speed cuts fuel consumption by 30 percent. If the energy were cheap, ships could be designed to travel at 35 knots instead of the 16 to 25 knots that is now standard. That could make one cargo ship do the work that now requires two. In addition, each ship would have more space for cargo. Container ships today have big tanks for millions of gallons of fuel oil, and the engines can be more than 40 feet high and nearly 90 feet long.</bq> <bq>Reactor-powered ships would solve another problem: coastal air pollution. California now requires ships coming within 24 miles of the coast to use fuel with a sulfur content of 0.1 percent or less. Clean air advocates blame ship emissions for air pollution near Oakland, Long Beach, and Los Angeles. (East Coast ports have problems, too, but the prevailing winds blow ship emissions out to sea.)</bq> <bq>Spent fuel, and the residue of reprocessing, generally stays in the country where it was generated. For maritime reactors, that would probably mean going back to the country whose flag the ship carries. Liberia and Panama are not the kind of places that have spent fuel management programs, however. Reactors also carry insurance. But Price-Anderson, the U.S. legislation that limits liability for nuclear accidents, doesn’t cover ships.</bq> <hr> A good friend of mine wrote a good summary of what's happening in the RAM business. They distributed it in an e-mail titled "RAMageddon and you", primarily as a warning to people about what their chances of obtaining RAM for personal use will look like, but also as a heads-up for people involved in sourcing RAM for the various devices that we produce. I will cite from it below because I found the content very interesting and concerning. <bq>The recent spate of large scale AI datacenter construction projects has led to a massive surge in demand for computer memory which only a few companies are able to make, and our new AI overlords have essentially bought out next year’s entire supply of memory chips. This has led to a major supply chain crunch, panic buying, and a lot of uncertainty about the future of computer hardware availability.</bq> <bq><ul>Almost all the world’s memory modules come from three companies: Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix, and only a few silicon fabs are set up to make it. They are trying to increase capacity but these things take years to come online, and the industry’s history of boom-bust cycles and questionable business practices by the major manufacturers makes them quite gun-shy about overcommitting. Commodity DDR5 RAM prices have risen over 300% from the beginning of the year and have not reached a price plateau. This trend is expected to continue in 2026. Industry analysts predict that existing memory stocks will exhaust in Q2 2026, and the overall supply crunch could last in excess of five years. Micron just announced its exit from direct consumer sales, and others may follow if they’re unable to source parts or simply tempted by the much better revenue to be had from enterprise customers. While the newer DDR5 is taking the brunt of the chaos, many manufacturers were already starting to phase out production of the older DDR4 and that is also seeing drastically limited supply and higher prices. OEMs and integrators are panic buying to cover their own needs; things are bad enough that memory giant Samsung allegedly can’t guarantee supply for its own divisions. There is speculation that PC manufacturers will reduce system specs across their product lines, starting with retail computers. This is spilling into other sectors like graphics cards and smartphones. GPU makers have already announced rolling price increases and other components are slowly creeping up. Supply is holding up so far but it may be a different story by mid 2026.</ul></bq> <bq>All of this points to a protracted shortage of PC memory and supply disruptions of those products that incorporate it. Best case is the AI bubble pops sooner rather than later and the supply chain normalizes in another six months or so. More realistic is 2-3 years of supply chaos as manufacturers, vendors, and retailers struggle to make deals. Some industry insiders think that this could go on for 5+ years.</bq> <bq>If you think you need a memory upgrade kit or new computer in the next couple of years it is probably a good idea to buy it now while the prices are extortionate but it’s at least available, because all signs point to this situation getting worse in the coming months when supply dries up.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/chinese-surveillance-and-ai.html" author="Bruce Schneier" source="">Chinese Surveillance and AI</a> Oh, Bruce. Don't ever change. I doubt you will. He cites a CNN article that covers a report by ASPI about China, AI, and surveillance. <bq>China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence based insights for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to counter the rise of AI enabled repression and human rights violations, and China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders. [...] show how new AI capabilities are being embedded across domains that strengthen the CCP’s ability to shape information, behaviour and economic outcomes at home and overseas. [...] how the CCP is integrating AI technologies into its political control apparatus.</bq> Now, I absolutely would not expect Bruce to put any of this kind of "reporting" into context because that is absolutely not the side on which his bread is buttered. But I'm happy do a bit of yeoman's work in that regard, simply because I've already done it, in trying to determine to what degree I should be worried about any of this more than I'm worried about western oppression, via AI or otherwise. I'm quite familiar with CNN, which is a U.S. media service that works nearly exclusively as an arm of U.S. state propaganda, cheerfully presenting press releases as journalism for most of its content. I didn't know who ASPI was until I clicked through to discover that it is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which I would bet $1000 is a right-wing think-tank funded nearly exclusively by weapons manufacturers. Let's have a look. <bq>ASPI was established by the Australian Government in 2001 and is partially funded by the Department of Defence with other sources of revenue including sponsorship, commissioned tasks and event registration fees.</bq> A peek into their <a href="https://ad-aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/2025-03/ASPI%20Funding%202023-24.pdf?VersionId=GsXfp4y_oklpcSHqbirBC0VQKo3ni8ED">funding report</a> shows that fully a third of their budget comes directly from the Australian Department of Defence, with 14.1% coming from <iq>Overseas government agencies,</iq> which, like, I totally know who that is. Another third comes from unnamed <iq>Federal government agencies</iq>. Completely unsurprising that this is a think tank that deems itself <iq>non-partisan</iq>, but c'mon there was only every going to be one report that this group was going to write. They were certainly never going to conclude that China isn't exporting its repressive state apparatus for surveillance to other, unsuspecting countries. They were never going to conclude that we don't need to do anything about China other than to try harder ourselves because we've gotten lazy, living off the fruits of empire. This is probably the same think that decided that Australia needs to go to war with its largest trading partner. But Bruce was never going to provide that context and he was certainly never going to see the irony that the conclusions to which the report comes about China could just as well---or better---be applied to the wave of AI-based surveillance software emanating from the U.S. They probably wrote the report using only U.S. technology, cheerfully building paragraphs of the report with U.S.-based LLMs and never did a single thought about the irony of it all disturb the unrippled surface of their smooth, smooth brains. <hr> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/19/roaming-charges-the-politics-of-cruelty-and-crudity/" author="Jeffrey St. Clair" source="CounterPunch">Roaming Charges: the Politics of Crudity and Cruelty</a> <bq>Electrek also reported that Tesla’s Robotaxi is crashing roughly once every 40,000 miles since its deployment in Austin, and that’s with a human safety supervisor in the vehicle. (The average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles.) 16 Democratic senators colluded with Republicans to confirm billionaire and “private astronaut” Jared Issacman to head NASA. Isaacman is an intimate of Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has billions in contracts with the space agency and is seeking billions more.</bq> <hr> Today, I finally figured out the a BlueTooth speaker whose behavior had frustrated me in the past, as it sluttily connected to everything it could find. You push the bluetooth button to cycle through either the combination of connected devices (the default, so Snotra and Vidarr), or then Snotra, Gunn, Hyndla, Vidarr, etc. When I stopped on just Snotra, the speaker beeped once to indicate that it had disconnected from Vidarr and then said "Snotra" to indicate that it was now connected to just that device. TIL. <hr> <a href="https://webkit.org/blog/17640/webkit-features-for-safari-26-2/" source="WebKit Blog" author="Jen Simmons, Tim Nguyen, Vassili Bykov, David Johnson, Lily Spiniolas and Brian Weinstein">WebKit Features for Safari 26.2</a> <bq>For elements with a light color scheme, if the luminance of the accent color is greater than 0.5, the displayed accent color is clamped back down to 0.5 while preserving the hue. For elements with a dark color scheme, if the luminance of the accent color is less than 0.5, the displayed accent color is clamped back down to 0.5 while preserving the hue. If the luminance of the accent color is greater than 0.5, then the following controls adapt in order to remain legible:<ul>checkboxes display with a dark check radio buttons display with a dark indicator submit buttons display with dark text by default switch controls display with an increased drop shadow for the thumb in the on-state</ul></bq> <bq>[...] you can combine separate underline qualities for underlines, overlines and sidelines into one CSS rule like this: <c>text-decoration: green wavy underline 3px</c>. This turned out to be a large project, requiring significant refactoring of decades-old code to untangle the interaction between text-decoration and editing code.</bq> <bq>[...] this code will take the browser’s default styling for spelling errors (whatever that might be) and apply it to the span of text: <c>.span { text-decoration-line: spelling-error; }</c> (If you want to override the browser’s default styling for spelling or grammar errors, you can target it with <c>::spelling-error</c> or <c>::grammar-error</c> and apply styling as desired — a feature that shipped in Safari 17.4 and is supported in Chromium browsers.)</bq> <bq>The <c>@scope</c> rule now correctly handles implicit scoping roots when used with constructed and adopted stylesheets in shadow DOM contexts. Previously, styles defined in constructed stylesheets might not have properly respected the shadow boundary as an implicit scope.</bq> Web-component fix. <bq>WebKit for Safari 26.2 supports using <c>:host</c> as the scoping root in <c>@scope</c> rules. This allows you to create scoped styles that target the shadow host element, making it easier to write encapsulated component styles. <c>@scope(:host) { .component { color: blue; } }</c> This feature enhances the ability to write modular, component-based styles while maintaining proper encapsulation boundaries in Web Components.</bq> <bq>The new <c>math-shift</c> CSS property gives you the ability to create a more tightly compacted rendering of formulas by using <c>math-shift: compact</c> to reduce the vertical shift of superscripts.</bq> <bq>Safari 26.2 adds support for using the <c>:scope</c> pseudo-class when the scoping root matches the <c>:visited</c> pseudo-class. This allows you to create sophisticated scoping patterns that take link visitation state into account.<code>@scope (a:visited) { scope { color: green; } }</code></bq> <bq>The Navigation API solves these problems with a cleaner, more powerful interface. The key feature is the navigate event, which fires for all types of navigation — link clicks, form submissions, back-forward buttons, and programmatic changes. You can intercept these navigations and handle them client-side, making it much easier to build SPAs without routing libraries. The API is also promise-based, so you can easily coordinate async operations like data fetching with navigation changes, and it includes built-in state management for each navigation entry.</bq> <bq>Here’s a simple example of client-side routing:<code>navigation.addEventListener("navigate", (event) => { if (!event.canIntercept) return; event.intercept({ async handler() { const response = await fetch(event.destination.url); const html = await response.text(); document.querySelector("main").innerHTML = html; }, }); });</code>With this code, all link clicks and navigation within your site are automatically intercepted and handled client-side, turning your multi-page site into a single-page application with just a few lines of code.</bq> <bq>WebKit for Safari 26.2 adds support for <c>document.caretPositionFromPoint()</c>. This method is useful whenever you want to convert screen coordinates (x, y) into a text position in the document, giving you character-level precision for sophisticated text interaction (like building text editors, annotation tools, or custom selection interfaces).</bq> <bq>The CookieStore API originally shipped in Safari 18.4.</bq> <bq>The <c>Animation.commitStyles()</c> method now works with completed animations, letting you persist their final state as inline styles. You can run an animation to completion, lock in the result, and remove the animation itself — keeping the visual effect while freeing up resources.</bq> <h id="llms">LLMs & AI</h> <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/ai-vs-human-drivers.html" source="" author="Bruce Schneier">AI vs. Human Drivers - Schneier on Security</a> Citing from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Driving-Intelligence-Green-Routes-Autonomy/dp/1032911220">Driving Intelligence: The Green Book</a>, <bq>I am not convinced that it is good enough to argue from statistics that, to a greater or lesser degree, fatalities and injuries would have occurred anyway had the AVs had been replaced by human-driven cars: a pharmaceutical company, following death or injury, cannot simply sidestep regulations around the trial of, say, a new cancer drug, by arguing that, whilst the trial is underway, people would die from cancer anyway….</bq> Citing from <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0965856416302129">Driving to safety: How many miles of driving would it take to demonstrate autonomous vehicle reliability?</a>, <bq>Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared to vehicle miles traveled, we show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles—an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use. These findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability. And yet, the possibility remains that it will not be possible to establish with certainty the safety of autonomous vehicles. Uncertainty will remain.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://paulkedrosky.com/weekend-thinking-a-cul-de-sac-with-a-view/" author="Paul Kedrosky" source="">Weekend Thinking: A Cul-de-Sac With a View</a> <bq>Continuous learning is one of the main problems with current models, which have specific end dates wrt training, and subsequent gaps must be backfilled by web search. Perhaps worse, they do not learn from what they are exposed to or retrieve, and attempts to make them do so often lead to catastrophic forgetting, wherein they not only fail to learn but also forget what they previously knew. It remains an unsolved research problem.</bq> <bq>Everyone agrees that models have reached a kind of pre-training dead end, even if they don't say that out loud, and even if the continuing utility of massive training runs underlies much of current capex, and they swap in an unsolved problem as a solution. Granted, there are currently some workarounds. For example, retrieval augmented generation lets models access external databases, but it doesn't make the underlying model smarter. In the interim, leading AI developers are pushing out relatively trivial updates to their models at a faster pace. Anthropic has said it's doing "more incremental improvements rather than only shipping the really big upgrades." OpenAI's GPT 5.2 came out this week to a mostly meh response. The pace of releases creates the impression of momentum through frequency rather than the magnitude of change.</bq> <bq>The AI industry spent years betting that scaling—more data, more compute, bigger models—would produce AGI. That bet has not paid off. The improvements are real, but increasingly incremental and slowing, while costs soar. The systems are impressive but bounded. Now the labs are returning to older, harder problems. Continual learning. New architectures. Different training methods. These are necessary research directions, but they are a reminder that the next five years will be nothing like the last five. They're the work of an industry recalibrating after hitting a wall. The article cheerfully frames this as labs "eyeing new breakthroughs." The reality: engineered-in gains via expensive scaling have run their course, and they are trying to figure out what to do next. There is no eyeing, contrary to the piece's headline, just hoping.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1pmitmc/this_poster_at_work/" author="" source="reddit">this poster at work</a> <img src="{att_link}o_is_penguin.webp" href="{att_link}o_is_penguin.webp" align="none" caption="O is penguin" scale="75%"> <ul>A is for ak B is for C is foreah D is foer E is elephant (got one!) F is fox (got two!) G is gorilla (three in a row!) No H. L is for I is iguana (there's I!) K is kangooo N is awal O is penguin M is monkey (there's M!) N is narwhal (picture of a blue whale) S is snake (picture of a bird) R is rhinocros (picture of a snake) V is vulture (bird with no head) X is xerus (picture of a dog) V is vulture (again, but this time with a picture of a vulture) W is vulf I guess we're really not going to get P or Y.</ul> The longer you look at it, the worse it gets. A kid, though? They probably wouldn't notice much right away. <hr> <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-mythbusters/" author="Ed Zitron" source="Where's Your Ed At">Mythbusters - AI Edition</a> <bq>The AI era is one of mythology, where billions in GPUs are bought to create supply for imaginary demand, where software is sold based on things it cannot reliably do, where companies that burn billions of dollars are rewarded with glitzy headlines and not an ounce of cynicism, and where those that have pushed back against it have been treated with more skepticism and ire than those who would benefit the most from the propagation of propaganda and outright lies.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9693Ix4W7IE" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/9693Ix4W7IE" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Alberta Tech" caption="Tricking a vibe coder into learning to code"> <bq>Alberta: This is like the next level of vibe-coding. You just type out exactly what you want. It's really like, 'we just put the AI in your brain.' Here, I'll show you how to do it.. It's like that ... and it's done. Varun: This is future of vibe-coding right here. Yes! We're gonna write the code ourselves. Alberta: You are the AI. Varun: I am the AI. Alberta: Human intelligence. Alberta: There's this crazy website called <a href="https://leetcode.com/">leetcode</a> where you can just play around and pretend to be the AI. And then, if you get really good at it, somebody will give you a job, as the AI.</bq> It's like trying to get a child to eat spinach because Popeye eats it. <hr> <a href="https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got-better" author="Kent Beck" source="Software Design: Tidy First?">The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better</a> <bq>I’ve been watching junior developers use AI coding assistants well. Not vibe coding—not accepting whatever the AI spits out. Augmented coding: using AI to accelerate learning while maintaining quality. Remember, you’re managing for learning, not production.</bq> <bq>The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning.</bq> <hr> <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPitD1eYLiM" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/IPitD1eYLiM" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="RedLetterMedia" caption="A.I. Slop - Beyond the Black Void"> From the description: <bq>This is a topic that's far reaching and moving super fast. And we don't exactly know where it's heading. The one thing I do know for sure is that the MAJORITY of Human beings are not very smart, can easily be fooled, and generally are lazy and like convenience. A.I. is more dangerous that the fictional Skynet. I'd take that world over the current one any day! From funny videos, to fake-looking ones, to ultra realistic videos that look so real we start to question when a real video is, in fact, actually real. People will start to distrust our governments. Distrust the news. And even the people around them. But people need to work. When no one is working, people starve and there is social chaos. This is not looking good, kids. But there is one truth in this universe you can count on. You can always know that whatever happens - middle aged men in a Wisconsin warehouse will be watching and laughing at old B-Movies until the bots come for them at last.</bq> <bq>Mike: I won't watch a video on YouTube unless I see that it was uploaded 12 years ago.</bq> <bq>Mike: If we had a society where your house is made for you by a robot and you you get your food delivery every day and you don't have to worry about money and 5% of the world's population will use that time to enrich themselves to read books to paint to create art. 95% will use that time to cause mischief [and] fight with each other.</bq> At the end, <bq>Mike: My advice is to put all your money into canned food and shotguns.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/thanks-to-ai-its-probably-time-to-take-your-photos-off-the-internet/?comments-page=1#comments" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease</a> <bq>If you’re one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior. New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it. Photographs have always been subject to falsifications—first in darkrooms with scissors and paste and then via Adobe Photoshop through pixels. But it took a great deal of skill to pull off convincingly. Today, creating convincing photorealistic fakes has become almost trivial.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/12/openais-new-chatgpt-image-generator-makes-faking-photos-easy/" author="Benj Edwards" source="Ars Technica">OpenAI’s new ChatGPT image generator makes faking photos easy</a> <bq>OpenAI’s new GPT Image 1.5 is an AI image synthesis model that reportedly generates images up to four times faster than its predecessor and costs about 20 percent less through the API. The model rolled out to all ChatGPT users on Tuesday and represents another step toward making photorealistic image manipulation a casual process that requires no particular visual skills.</bq> <bq>GPT Image 1.5 is notable because it’s a “native multimodal” image model, meaning image generation happens inside the same neural network that processes language prompts. (In contrast, DALL-E 3, an earlier OpenAI image generator previously built into ChatGPT, used a different technique called diffusion to generate images.) This newer type of model, which we covered in more detail in March, treats images and text as the same kind of thing: chunks of data called “tokens” to be predicted, patterns to be completed. If you upload a photo of your dad and type “put him in a tuxedo at a wedding,” the model processes your words and the image pixels in a unified space, then outputs new pixels the same way it would output the next word in a sentence. Using this technique, GPT Image 1.5 can more easily alter visual reality than earlier AI image models, changing someone’s pose or position, or rendering a scene from a slightly different angle, with varying degrees of success. It can also remove objects, change visual styles, adjust clothing, and refine specific areas while preserving facial likeness across successive edits. You can converse with the AI model about a photograph, refining and revising, the same way you might workshop a draft of an email in ChatGPT.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.coryd.dev/posts/2025/cloudflare-proposes-the-spotify-model-for-the-web" author="Cory Dransfeldt" source="">Cloudflare proposes the Spotify model for the web</a> <bq>They proclaim that "answer engines" will replace search. What are "answer engines"? Well, they're what we're now having foisted up on us: chat interfaces that conveniently fail to direct traffic to the sites and platforms they've scraped for citations and data while keeping users on their own platform. Search is dead because we killed it. Talk to our chatbot. Search worked (and works) quite well. You hit a revenue ceiling with it, so you're trying to kill it and force users to "the future". You're pivoting to the next thing you can strip mine for value.</bq> This is an excellent analysis of a stated threat (in the form of a "founder's letter" by a major backbone of the Internet. The proposal itself is maniacally bad. It's completely unaware of how much like a James Bond villain's plan it sounds. They consider it to be inevitable because no-one's paying them to think outside of the very profitable box that they've trapped everyone else in. And no-one's regulating anything anymore. <hr> <a href="https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/12/15-random-thoughts-about-ai.html" source="3QuarksDaily" author="Eric Schenck">15 Random Thoughts About AI</a> <bq>If you aren’t using AI for anything, start. Even just once a week going back and forth with ChatGPT can start to build the skillset.</bq> What kind of skillset? Doing what? Interacting with a game? What is wrong with you people? This is profoundly different than the Internet. The Internet never claimed to replace friends and community. Or maybe I never got properly addicted to the Internet. I think my non-addictive personality---well, addictive to stuff I choose to become addicted to, like writing or cycling---protects from from these drive-by scams. Just start using it; doesn't matter what you do with it. Jesus. Just start using the Internet, doesn't matter how. Even browsing TikTok will be great for your resumé. <bq>This person probably already exists, and they are probably a 16-year-old that is currently obsessed with AI. This is absolutely mind-blowing to me. Companies used to be these giant things that needed massive teams of people to keep going. But with an army of AI agents? The very definition of “company” will likely change. That’s the exciting, optimistic idea.</bq> It's not that hard to blow a one-amp fuse. 🤯 <bq>It’s tempting to think AI will make us all hyper-capable. But just look at everything we already have access to that we underutilize.</bq> How the f@&k does one even begin to analyze this? Is he saying we're all too lazy to make money right now? Like, is that the spin here? What is he even writing about? Did he get AI to write this? <bq>If a tool can do 70% of your work in 10% of the time – how valuable are you? This isn’t just an economic question. It’s a spiritual one too.</bq> Pareto would like a word, but I feel like this guy's not going to get it. <bq>There are people everywhere that lack social interaction:<ul>Old people in nursing homes Single adults that don’t have kids People working in remote corners of the world</ul>But with AI? We finally have somebody to talk to, and the better it gets, the more “human” it feels.</bq> Here's a photograph of a friend. It's a loneliness cure. It is just as spiritually fulfilling as this photograph of eggs is satiating. <h id="programming">Programming</h> <a href="https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/should-pagination-take-you-to-a-new-page" source="tempertemper" author="Martin Underhill">Should pagination take you to a new page?</a> <bq>Add the page number to the title Screen reader users should hear the contents of the element when they arrive on a new page, reassuring them that they’ve landed on the right page.</b> <title>Blog page 2 This also updates the browsing history, making it easier to find the page you want to go back to. No need to include any details of the page number on the first page.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://andrewlock.net/trying-out-the-zed-editor-on-windows-for-dotnet-and-markdown/" source=".NET Escapades" author="Andrew Lock">Trying out the Zed editor on Windows for .NET and Markdown</a> <bq>I want to be able to edit a file in explorer and have it pop up straight away, not to have to wait 5 seconds for the window to appear.</bq> What are you doing that it's that slow? How many extensions do you have? How slow is your computer? That is not my experience, even on the nearly decade-old iMac on which I'm typing this. Whenever people complain about startup speed, I wonder: why are you even quitting apps in the first place? Just leave it open. You have plenty of RAM. Ideally, the tool shouldn't even use that much RAM. Just leave it open. You'll see your file open nearly instantly. My advice is: don't even shut down your computer (use hibernate on Windows and sleep is sufficient on MacOS) and don't quit any applications. Just leave your tools out on the workbench, as long as they don't take up too much space. <hr> <a href="https://arxiv.org/html/2503.14183v1" source="Arxiv" author="Aleksandr Shefer, Igor Engel, Stanislav Alekseev, Daniil Berezun, Ekaterina Verbitskaia, Anton Podkopaev">Can LLMs Enable Verification in Mainstream Programming?</a> <bq>A promising solution to this problem comes in a form of intermediate verification languages such as Viper [23]. With this approach, an algorithm can be implemented in a restricted subset of a popular programming language directly and then supplemented with formal specification and proofs. This helps bridge the gap between mainstream programming and formal methods, reducing the barriers for adoption.</bq> <bq>We have noticed that models tend to make minor mistakes when working on Nagini, mostly mixing up keywords and syntax structures. For example, double negations such as <c>a are often produced even though they are not allowed in the system, likely because they are legal in Python. These kinds of errors can be fixed through non-ML means, which is both cheaper and faster than the counterpart. Thus, we implemented several simple syntactic converters to resolve such issues in Nagini and employ them prior to passing the incorrect candidate back to the LLM.</bq> <bq>[...] instead of requiring equivalence, which may be too strict in practice, we check if the generated specification implies the specification as written in the reference solution in the data set. This way, we do not expect the LLM to guess the exact solution, giving it more freedom. In particular, the generated preconditions can be weaker and the postconditions can be stronger than the original.</bq> <bq>We can see that the performance of program synthesis in Dafny is higher than in either Nagini or Verus. This is expected given that this system is more popular than the others and there is significantly more code available among the training data. Nevertheless, the first four modes demonstrate decent results in the case of Nagini with over half of the programs successfully verified. This is not the case for Verus which is the least expressive and the newest among the three.</bq> <bq>We classified errors into a few groups, including syntax and type errors, unresolved identifiers, and inability to prove an invariant or a postcondition. Among all errors, timeout stands out: it does not occur as often in Dafny or Verus, since these languages are aimed at delivering results of verification quickly. Nevertheless, it is the most frequent error in the case of Nagini. As this error does not convey any meaningful information about the actual problem in the proof, LLMs rarely manage to resolve the issue.</bq> <bq>Mistakes that LLMs tend to make for these systems likely stem from the models’ unfamiliarity with them, which we plan to address in future work by fine-tuning. This will require significantly larger datasets, the collection of which is complicated by the insufficient amount of source code published online, but can be approached through synthetic means.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3773097" source="ACM Queue" author="Louis Dionne, Alex Rebert, Max Shavrick, and Konstantin Varlamov">Practical Security in Production: Hardening the C++ Standard Library at massive scale</a> <bq>Possibly one of the best places to start today is by improving our standard libraries. They provide the baseline "vocabulary types" for developers—and if they're not safe, it will be tough to build safety around them. The <c>std::optional</c> type is only one of many vocabulary types in the C++ Standard Library that aren't safe by default today. Given the current state, it seems mostly clear that the first step should be hardening our standard library, and in our case, this was LLVM's libc++.</bq> <bq>The alternative, therefore, is to enable hardening universally in production. While testing is vital, it cannot replicate the exact conditions, subtle timings, or adversarial pressures of a live environment. Many latent bugs manifest only under production traffic or adversarial inputs. To provide safety guarantees, checks must be active where the code actually runs.</bq> <bq>A crash from a detected memory-safety bug is not a new failure. It is the early, safe, and high-fidelity detection of a failure that was already present and silently undermining the system. The alternative to a "loud crash" is not a healthy system; it is a silently corrupted one that will fail later in a more complex, damaging, and less understandable way.</bq> <bq>While deployment experience showed this to be a particularly good fit for some projects with adoption in Safari and Chromium, it quickly became clear that there were environments for which safe mode was too expensive. A one-size-fits-all approach is too blunt; developers need to choose the right security-versus-performance tradeoff for their environment.</bq> <bq>The idea is that almost all applications should be able to allow fast mode, while more security-conscious applications might opt into extensive mode. Additionally, there is a none mode (no hardening checks—that is, the status quo) and a (new, unrelated to legacy) debug mode; debug mode contains more expensive checks, although it still aims to never affect the big-O complexity of algorithms. Each subsequent mode is a superset of the previous one, both in terms of the number of checks and the performance overhead (<c>none → fast → extensive → debug</c>).</bq> <bq>The primary concern was performance. To address this, key services were benchmarked to understand libc++ hardening's performance characteristics. This is where we identified that profile-guided optimization allowed us to keep hardening overhead low.</bq> <bq>Ultimately, securing buy-in across a large engineering organization was the most time-consuming phase of the project, a reflection not on the technology, but on the diligence required for a change at this scale.</bq> <bq>The most significant concern—performance—proved largely unfounded in practice. Across Google's server-side C++ codebase, the average production performance overhead of enabling libc++ hardening was measured at a remarkably low 0.3 percent.</bq> <bq>LLVM's optimization capabilities for these kinds of checks have significantly improved over the years, partly driven by the needs of memory-safe languages such as Swift and Rust, which rely heavily on runtime checks and use LLVM as a compiler backend. C++ benefited indirectly from this broader ecosystem investment.</bq> <bq>We anticipated that some critical code paths would be too sensitive for any overhead. To address this, we provided two distinct escape hatches: a mechanism to opt an entire service out of hardening, and a fine-grained API to bypass checks for a specific line of code. The final tally after the rollout was remarkable. Across hundreds of millions of lines of C++ at Google, only five services opted out entirely because of reliability or performance concerns. Work is ongoing to eliminate the need for these few remaining exceptions, with the goal of reaching universal adoption.</bq> <bq>[...] the fine-grained API for unsafe access was used in just seven distinct places, all of which were surgical changes made by the security team to reclaim performance in code that was correct but difficult for the compiler to analyze.</bq> <bq>More than 1,000 bugs were found and fixed during the rollout, including several security vulnerabilities and bugs that had lurked in the codebase longer than a decade. Hardening is projected to prevent 1,000 to 2,000 new bugs annually at the current development velocity.</bq> <bq>The baseline segmentation fault rate across the production fleet dropped by approximately 30 percent after hardening was enabled universally, indicating a significant improvement in overall stability.</bq> <bq>The initial proposal from Apple, based on the implementation of hardening in libc++, has been recently voted into the upcoming C++26 Standard; the successful deployment experience of the hardened libc++ at Google and Apple has been crucial in getting the paper adopted.</bq> <bq>The paper is based on an observation that in fact all the hardening checks are already stated, almost always explicitly, in the Standard in the form of preconditions; it's just that violating a precondition used to result in the dreaded undefined behavior. Changing these cases of undefined behavior into useful well-defined behavior is, from the textual point of view, quite straightforward, making the proposal a lot less disruptive than might be expected.</bq> <bq>[...] much of the foundational work, in both the toolchain and in uncovering issues, has now been completed. The path for other organizations to adopt hardening is now significantly clearer and less daunting.</bq> <bq>[...] we highly recommend that any organization using C++ enable hardening in their standard library today. Whether this means enabling hardening in LLVM's libc++ or requesting a comparable safety feature from other standard library implementations, it is a critical and affordable step forward in building a more secure and reliable C++ ecosystem.</bq> <hr> <a href="http://jonathan.protzenko.fr/2025/10/28/eurydice.html" source="" author="Jonathan Protzenko">Eurydice: a Rust to C compiler (yes)</a> <bq>Eurydice plugs in directly at the MIR level, using Charon to avoid reimplementing the wheel and paying the price of interacting with the guts of <c>rustc</c>. Our paper on Charon says more about its architecture. The advantage of plugging in at the MIR level is that i) we do not have to interpret syntactic sugar, which means our translation is more faithful to the Rust semantics, and ii) we have way fewer constructs that need compiling to C. Even then, it’s no easy feat to translate Rust to C. There is naturally, the need to perform whole-program monomorphization, over types and const-generic arguments; the compilation of pattern matches into tagged unions; recognizing instances of iterators that can be compiled to native C for-loops.</bq> <bq>Rust relies on whole-program monomorphization; this means that the C code is inevitably going to contains multiple copies of the same types and functions, but for different choices of type and const generic arguments. This is currently done with a builtin phase in Eurydice (for historical reasons), but in the long run, we want to rely on Charon’s support for monomorphization.</bq> <bq>In practice, as soon as you use traits, the C code becomes more voluminous than the Rust code. We rely on a configuration file mechanism to control the placement of monomorphized instances of a given function, rather than put everything in one big C file. This currently requires a lot of manual intervention to give good results on large projects.</bq> <bq>[...] about 30 nanopasses simplify the KaRaMeL AST until it becomes eligible for compilation to C. Of those, a handful were originally written for KaRaMeL and were somewhat reusable; this includes compilation of data types, as well as monomorphization. The rest was written from scratch for Eurydice, and totals about ~5000 lines of OCaml code.</bq> <bq>[...] because there are so many peephole optimizations, I got tired of maintaining enormous pattern-matches that would try to catch every flavor of Rust iterator that can be compiled to a C for-loop. Instead, a custom OCaml syntax extension allows writing concrete syntax for the internal KaRaMeL language in OCaml patterns. Those magic patterns then get compiled at compile-time to OCaml AST nodes for an actual OCaml pattern that matches the (deeply-embedded) syntax of KaRaMeL’s AST. This relies on a ppx that lexes, parses and compiles the concrete syntax.</bq> Ocaml macros / language extensions FTW. Incredible. <bq>For simplicity, Eurydice emits a compound initializer <c>(Foo) { .tag = bar, .value = { .case_Foo = { .bar = baz }}}</c>, or a C++20 aggregate that uses designated initializers, relying on a macro (not shown here) to hide the syntax differences between the two. But C++17 does not have designated initializers, so there is an option for Eurydice to emit different code that relies on member pointers to achieve sensibly the same effect.</bq> <bq>[...] we cannot guarantee that the layout of objects will be the same in C as in Rust; conceivably, one could parse the layout information from MIR, then emit compiler-specific alignment directives to keep the two identical, but this is not done currently;</bq> <hr> <a href="https://matklad.github.io/2025/12/06/mechanical-habits.html" source="Matklad" author="Alex Kladov">Mechanical Habits</a> <bq>If releases are small, writing changelogs is easy, assessing the riskiness of release doesn’t require anything more than mentally recalling a week’s worth of work, and there’s no need to aim to land features into a particular releases. Delaying a feature by a week is nothing, delaying by a year is a reason to put in an all-nighter.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/r_the_software_way_0" author="Iris Meredith" source="Dead Simple Tech">R the Software Engineering Way: Introduction and Chapter Zero</a> <bq>It is worth noting from the very beginning that a software engineer's work doesn't start with writing code, but with setting up the development environment and the tools that they need to write code effectively. Good tooling can make the difference between you writing clean, tight, maintainable code on the one hand and creating an unmaintainable abomination on the other. This entire first chapter, then, is dedicated to setting up a development environment that lets you build things in R in a consistent, reproducible and easy to fix or revert way. We'll start with basic command line skills, move on to version control and then finally discuss containerisation and the setting up of a development container for your project.</bq> <bq>[...] so we have a project and a way to edit it that isn't entirely terminal-based (many very strong engineers work entirely in the terminal: I'm not personally sold on this, as we have at least some evidence to suggest that GUI code editors really do increase efficiency, but it is very much possible). The next step is to version control our code, which we'll be doing with git.</bq> The author did feel the need to include the following, which is an odd choice. <bq>As an aside, the default branch created after running git init is called "master". We tend to no longer call default branches that unless we wish to be performatively racist or otherwise a bit awful, so to change the name of the default branch to something nicer, you can run git branch -m "main" immediately after initiating to rename your initial branch to "main".</bq> No, some of us just leave it as the word "master" because we are not triggered by words. When I open a git repository and see that the main branch is called "master", I have never, ever thought of racism. I can't imagine anyone of sound mind who would do so, or would be so triggered that they would be distracted into not being able to continue working. FFS. Focus on real racism instead of managing language. Stop trying to make "master" a purely racist word. As it stands, we've nearly eliminated the poetic master-apprentice pair in favor of mentor-mentee, which feels much more awkward. <bq>I'd normally wait quite a bit longer to introduce containerisation as a concept, if I'm to be honest: it's not exactly the kind of thing you see in Intro to Software courses. Unfortunately, we're working with R, and for the many merits of the language, it is not very portable. Scripts and packages that run on one version or operating system will often just not run on another, versioning is a real headache and in general trying to get one person's code to run on another person's system is a real pain. For researchers, that's a real problem: if other researchers can't easily run your code, they can't very well participate effectively in the research process. Containerisation neatly sidesteps this issue. A container image is a representation of a complete userspace (so lighter than a full virtual machine, as it doesn't attempt to virtualise hardware), with whatever operating system you want, set versions of all your packages and everything just as you want it. If you then publish that image on a container registry, anyone, on any operating system, who has a container engine installed can pull that image, start up a container using it and run your scripts with exactly the same versions, environment and everything that you were using when you published it. It will consistently work, no matter what.</bq> <hr> The type system can capture many requirements, but not all of them. For example, performance is very important but it's impossible to capture how quickly a function returns with any type system I've ever seen. <hr> <a href="https://arborium.bearcove.eu" author="" source="">arborium - Syntax Highlighting</a> This is a syntax-highlighting package for web pages. It is written in Rust using the tree-sitter crate. It supports 96 languages. The JS files are kind of large but the highlighting is impeccable. <bq>Add this to your HTML and all

 blocks get highlighted automatically:<code></code>Your code blocks should look like this:<code>fn main() {}

fn main() {}

fn main() {}</code></bq>

From the FAQ:

<bq>Why not highlight.js or Shiki?

Those use regex-based tokenization (TextMate grammars). Regexes can't count brackets, track scope, or understand structure—they just pattern-match.

<b>Tree-sitter actually parses your code into a syntax tree, so it knows that <c>fn</c> is a keyword only in the right context, handles deeply nested structures correctly, and recovers gracefully from syntax errors.</b></bq>

<hr>

<media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwvjsmD2iY" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/hiwvjsmD2iY" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Kevin Powell" caption="3 powerful CSS nesting tricks">

This is a great tutorial on things like <c>&</c>, <c>has(> &)</c>, and <c>isolation: isolate</c>, when combined with nesting to keep related things together.

<hr>

<a href="https://css-tip.com/connected-circles/" author="Temani Afif" source="CSS Tip">Connecting Circles With Anchor Positioning</a>

<bq>Let's suppose you have two circles randomly placed on the page, and you want to create a connection between them. Sounds like a JavaScript job, but CSS can also do it.

A good overview of what can be possible using modern features such as <b>Anchor Positioning, <c>attr()</c>, container queries, <c>shape()</c>, trigonometric functions, and more!</b>

With a simple HTML/CSS configuration, you have an arrow fully controlled using CSS. <b>Not only is the position dynamic, but the shape adjusts according to the distance between the circles.</b> And if they touch each other, the link disappears. Collision detection using pure CSS!</bq>

The code is below to illustrate that CSS is a programming language. The CodePen linked above does include some JavaScript. I haven't analyzed whether its for fallback, though.

<bq><code>@property --_m0 {syntax: "<integer>";initial-value: 1;inherits: true}

.arrow {
  /* arrow dimension */
  --r: 25px;
  --a: 40deg;
  --d: 5px;
  /**/
  --g: 10px; /* gap between the arrow and circles */
  --c: #556270;
  pointer-events: none;
  --x: attr(x type(<custom-ident>));
  --y: attr(y type(<custom-ident>));
  --r1: calc(attr(size_x type(<length>))/2 + var(--g));
  --r2: calc(attr(size_y type(<length>))/2 + var(--g));
}

.arrow :is(a,b,c,d) {
  position: absolute;
  display: grid;
  --_x: calc(anchor(var(--x) inside) + anchor-size(var(--x))/2 - .1px);
  --_y: calc(anchor(var(--y) inside) + anchor-size(var(--y))/2);
  container-type: size;
}
.arrow :is(a,b) {top:  var(--_x); bottom: var(--_y)}
.arrow :is(a,c) {left: var(--_x); right:  var(--_y)}
.arrow :is(c,d) {top:  var(--_y); bottom: var(--_x)}
.arrow :is(b,d) {left: var(--_y); right:  var(--_x)}

.arrow :is(a,b,c,d):before {
  content: "";
  border-image: conic-gradient(var(--c)) fill 0//900px;
  --_a: atan(100cqh/100cqw);
  --_aa: atan(var(--d)/(var(--r)*cos(var(--a))));
  --_m0: max(sign(100cqh/sin(var(--_a)) - (var(--r1) + var(--r2) + 2*var(--r))),0);
  --_m1: max(sign(100cqh/sin(var(--_a)) - (var(--r1) + var(--r2) - 2*var(--g))),0);
  opacity: calc(sign(1cqw)*sign(1cqh)*var(--_m1));
  clip-path: if(style(--_m0: 1):
    polygon(
      calc((var(--d)/sin(var(--_aa)))*cos(var(--_a) - var(--_aa)))
      calc((var(--d)/sin(var(--_aa)))*sin(var(--_a) - var(--_aa))),
      calc(var(--r)*cos(var(--_a) - var(--a))) 
      calc(var(--r)*sin(var(--_a) - var(--a))),
      0 0,
      calc(var(--r)*cos(var(--_a) + var(--a)))
      calc(var(--r)*sin(var(--_a) + var(--a))),
      calc((var(--d)/sin(var(--_aa)))*cos(var(--_a) + var(--_aa)))
      calc((var(--d)/sin(var(--_aa)))*sin(var(--_a) + var(--_aa))),
      calc(100% - (var(--d)/sin(var(--_aa)))*cos(var(--_a) - var(--_aa))) 
      calc(100% - (var(--d)/sin(var(--_aa)))*sin(var(--_a) - var(--_aa))),
      calc(100% - (var(--r))*cos(var(--_a) - var(--a))) 
      calc(100% - (var(--r))*sin(var(--_a) - var(--a))),
      100% 100%,
      calc(100% - (var(--r))*cos(var(--_a) + var(--a))) 
      calc(100% - (var(--r))*sin(var(--_a) + var(--a))),
      calc(100% - (var(--d)/sin(var(--_aa)))*cos(var(--_a) + var(--_aa))) 
      calc(100% - (var(--d)/sin(var(--_aa)))*sin(var(--_a) + var(--_aa)))
    );
    else:
    shape(  
      from   calc(100% - var(--r)*cos(var(--_a) - atan(2*var(--d)/var(--r)))/2) 
             calc(100% - var(--r)*sin(var(--_a) - atan(2*var(--d)/var(--r)))/2),
      arc to calc(100% - var(--r)*cos(var(--_a) + atan(2*var(--d)/var(--r)))/2) 
             calc(100% - var(--r)*sin(var(--_a) + atan(2*var(--d)/var(--r)))/2) of calc(var(--r)/2) large,
      line to calc(var(--r)*cos(var(--_a) - atan(2*var(--d)/var(--r)))/2)
              calc(var(--r)*sin(var(--_a) - atan(2*var(--d)/var(--r)))/2),
      arc to  calc(var(--r)*cos(var(--_a) + atan(2*var(--d)/var(--r)))/2)
              calc(var(--r)*sin(var(--_a) + atan(2*var(--d)/var(--r)))/2) of calc(var(--r)/2) large,
    ););
}

.arrow a:before {
  margin: 
    calc(var(--_m0)*sin(var(--_a))*var(--r1))
    calc(var(--_m0)*cos(var(--_a))*var(--r2)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*sin(var(--_a))*var(--r2)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*cos(var(--_a))*var(--r1));
}

.arrow b:before {
  margin: 
    calc(var(--_m0)*sin(var(--_a))*var(--r1)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*cos(var(--_a))*var(--r1)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*sin(var(--_a))*var(--r2)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*cos(var(--_a))*var(--r2));
  scale: -1 1;
}

.arrow c:before {
  margin: 
    calc(var(--_m0)*sin(var(--_a))*var(--r2)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*cos(var(--_a))*var(--r2)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*sin(var(--_a))*var(--r1)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*cos(var(--_a))*var(--r1));
  scale: 1 -1;
}

.arrow d:before {
  margin: 
    calc(var(--_m0)*sin(var(--_a))*var(--r2)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*cos(var(--_a))*var(--r1)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*sin(var(--_a))*var(--r1)) 
    calc(var(--_m0)*cos(var(--_a))*var(--r2));
  scale: -1 -1;
}

.circle {
  position: absolute;
  left: 10%;
  top: 10%;
  width: calc(attr(size type(<length>)));
  aspect-ratio: 1;
  background: #45ADA8;
  border-radius: 50%;
  anchor-name: attr(name type(<custom-ident>));
}

.circle + .circle {
  background: #FA6900;
  left: 72%;
  top: 40%;
}</code></bq>

<hr>

<a href="https://cekrem.github.io/posts/tailwind-targeting-child-elements/" author="Christian Ekrem" source="">Tailwind CSS: Targeting Child Elements (when you have to)</a>

<bq><b>Arbitrary variants with <c>[&...]</c> syntax let you write virtually any CSS selector within Tailwind’s utility-class paradigm.</b> The <c>&</c> represents the element your class is on, and everything after it is standard CSS selector syntax (with <c>_</c> for spaces).</bq>

The example the author gives is as follows:

<bq><code><hl>class="[&_a]:font-semibold [&_a]:no-underline [&_a:hover]:underline [&_li]:list-disc [&_li]:ml-6"</hl>
>
  Some text with a link in it.
  
    List item one</li>
    
List item two</li>
  
</code></bq>

Look at that class-name <hl>value</hl>. Imagine being so far down the Tailwind rabbit-hole that this seems like a good idea. The author writes <i>several times</i> that <iq>[...] adding a small piece of vanilla CSS to handle this is often the simplest and most sensible solution.</iq>

Look, I understand that the CSS example above looks like even <i>more</i> gobbeldygook than the Tailwind stuff. The difference is that the CSS code above describes a highly dynamic and responsive system for building graphs of objects connected by arrows, whereas the Tailwind code cited above is simply for setting some text styles. I'm not even sure why they bothered developing something like this, other than Tailwind's users probably badgered its engineers into doing it because they never, ever, ever wanted to write any CSS.

<hr>

<a href="https://frontendmasters.com/blog/the-deep-card-conundrum/" author="Amit Sheen" source="Front-end Masters">The Deep Card Conundrum</a>

<bq>By dynamically calculating the <c>perspective-origin</c> based on the card’s tilt, we are essentially telling the browser: “Hey, I know you flattened this element, but <b>I want you to render the perspective of its children as if the viewer is looking at them from this specific angle.</b>”

We are <b>effectively projection-mapping the 3D scene onto the 2D surface of the card.</b> The math ensures that the projection aligns perfectly with the card’s physical rotation, creating the illusion of a deep, 3D space inside a container that the browser considers “flat.”</bq>

<bq>The Deep Card is now a solved problem. <b>We can have our cake (3D depth), eat it (clipping), and even spin it around 360 degrees without breaking the illusion.</b>

So, the next time you hit a wall with CSS, and you’re sure you’ve tried everything, maybe <b>take a second look at those properties you swore you’d never use.</b> You might just find your answer hiding in the documentation you skipped.</bq>

<hr>

<a href="https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2025-11-27-crdt-dictionary/" author="Ian Duncan" source="">The CRDT Dictionary: A Field Guide to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types</a>

<bq><b>The biggest pitfall of LWW-Element-Set is clock skew.</b> If replica A’s clock is ahead of replica B’s, then A’s operations will always “win” over B’s, even if B’s operations happened later in real time. Solutions include:<ul><b>Use hybrid logical clocks (HLC) instead of wall clocks</b>
Use replica IDs as tiebreakers (e.g., timestamps are (wall_time, replica_id) pairs)
Accept the inconsistency as a tradeoff</ul></bq>

<bq>Instead of “insert at position 5,” you <b>say “insert after element X.”</b> Since X has a unique ID, this instruction is <b>unambiguous even when other replicas are concurrently inserting elsewhere.</b></bq>

<bq>Use Delta CRDTs when network bandwidth is a concern or state size is large. Most production CRDT systems use delta-state internally (Riak, Automerge). <b>If you’re implementing your own CRDT system from scratch, start with deltas. Your future self will thank you.</b></bq>

<bq>Instead of storing a linear sequence, <b>WOOT</b> stores constraints: “this character comes after X and before Y.” <b>When multiple characters claim to be between X and Y, a deterministic ordering (based on UID) resolves the conflict.</b>

[...] WOOT is <b>primarily of historical interest.</b> Modern implementations prefer RGA [Replicated Growable Array] or YATA [Yet Another Transformation Approach] for better performance. But it’s a neat design, and the name alone makes it worth knowing about.</bq>

He recommends YATA but doesn't provide an example. He writes in a footnote that it's used in the <a href="https://yjs.dev/" author="" source="">Yjs</a> library.

<bq><b>Use Tree CRDTs for file systems, organizational charts, or document outlines</b> where the hierarchy must be replicated. Be prepared for complexity in handling concurrent structural changes.</bq>

<bq>Garbage collection is one of the most challenging practical problems with CRDTs. The fundamental tension: <b>CRDTs achieve convergence by monotonically accumulating information, but production systems can’t grow unbounded forever.</b></bq>

Garbage-collection i.e. "tombstone removal" is a challenge for many of these algorithms. You can feel it in Apple Notes, if you use a single note for a scratchpad over a long time. The updates can get <i>slow</i>. That's because it's too dumb to do what the author suggests below,

<bq><b>Use distributed consensus to agree on what’s safe to discard.</b> Once all replicas acknowledge they’ve received a particular update, the corresponding metadata can be safely removed.</bq>

The coolest bit of advice, which is that <iq>you can often build more complex CRDTs by combining simpler ones.</iq>

This is a very long paper, so you might want to jump to the <a href="https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2025-11-27-crdt-dictionary/#practical-considerations">practical considerations</a> section, which is a sort of flow-chart for choosing CRDT algorithms, and the <a href="https://www.iankduncan.com/engineering/2025-11-27-crdt-dictionary/#a-note-on-causal-consistency">note on causal consistency</a>, which is a table of Big-O performance estimates for the various operations for the various CRDT algorithms. It's quite thorough.

He concludes with,

<bq><b>CRDTs are not a silver bullet. They trade coordination for metadata, strong consistency for eventual consistency, and simplicity for convergence guarantees.</b> But in scenarios where availability matters more than immediate consistency, they’re remarkably powerful.

<b>There is no “best” CRDT, only CRDTs suited to different problems</b>; the CRDT you choose depends entirely on your application’s semantics:<ul>What operations do you need (add, remove, re-add)?
Can you tolerate lost updates?
Do you need to detect conflicts or resolve them automatically?
What’s your tolerance for metadata overhead?</ul>The <b>CRDT abstraction is elegant in theory, but bewildering in practice</b> because there are so many instances with subtle differences. Hopefully this guide has cut through some of the confusion, and given you a good intuition for how they work and when to use them.

<b>I honestly still haven’t hit a use case for CRDTs that I couldn’t solve with a traditional database and some custom coordination logic.</b></bq>

It seems quite scholarly and based on a lot of experience. Though the "Key Observations" section <i>reeks</i> of having been produced by an LLM, I think that, though an LLM might have been used, the author used it as a tool to aid formulation and to summarize, rather than to write the majority of it.

I've written about <a href="https://www.earthli.com/news/search.php?search_form_submitted=1&debug=0&id=¬_state=0&state=1&folder_ids%5B%5D=&folder_search_type=context_none&quick_search=1&search_text=crdt&type=article#">CRDTs</a> before, most especially the <a href="https://automerge.org/">AutoMerge</a> library, which I wrote about in <a href="https://www.earthli.com/news/search.php?search_form_submitted=1&debug=&id=¬_state=&state=1&folder_ids%5B%5D=&folder_search_type=context_none&quick_search=1&search_text=automerge&type=article#">2023 and 2024</a>. There's also Ink&Switch's <a href="https://github.com/inkandswitch/peritext" author="" source="GitHub">Peritext</a>, which I mentioned having seen in a talk in <a href="https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4729&search_text=peritext">April 2023</a>.

<h id="design">Design</h>

<a href="https://htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2025/6/" author="Todd Libby" source="HTML Hell">Accessible by Design: The Role of the 'lang' Attribute</a>

<bq>A refreshable braille display translates text into small patterns of raised bumps. <b>Different languages use different contraction rules in braille (called Grade 2 braille).</b> If the language is not set, the braille translator might use the wrong rules, turning clear text into meaningless gibberish for the braille reader.</bq>

<bq>Proper hyphenation is entirely language-dependent. <b>Hyphenation rules can be complex and unique to each language.</b> when CSS is used, <c>hyphens: auto</c>, the browser or user agent relies on the <c>lang</c> attribute to load the appropriate hyphenation dictionary and apply correct linguistic rules which can improve text flow and readability. Especially in justified or narrow columns.</bq>

<hr>

<media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/1fZTOjd_bOQ" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Canonical Ubuntu | Scott Jenson" caption="Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10">

This was a great talk; recommended for anyone involved with developing software. Even his attitude toward AI is sound, by which I mean I agree with him nearly 100%.

<hr>

This is how Apple gets its users to update to newer versions of its operating systems. I checked whether there were any updates and saw that Sequoia---which I still have installed because I am not interested in a whole new, worse UI---had an update.

<img src="{att_link}select_to_update_macos_sequoia.webp" href="{att_link}select_to_update_macos_sequoia.webp" align="none" caption="Select to update MacOS Sequoia" scale="75%">

I select to see information about updating macOS Sequioa and got the following dialog, cheerfully ready to "upgrade".

<img src="{att_link}apple_tries_to_trick_me_into_upgrading_to_tahoe.webp" href="{att_link}apple_tries_to_trick_me_into_upgrading_to_tahoe.webp" align="none" caption="Apple tries to trick me into upgrading to Tahoe" scale="75%">

Stick it in your ear, Apple. I'm not interested.

When I reboot in a few minutes, I 100% expect to see it ask me to enable Apple Intelligence, which I've always been able to skip. I will continue to skip it for as long as I can but I realize that I am not in charge, not really. I avoid the Tahoe upgrade and the Apple Intelligence integration only because Apple allows me to. For now.

<h id="sports">Sports</h>

<a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-506-my-145056822" author="TrueAnon" source="Patreon">Episode 506: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy League</a>

The TrueAnon podcast about sports betting is funny in that Liz and Pablo both believe that the data is real. She says that you could never make prop bets before because you didn't have the data. Do you believe that they have the data now? What is the incentive for accuracy? Precision, sure. It convinces the rubes that they should bet because they <i>think</i> it's real. But what's the incentive for investing more money than necessary to deliver clean, accurate data?

People just want to bet and they want to make money. Make enough bets land and people will keep coming. Hell, does the game even have to happen? Could it be a simulation? I guess that's what fantasy leagues are.

I agree with them that sports-betting is ruining sports, the communality of it.

Let's take a look at a recent example of what happens when you have unregulated markets with lots of money involved in them. <a href="https://responsiblestatecraft.org/isw-polymarket-ukraine-war-map/" author="Nick Cleveland-Stout" source="Responsible Statecraft">Polymarket ISW
Think tanker altered Ukraine war map before big Polymarket payout</a> writes,

<bq>When nightfall came, <b>these longshot gamblers miraculously won big, though not because Russia took the town</b> (as of writing, Ukraine is still fighting for Myrnohrad). Instead, it was because of an apparent intervention by a staffer at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a D.C.-based think tank that produces daily interactive maps of the conflict in Ukraine that Polymarket often relies on to determine the outcome of bets placed on the war.

According to tech outlet 404 Media, <b>just before the market was resolved, someone at ISW edited its map to show that Russia had taken control of a key intersection in the town</b>, despite the lack of indications that Russia had made any such advance. <b>After Polymarket had paid out the winners of the bet, ISW’s edit mysteriously disappeared by the following morning.</b></bq>

<bq>Legal repercussions for insider trading on prediction markets are “virtually non-existent,” according to Forbes contributor Boaz Sobrado. Prediction markets are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission which does not address insider trading in prediction markets.</bq>

Well, yeah, duh. You might as well be betting on dog fights in a back alley. No-one's going to help you get your money back. You've got no legal recourse because you were betting money in an unregulated market. That's on you.

<hr>

<img src="{att_link}cr_on_tcs_parkplatz-bachtel_turm.png" align="none" caption="CR on TCS Parkplatz-Bachtel Turm">

<dl dt_class="field">Distance
2.37km
Elevation Gain
337m
Avg Grade
14.2%
Lowest Elev
777m
Highest Elev
1,113m
Elev Difference
337m
Climb Category
2</dl>

I picked up the fastest ascent on a local mountain here. I thought it was odd because I'm not the youngest but whatever, I'll take it.

<hr>

<a href="https://www.der-postillon.com/2025/12/lkw-abladestreifen.html" author="" source="Der Postillon">Lieferfahrer fragt sich schon immer, was komisches Symbol auf Lkw-Abladestreifen eigentlich darstellen soll</a>

<img src="{att_link}lkw_fahrer_fahrradweg.webp" href="{att_link}lkw_fahrer_fahrradweg.webp" align="none" caption="Lkw Fahrer auf dem Fahrradweg" scale="50%">

Translation: "Truck driver always wondered what that strange symbol painted on the unloading zone meant."

<hr>

I have heard it suggested that all of our devices and machines and tracking of activity could be used by health-insurance companies to get an idea of how active you are. The software is going to have to get a good deal more reliable first.  

I just took an 80+-minute indoor ride using TacX by Garmin  and it failed to transfer the ride from <i>itself to itself</i> and lost my ride. It's like it never happened. Well, not quite: the intensity minutes were tracked. The elevated heart rate was tracked. But the ride is gone. So, if my insurance company were to reward me for every kilometer ridden on a bike, I would have just lost 45km.

As it stands, it doesn't matter. As the software is now, it <i>can't matter</i>. It's just not good enough. But sure, we'll build some world-girdling intelligences any day now. I am becoming increasingly convinced that no-else really complains about these things because they just don't even notice anymore.

Software has always sucked, it continues to suck, and it will suck forevermore amen.

Garmin software especially so. I am very glad that I'm not paying them CHF11/month for the pleasure.

<h id="fun">Fun</h>

<media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVOkf63Oszg" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/mVOkf63Oszg" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Meditations for the anxious mind" caption="This is why everyone is a DJ now">

<bq>Our parents had consumerism. And now we have DJs.

[...]

[...] stage 4 individualism. A terminal condition where <b>everyone's on stage and there's no one left in the audience.</b> A collective comedown from being told we were special. <b>Performing uniqueness in similar ways.</b> Our dreams became speckled, ears still ringing when the raves shut down. And we all forgot to stop dancing. Hung over from a world that told us we could be anything, we decided to be DJs. <b>We don't create our own music. We curate playlists, recirculating signs that will make people think we're cool.</b> And we do this through the labels we wear, the books we read, the people we hang out with, and the opinions we parrot. <b>The DJ figure, ruled by the same logic, is just another celebration of self.</b></bq>

This reminded me so much of Adam Curtis documentaries.

<hr>

(There was an attempt) <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/1plofne/to_enjoy_a_rendition_of_your_most_popular_hit/" author="" source="Reddit">To enjoy a rendition of your most popular hit single</a>

The clip highlighted by the link above is <i>painful</i> to listen to. Luckily, Reddit users will almost always come through with much better ones in the comments.

<media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSzICmwmRsA" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/lSzICmwmRsA" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Polar Music Prize" caption="Gregory Porter performs 'It's Probably Me' at the Polar Music Prize Ceremony 2017">

<media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXX8ZWuVQRI" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/lXX8ZWuVQRI" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="The Kennedy Center" caption="Bruno Mars - 'So Lonely,' 'Message In a Bottle' (Sting Tribute) | 2014 Kennedy Center Honors">

<hr>

<a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/1pmkzx2/when_the_followup_comment_is_the_real_holiday/" author="" source="Reddit">When the follow-up comment is the real holiday tragedy.</a>

For the uninitiated, I guess this is supposed to be a picture of Charlie Kirk with his family, but it might as well just what an AI puked up for "family with daughters at the beach". The point is that someone thinks that we haven't mourned Charlie Kirk's passing enough. But then someone else reminds them that, with Kirk's wife Erika having spent about six seconds in mourning before going on a nationwide tour, it's unclear why we all should be mourning so much.

<img src="{att_link}mother_and_wife_of_the_year.webp" href="{att_link}mother_and_wife_of_the_year.webp" align="none" caption="Mother and wife of the year" scale="75%">

<bq><b>@EndWokeness:</b> These children will be without their dad this Christmas and the left celebrates that fact

<b>@smalls2672:</b> <b>hopefully Erika's press tour will be finished up by then so they can at least have their mother there.</b></bq>

<hr>

Here's a Wordle for you: I guessed my lady's favorite first guess to eliminate four vowels. My second wild stab---with two Rs; doubled letters also being a favorite of the lady---eliminated the "O" and showed me that the "Y" was <i>not at the end of the word.</i>

<img src="{att_link}the_only_vowel_is_y_and_it_s_not_at_the_end.png" href="{att_link}the_only_vowel_is_y_and_it_s_not_at_the_end.png" align="none" caption="The only vowel is Y and it's not at the end" scale="50%">

Where the hell is the Y then?

Hint: it was December 19th.

That's a week out from Christmas day.

Think: Three Wise Men.

Think: Gifts.

<a href="{att_link}myrrh_-_tis_the_season.png">Frankincense</a>! Obvs.