Richard Wolff is the gift that keeps on giving. He’s just as brilliant talking into a laptop camera as he is giving lectures. I mentioned him recently as one of my favorite economist. The video is 75 minutes, but well-worth the time.

Richard D. Wolff − Is the Coronavirus the end of Capitalism & the Revival of Socialism? by AcTVism Munich (YouTube)

The following citation/transcript is from about 55 minutes, when the interviewer asked him what he thought of Biden vs. Trump..

“Biden is better than Trump, that seems clear to me. But, it’s almost meaningless because that’s such a low bar that the statement is,... [More]”

I sometimes wonder what my younger self would think of what he’s become. I like to think that I’ve avoided a disappointed reaction, but it’s hard to say because I’ve always been a bit “judgey”. At the very least, there are several things I couldn’t have predicted. One is that I actually have a list of favorite economists. 20-year-old me couldn’t have imagined that in a million years.

In no particular order,

Dean Baker

He’s the founder of CEPR, the voice of sanity and national treasure of... [More]

Everybody’s talking about ‘em: facemasks. Which kind? Where can you buy them? How do you get your outsized ass to a hospital that needs them? Should you wear one? Should everybody? Which kind? In which situations?

The beleaguered CDC

The lynching party seems to be out in the States for the CDC, which is being blamed for trying to kill everyone by telling them that they don’t need facemasks. This is the same advice being given the world over by anyone qualified to have an opinion.

In the... [More]

I titled and started writing this article on March 6th.

A lot has changed since then.

Bernie’s lead evaporates

I wrote the following at the end of March.

Bernie is now almost mathematically unable to win the Democratic nomination.

Then this article got away from me again.

A lot has changed since then.

The Democrats were always going to nominate Biden.

The country needs Bernie right now.

In light of the massive changing of the facts on the ground engendered by COVID-19, Bernie should... [More]

The article An Open Letter to the Green Party About 2020 Election Strategy by Noam Chomsky, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathy Kelly, Ron Daniels, Leslie Cagan, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert (LA Progressive) gets to its point relatively quickly.

“If Clinton got Jill Stein’s Green votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Clinton would have won the election. Thus, the Green Party’s decision to run in those states, saying even that there was little or no difference between Trump and Clinton, seems to us to be a factor worthy of being removed from contested state dynamics, just like the Electoral College is a factor... [More]”

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

A few days ago, I read the article America Will Struggle After Coronavirus. These Charts Show Why. by David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez (NY Times), which has very nice charts showing a gaping inequality chasm in the United States. It’s really nicely done and drives the point home in a way not often discussed so openly in the mainstream media.

420% income increase for the 0.1%I was honestly wondering what to make of it, simply because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the NY Times to blame Trump and/or Russia for the whole debacle, even though their charts... [More]

The Web Animations Working Draft (W3C) was published in October of 2018. Can I use “Web Animations” (CanIUse) shows that the only browser that supports this API 100% is the latest technology preview on iOS and MacOS. Chromium-based browsers have had (very) basic support for quite some time, but Safari has thrown down the gauntlet with full support, which I learned about from Web Animations in Safari 13.1 by Antoine Quint (WebKit Blog).

This API is intended to replace many usages of CSS Animations and CSS Transitions, which are not only... [More]

Despite the title, from what I can gather from 10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL by Rick Branson (Medium), the author is a big fan of PostgreSql. However, he has such vast experience with it that he can still list 10 things that don’t work as well as they could.

They seem to boil down to:

• Default replication is still serialized and therefore not as reliable as the alternative async protocol that is much harder to configure and pretty much what every other major database offers.
• Obsolete-data-handling requires... [More]

I’ve settled on using the Coronavirus (World-o-meter) tracker. It seems to update relatively quickly and reasonably accurately and is also well-sourced. About a week ago, they finally added two new columns: total tested and tested/million people, which helps you compare the case numbers of countries more accurately (i.e. if a country has no cases and is testing like mad, then that’s good news; if they have few tests, then you can’t really conclude anything, but it’s probably not good news).

For Switzerland,... [More]

An American, originally from New York City and now living in Vermont, mused in the blog post Why Has Germany Been Effective at Limiting Covid-19 Deaths? by Jason Kottke,

“I can’t be the only American whose response to the pandemic is to think seriously about moving to a country with a functioning government, good healthcare for everyone, and a real social safety net.”

No, thank you.

The world neither wants nor needs American refugees.[1]

They would almost certainly be the most entitled refugees the world has... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

1. Wilder S02 (2020) — 8/10
2. Battlestar Galactica (s01-s02) (2004-2005) — 7/10
3. Silicon Valley S06 (2019) — 8/10
4. A Marriage Story (2019) — 6/10
5. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) — 6/10
6. Knives Out (2019) — 6/10
7. Parks and Recreation S01-S07 (2009-2015) — 9/10
8. Black Sea (2014) — 7/10
9. Mark Maron: End Times Fun (2020) — 7/10
10. Taylor Tomlinson: Quarter-Life Crisis (2020) — 9/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve rated... [More] (IMDb)

The original quote is shown below.

The following is my best attempt at a direct translation, which I hope imparts just how balky the original is.

“But what experience and history have taught, is that society and governments never learn anything from history and acted on lessons from... [More]”

According to What is the origin of the saying “six feet under”,

“The phrase “6 feet under” originated in London, England in 1665. It came about as London was being ravaged by the Bubonic Plague. […]
The mayor of London at the time issued a decree that all plague deaths had to be buried at least “6 feet under” to help halt the spread of infection.”

355 years later, another plague has made the expression “six feet” au courant, at least in those countries still using the imperial system of... [More]

I found this truly excellent comment by Remember-The-Future (Reddit) on /r/bestof—and it truly is one of the best things I’ve read on Reddit.

The entire comment is well-worth reading, but I’ve liberally selected the bits I liked the most.

A democracy cannot function without actual citizens.

“I think most people would be very unhappy if Sanders supporters put the blame where it truly belonged. Because the real problem with America is, and always has been, the quality of its people.

“[…] the truth is that there is no... [More]”

The interview The Tip of the Iceberg: Virologist David Ho (BS ‘74) Speaks About COVID-19 (Caltech) includes the following:

Why different symptoms? Mutated strains?

No.

“This virus is mutating but it has mutated very little so far. There are differences but probably they are functionally not important, so that’s not the explanation for why you see different disease courses among the infected.”

Can you get re-infected?

No.

“Only one study was formally done and it is not a human study. It’s a macaque... [More]”

The article How to Survive End Times by Ted Rall (CounterPunch) discusses what kind of people are needed once society collapses or changes significantly, based on experience in Afghanistan.

“You make yourself useful in a failed state exactly the opposite of how you do in ours. In the United States in 2020, it pays to have excellent skills in one or two areas, to be the best at what you do in your specialty. Not in Afghanistan in 2000. Dangerous places work best for people who are renaissance men and women, those with a... [More]”

I wrote Book recommendations from Kindle in October of 2019. Since then, the recommendations have not gotten any better.

The following three recommendations have been haunting me for a month.

How to Retire on DividendsHer Cowboy Billionaire Best FriendDevious Lies

None of these makes any sense for me whatsoever. None of them comes even close to matching my reading history.[1]

The bodice-rippers are just generic recommendations; the investment book is particularly laughable right now, in our time of COVID-inspired free-fall and an attendant complete reworking of... [More]

That’s six hours of quarantine time for 1000 pieces. We still have more puzzles of the same size, plus a pretty big lego kit (10242 − Creator: Mini Cooper).

The programmable notebook Introduction to D3 by Arvind Satyanarayan (MIT Visualization Group) is part of a full course at MIT about Interactive Data Visualization.

The linked notebook uses D3.js, but previous classes in the course have dealt with Vega, which is,

“[…] a visualization grammar, a declarative language for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualization designs. With Vega, you can describe the visual appearance and interactive behavior of a visualization in a JSON format, and generate web-based views using Canvas or SVG.... [More]”

I found the article A half-hour to learn Rust by Amos to be extremely helpful in learning the syntax and mechanics of Rust.

It starts out with the absolute basics:

“let introduces a variable binding […]”

then takes you through

• Modules
• Blocks
• Conditionals
• Matches
• Options
• mutables
• Copy/clone semantics
• Traits
• Generic parameters
• Constraints
• Macros
• Enums
• Lifetimes and borrowing
• Generic lifetimes
• Statics vs. owned vs. referenced
• Slices and range literals (Index and IndexMut)
• Results
• Errors, panic and unwrap... [More]

The article Why the Developing World Cannot Flatten the Curve with Coronavirus (COVID-19) and Beyond by J.P. Linstroth (CounterPunch) addresses the global inequality—not just that between classes/strata in first-world societies—that will doom many to the worst effects of COVID.

“when we speak of epidemics, and even pandemics like the Coronavirus (COVID-19), we must understand that medical care is unequal in our world today. We must understand that “power structures” control who gets medical care and who does not. We... [More]”

The excellent article The Art of the Phony Peace Deal by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch) expresses strong suspicions that the co-called peace deal with Afghanistan that should see the removal of US troops is instead chock-full of the standard caveats and conditions that US loads upon its vassal states. The only real fix for America’s hyper-militarism begins at home, with its people no longer supporting it.

“Look, dearest motherfuckers, I don’t like to be the killjoy here, I really don’t. But when you cut deals with an empire... [More]”

Much of the world is in an unprecedented lockdown that has completely changed the face of the global economy. The gossamer castle of globalization has been put on ice—perhaps temporarily, but hopefully for good. We can at least hope that the extremely unequal and cruel form that it had doesn’t return.

An unprepared populace

This is a particularly trying crisis for a world full of people who don’t even understand the minimal basics of how their world even works. The world works smoothly... [More]

Now that Quino 8.x is out the door, we can look forward to Quino 9.

Quino 8 is a very solid and stable release that has already been test-integrated into many of our current products running on Quino. We don’t anticipate any more low-level API changes, though there will be follow-up bug-fix releases.

There are a few larger-scale changes improvements and enhancement, outlined below (and noted in the roadmap).

Ready for Change

With this release, we’ve got more coverage than ever. Excluding... [More]