FeedLand likes for gwthompson

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 19:33:02 GMT

Podcast: How I view WordPress.

Billionaire-proof, day2

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 16:37:05 GMT

Given that the conversation has rightly turned to billionaire-proofness of Bluesky, if they allow devs to build on Bluesky with RSS in and out, that's enough to alleviate the concern about it being billionaire-proof. They already support outbound RSS. Now just let us get into the system with just RSS. Yes, I know it's a "third party opportunity" but something like this, to have the required value, has to be a fully supported and maintained feature of the platform.

Let's do this right, and we can spread this into Masto-Land and Threads-Land and then we can thank Elon Musk for helping us not just bridge these systems, but make them all part of the same freaking system.

We can do this.

7 Things You Should Never Do with Your Raspberry Pi

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 15:47:40 GMT

These days, a Raspberry Pi can be used for almost anything. Unfortunately, that versatility can sometimes make you forget that this single-board computer is not invincible and a small mistake can damage the board completely. I have a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Raspberry Pi Pico sitting on my desk, both dead because I overlooked...

November 22, 2024

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 15:32:12 GMT

“It all began so beautifully,” Lady Bird remembered. “After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas.”

It was November 22, 1963, and President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were visiting Texas. They were there, in the home state of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, to try to heal a rift in the Democratic Party. The white supremacists who made up the base of the party’s southern wing loathed the Kennedy administration’s support for Black rights.

That base had turned on Kennedy when he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had backed the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in fall 1962 saying that army veteran James Meredith had the right to enroll at the University of Mississippi, more commonly known as Ole Miss.

When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights.

So the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar and put more than 500 law enforcement officers on the campus. White supremacists rushed to meet them there and became increasingly violent. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!” The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals. They killed two men and wounded many others.

The riot ended when the president sent 20,000 troops to the campus. On October 1, Meredith became the first Black American to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

The Kennedys had made it clear that the federal government would stand behind civil rights, and white supremacists joined right-wing Republicans in insisting that their stance proved that the Kennedys were communists. Using a strong federal government to regulate business would prevent a man from making all the money he might otherwise; protecting civil rights would take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of Black and Brown people. A bumper sticker produced during the Mississippi crisis warned that “the Castro Brothers”—equating the Kennedys with communist revolutionaries in Cuba—had gone to Ole Miss.

That conflation of Black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend some fences in the state Democratic Party.

On the morning of November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and giving “support and encouragement to the Communist inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife that they were “heading into nut country today.”

But the motorcade through Dallas started out in a party atmosphere. At the head of the procession, the president and first lady waved from their car at the streets “lined with people—lots and lots of people—the children all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows,” Lady Bird remembered. “There had been such a gala air,” she said, that when she heard three shots, “I thought it must be firecrackers or some sort of celebration.”

The Secret Service agents had no such moment of confusion. The cars sped forward, “terrifically fast—faster and faster,” according to Lady Bird, until they arrived at a hospital, which made Mrs. Johnson realize what had happened. “As we ground to a halt” and Secret Service agents began to pull them out of the cars, Lady Bird wrote, “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw in the President’s car a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat…Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”

As they waited for news of the president, LBJ asked Lady Bird to go find Mrs. Kennedy. Lady Bird recalled that Secret Service agents “began to lead me up one corridor, back stairs, and down another. Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall…outside the operating room. You always think of her—or someone like her—as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life.”

After trying to comfort Mrs. Kennedy, Lady Bird went back to the room where her husband was. It was there that Kennedy’s special assistant told them, “The President is dead,” just before journalist Malcolm Kilduff entered and addressed LBJ as “Mr. President.”

Officials wanted LBJ out of Dallas as quickly as possible and rushed the party to the airport. Looking out the car window, Lady Bird saw a flag already at half mast and later recalled, “[T]hat is when the enormity of what had happened first struck me.”

In the confusion—in addition to the murder of the president, no one knew how extensive the plot against the government was—the attorney general wanted LBJ sworn into office as quickly as possible. Already on the plane to return to Washington, D.C., the party waited for Judge Sarah Hughes, a Dallas federal judge. By the time Hughes arrived, so had Mrs. Kennedy and the coffin bearing her husband’s body. “[A]nd there in the very narrow confines of the plane—with Jackie on his left with her hair falling in her face, but very composed, and me on his right, Judge Hughes, with the Bible, in front of him and a cluster of Secret Service people and Congressmen we had known for a long time around him—Lyndon took the oath of office,” Lady Bird recalled.

As the plane traveled to Washington, D.C., Lady Bird went into the private presidential cabin to see Mrs. Kennedy, passing President Kennedy’s casket in the hallway.

Lady Bird later recalled: “I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked…with blood—her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them. I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights—exquisitely dressed and caked in blood. I asked her if I couldn’t get someone in to help her change and she said, ‘Oh, no. Perhaps later…but not right now.’”

“And then,” Lady Bird remembered, “with something—if, with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”

—

Notes:

https://www.discoverlbj.org/item/ctjd-19631122

Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

The Code That Almost Led to Disaster • A Starbase Story

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 15:32:12 GMT

"Mind where you're going," yelled the supervisor. And he's normally one of the kinder people at Central Command. But not today. Everyone's stressed and tired today. And that's never a great combination.

Trision didn't apologise. This, also, was out of character for him. But there was no time to waste. He had the solution, but time was running out.

"Status?" Trision's tone wasn't what he was aiming for as he entered the engine room.

He didn't need an answer. He didn't wait for one.

"I've got it. I've run simulations. This will work."

"Here it is." Trision handed over the pad with the code. "I figured out we need to randomise the output power, but also ensure the mean power doesn't exceed our max op temp."

"I don't need a full presentation. Does it work?" Kwamian snapped. She was in charge in the engine room. The thing is, she always wanted to know even the smallest details of every operational change anyone suggested. After all, the primary engine was her baby. But she wasn't used to working under this sort of pressure.

Trision was sure about this code even though he didn't have the time to test it as thoroughly as he normally would:

All code blocks are available in text format at the end of this article • #1 • The code images used in this article are created using Snappify. [Affiliate link]

Trision was confident this varying power output will disrupt the systems on board the enemy starjets, which now were on the verge of breaching the starbase’s outer shields.

[Footnote that's not at the foot of the page: Yes, this code is relatively trivial for what you'd expect on a 29th-century starbase. Just play along. Please!]

[Another footnote: Note also that apply_power_to_main_engine() and pause_process() are functions defined elsewhere in the code used to control the starbase's primary engine. Comment them out when you need to try out this code! But don't try the code now—you won't see anything. Unless you're on the starbase!]

"Do you want me to insert the code in the primary system?" asked Trision.

"No, I'll do it. I need you to monitor the secondary systems."

"You need to insert this segment…"

"I know where it goes." Of course, she knew. Trision climbed the steps towards the secondary system interface and took over the console.

"TRISIOOON," Kwamian screamed over the loud alarm siren, "Get. Here. Now."

The attacking starjets were retreating. The interference from the fluctuating power was working. But the main engine was overloading.

If they stop randomising the power output, the enemy starjets will carry on their attack. If they keep they primary engine running in its current state, it will blow up, and…

…and that's not an option they can contemplate.

"Give me 30 seconds. Let me turn on the diagnostics."

"You told me you're sure this works…"

"Just 30 seconds."

Trision toggled CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT to True. He couldn't believe what he saw when he ran the code (remember to comment out the lines with the missing functions to run this code):

... Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 ...

The maximum operating power is 5.5 TW. He had checked and double checked his code before rushing it to the engine room. He was sure he hadn’t made any mistake. What's gone wrong? He couldn't understand…

Dear reader,

This is a good time to have the intermission in this story. It's your turn to look at this code again and make suggestions to Trision. He only has a few seconds to figure out what's wrong. If he can't, it's not good news for the starbase.

Trision didn't make any mistakes in his simulation. And neither Trision nor Kwamian, when she added this code segment to the main code, introduced any typos.

What else could it be?

Once you have a suggestion for Trision, erm, well, he's eight centuries in the future, so there's nothing much you can do, I'm afraid. Just read on…

Ten seconds had gone already. Kwamian wasn't going to give him more than the thirty he asked for. She wasn't going to risk the engine blowing up. The whole starbase would blow up.

Trision closed his eyes. He took two quick, deep breaths. That's all he could afford.

He knew these few lines of code well. Kwamian hadn't messed them up. Had she placed them in the wrong place? He hit the shortcut to go to the top of the code…

…and he saw it.

One of the lines at the top was:

That's it. That's the problem. Luckily, it's an easy fix. Trision knew about this Python pitfall.

Seven minutes earlier, when Trision had barged into the engine room with his precious lines of code, Kwamian took charge of adding them to the main code. She did, and she got this error when she ran the code:

NameError: name 'randint' is not defined

Kwamian was a decent programmer. She wasn't as proficient as Trision, but she had no problems dealing with this error message. The code hadn't relied on random numbers until now. She needed to add an import statement. And since the code used randint(3, 9), she knew she had to import this function from the module:

Error message gone. The engine reset to run on this code. Seconds later, the enemy starjets started struggling. A couple of minutes later, many were retreating. All was going well until the engine overload alarm went off.

Kwamian was standing behind Trision. "Time's up, we need to shut the engine down and revert to our standard operating parameters."

"No, I got it." Trision replaced the import statement with the following one:

He had no time to run tests. He ran the code.

"Reset the alarm. It will be fine now. Trust me."

Kwamian had to make a decision. But she didn't have time to think.

"OK," is all she said. She trusted Trision. She trusted his judgment call.

Pop! This was the last bottle of champagne they had. But that's a good thing. They were all exhausted after the day's events. And they had already finished quite a few bottles.

They were all heroes today. For thirteen hours and twenty-eight minutes, every person on the starbase had performed admirably. But Kwamian, from the other side of the hall, caught Trision's eye. She put on a tired smile and raised a glass towards Trision. Trision also raised his glass and nodded to acknowledge. Everyone was a hero today. But Trision knew what Kwamian meant. He had done well today.

The debrief will have to wait until tomorrow.

A minute of your time. Thank you to all of you who read these articles. And thank you to the paid subscribers and those who contribute from time to time. As you can imagine, a lot of time and effort goes into these articles, all in the evenings and weekends.

If you want to contribute, you can upgrade to a paid subscription, either just for a few months ($5 per month) or using the yearly option ($50).

Alternatively, you can make a one-off contribution whenever you can.

Now, back to the article.

So, what had gone wrong? And how did Trision recognise the problem?

Trision used the randint() function in his code to generate a random number within a specified range. However, randint is just a name, a reference. It could refer to different functions. In fact, there's more than one randint() function in the Python ecosystem.

The most common and well-known one is the one in the random module. The random module is part of Python's standard library.

Another well-known function that's also named randint() is the one in numpy.random, which is NumPy's own random submodule.

But they're not the same function. And their behaviour is different. See whether you can spot this difference. Here's the one from the standard library's random first:

And now here's the one from NumPy. You’ll need to install NumPy if you don’t already have it in your environment:

Did you see that? There are no 3's in this version, but there are 3's in the previous one. The randint() in the standard library's random module includes both the start and end of the range included. In this example, the code chooses a random integer between 1 and 3, including 3. This is not the usual behaviour in Python since, in most places, ranges exclude the endpoint. However, random.randint() doesn't follow this convention.

But the randint() function in numpy.random follows the default Python convention and does not include the endpoint. Therefore, NumPy's randint(1, 3) only picks 1's and 2's.

In the rush to save the starbase, Trision copied the main code snippet he had added to the test version of the primary engine's code. He didn't include the import statement he had used. He was using NumPy:

The output from this code, after the first few iterations of the loop, settled on the following mean power output:

... Mean power: 5.50 Mean power: 5.50 Mean power: 5.50 Mean power: 5.50 Mean power: 5.50 Mean power: 5.50 ...

The power variable only included the values from 3 up to and including 8, but not 9. The mean value of these numbers is 5.5, and 5.5 TW was the absolute maximum mean power output for the engine. He knew he could go higher in the short-lived bursts as long as the mean value never went above this maximum rating.

But when Kwamian used the standard library's random module, the name randint now referred to a different function, the one in the standard library, which includes the endpoint:

The output of this version, as Trision saw in horror in those interminable seconds, is the following:

... Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 Mean power: 6.00 ...

This is the mean value of the integers from 3 up to and including 9. And 6.0 TW is way too high.

What are the lessons learnt for Trision and the team?

Sure, he could have included the import statement in the code he copied on his pad to take to the engine room. That would work. But…

The Dangers of Importing from a Module

But he could also have used a different style of importing that would avoid all ambiguity:

Instead of importing randint() from numpy.random, he could have imported the whole module using import numpy. This forces him to use the expression numpy.random.randint(3, 9) in the code rather than simply randint(3, 9). Sure, it's more typing. But it wouldn't have put the starbase in danger!

Note that we often use the alias np and import numpy as np. But I'll stick to the full version in this article.

When you import a name from a module, such as from random import randint, you're bringing the randint name into the global namespace. Therefore, you can simply use the name randint. If the module is a box of tools, you're taking just one tool out of the box and placing it directly on the workbench with all the other main tools.

But when you import the whole module, import random, you're putting the whole box on the workbench, and you keep all the tools in random inside the box. When you need a tool from the box, you fetch it directly from the box.

In this scenario, it's the module name random that's in the global namespace and not its contents.

Trision Saved the Day, But He Made Another "Mistake"

There's another issue Kwamian and Trision identified in the debriefing session the day after! It's not quite a mistake, but it's still worth pointing out to make sure their code follows best practices.

NumPy's numpy.random.randint() is no longer the recommended way to generate random numbers using NumPy. There's a newer, preferred way:

#10

You create a random number generator using default_rng() and then you call the distribution you need. In this case, you use .integers() to generate random integers from a uniform distribution.

But this is a topic for another day, for another article.

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Final Words

There's nothing wrong with using from <module> import <name> in your imports. But beware of the consequences.

There aren't many disadvantages to importing the whole module instead. Yes, you'll need to type a bit more in your code as you'll need to reference the module name each time you need to use something from the module. But that's a small price to pay to save a starbase from annihilation, don't you think?!

Code in this article uses Python 3.13

The code images used in this article are created using Snappify. [Affiliate link]

For more Python resources, you can also visit Real Python—you may even stumble on one of my own articles or courses there!

And you can find out more about me at stephengruppetta.com

Further reading related to this article’s topic:

Using the NumPy Random Number Generator – Real Python

Appendix: Code BlocksCode Block #1# For optimal primary engine performance, set flag to False CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT = False if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = 0 count = 0 while True: if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: count += 1 # Set and apply new power output power = randint(3, 9) apply_power_to_main_engine(power) pause_process(0.5) if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = ((count - 1) * mean_power + power) / count print(f"Mean power: {mean_power:.2f}") Code Block #2from random import randint Code Block #3from random import randint Code Block #4from numpy.random import randint Code Block #5from random import randint for _ in range(10): print(randint(1, 3)) # 2 # 1 # 2 # 2 # 2 # 3 # 3 # 1 # 3 # 2 Code Block #6from numpy.random import randint for _ in range(10): print(randint(1, 3)) # 2 # 1 # 1 # 2 # 2 # 1 # 2 # 2 # 1 # 1 Code Block #7from numpy.random import randint # For optimal primary engine performance, set flag to False CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT = True if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = 0 count = 0 while True: if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: count += 1 # Set and apply new power output power = randint(3, 9) # apply_power_to_main_engine(power) # pause_process(0.5) if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = ((count - 1) * mean_power + power) / count print(f"Mean power: {mean_power:.2f}") Code Block #8from random import randint # For optimal primary engine performance, set flag to False CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT = True if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = 0 count = 0 while True: if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: count += 1 # Set and apply new power output power = randint(3, 9) # apply_power_to_main_engine(power) # pause_process(0.5) if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = ((count - 1) * mean_power + power) / count print(f"Mean power: {mean_power:.2f}") Code Block #9import numpy # Note that we normally use the alias np # For optimal primary engine performance, set flag to False CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT = True if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = 0 count = 0 while True: if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: count += 1 # Set and apply new power output power = numpy.random.randint(3, 9) # apply_power_to_main_engine(power) # pause_process(0.5) if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = ((count - 1) * mean_power + power) / count print(f"Mean power: {mean_power:.2f}") Code Block #10import numpy # Note that we normally use the alias np # For optimal primary engine performance, set flag to False CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT = True if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = 0 count = 0 rng = numpy.random.default_rng() while True: if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: count += 1 # Set and apply new power output power = rng.integers(3, 9) # apply_power_to_main_engine(power) # pause_process(0.5) if CHECK_MEAN_OUTPUT: mean_power = ((count - 1) * mean_power + power) / count print(f"Mean power: {mean_power:.2f}")

For more Python resources, you can also visit Real Python—you may even stumble on one of my own articles or courses there!

And you can find out more about me at stephengruppetta.com

The Avenging Heroes Among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:49:14 GMT

“The powerful fear art, whatever its form… because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us… becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring.”

“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression, then answered: “To face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” That is the heroism of the inner world, yes, but what makes a person heroic in the world we share is to face the greatest suffering — their own and the world’s — then make of it a found of hope and fulcrum of strength for others. Heroes are transmutation agents — people who alchemize suffering and restlessness and rage into love, who compost disappointment into fertilizer for growth, who break down cynicism to its building blocks of helplessness and hubris, then metabolize the toxin out of the system we call society.

There are myriad kinds of heroes capable of myriad heroisms — the epochal heroisms of speaking truth to power that mobilize the consciousness of a civilization and the small daily heroisms of the invisible labor that makes the world cohere, the heroism of planting a tree and the heroism of abolishing a plantation, the heroism of keeping faith in a friend through a hard time and the heroism of leaving a false love.

It helps to remember this diversity of heroisms, because it saves us from imprisoning our heroes in the expectation that everyone contribute to the shared cause — the great project of human flourishing — in the same way. The protest marcher and the poet are very different kinds of heroes, and it is an act of oppression against the gift of each to measure them on the register of the other. Only when we cease doing that can we begin to recognize the heroes who across the history of every civilization have kept the lighthouse blazing through the dark times — the heroes we call artists.

The Star-Lighter by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

These are the heroes John Berger (November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) celebrates in one of the essays in his 1991 collection Keeping a Rendezvous (public library) — the heroes we need in times “when the just cause is defeated… when our past is dishonoured and its promises and sacrifices shrugged off with ignorant and evil smiles, when whole families come to suspect that those who wield power are deaf to reason and every plea, and that there is no appeal anywhere, when gradually you realize… that They are out to break you, out to break your inheritance, your skills, your communities, your poetry, your clubs, your home and, wherever possible, your bones too.” Of such times, Berger writes:

The avenging heroes are now being dreamt up and awaited. They are already feared by the pitiless and blessed by me and maybe by you.

I would shield any such hero to my fullest capacity. Yet if, during the time I was sheltering him, he told me he liked drawing, or… she told me she’d always wanted to paint, and had never had the chance or the time to do so, if this happened, then I think I’d say: Look, if you want to, it’s possible you may achieve what you are setting out to do in another way, a way less likely to fall out on your comrades and less open to confusion.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up — a lyrical picture-book about the artist within

Echoing Iris Murdoch’s abiding observation that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify” and Auden’s insistence that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act,” Berger adds:

I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.

Complement with Leonard Cohen on what makes a modern saint, James Baldwin on the artist’s role in society, Toni Morrison on the artist’s task in troubled times, and Ernst Becker on heroism and our search for meaning, then revisit Berger on the power of music.

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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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Grace Against Gravity and the Physics of Vulnerability: How Birds Fly and Why They Flock in a V Formation

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:49:11 GMT

“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.”

I am writing this aboard an airplane. An earthbound ape in my airborne cage of metal and glass, I wonder who we would be, in the soul of the species, if we could fly — really fly, the way birds do; if we were born not just seeing “the world all simplified and beautiful and clear-cut in patterns,” as Georgia did out of that small round window, but feeling it. And yet you and I shall never know the open sky as a way of being — never know the touch of a thermal or the taste of a thundercloud, never see our naked shadow on a mountain or slice a cirrus with a wing. What cruel cosmic fate to live on this Pale Blue Dot without ever knowing its blueness. And yet we are recompensed by a consciousness capable of wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery.

It is wonder that led us to invent science — that quickening of curiosity driving every discovery — so that science may repay us with magnified wonder as it reveals the weft and warp of nature — the tapestry of forces and phenomena, of subtleties and complexities, woven on the enchanted loom of reality. To look at any single thread more closely, in all its hidden wonder, is to see more clearly how the entire tapestry holds together, to strengthen how we ourselves hold together across the arc of life. For, as Rachel Carson so memorably wrote, the greatest gift you could give a child — or the eternal child in you — is “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments… the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Art by Nikki McClure from Something About the Sky — Rachel Carson’s serenade to the wonder of the clouds

Take the wonder of a bird — this living poem of feather and physics, of barometric wizardry and hollow bone, in whose profoundly other brain evolution invented dreams. That so tiny a creature should defy the gravitational pull of an entire planet seems impossible, miraculous. And yet beneath this defiance is an active surrender to the same immutable laws that make the whole miracle of the universe possible.

In one of the three dozen fascinating essays collected in The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature (public library), the poetic physicist and novelist Alan Lightman illuminates the lawful wonder of avian flight, from evolution to aerodynamics, from molecules to mathematics, beginning with the fundamental wonderment of how a bird creates strong enough an upward force to counter gravity’s pull on its weight:

[The force] is created by a net upward air pressure, which in turn is created by the bird’s forward motion and the shape of its wings. The topside of an avian wing is curved, while the bottom side is rather flat. This difference in shape, together with the angle and some smaller adjustments of the wing, cause the air to flow over the top of the wing at higher speed than on the bottom. The higher speed on top reduces the air pressure above the wing compared to the air pressure below the wing. With more pressure pushing up from below than pressure pushing down from above, the wing gets an upward lift.

Anatomy of a bird by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

It may seem counterintuitive that a higher air speed above the wing would produce a lower pressure, but our creaturely intuitions have often been poor reflections of reality — it took us eons to discern that the flat surface beneath our feet is a sphere, that the sphere is not at the center of the universe, and that there is an invisible force acting on objects without touching them to make the universe cohere — a force which a bored twenty-something sitting in his mother’s apple orchard called gravity.

Alan explains the reality of chemistry and physics that makes flight possible as air molecules strike against the underside of the wing to lift the bird up:

Air consists of little molecules that push against whatever they strike, causing pressure. Molecules of air are constantly whizzing about in all directions. If no energy is added, the total speed of the molecules must be constant, by the law of the conservation of energy. But that speed is composed of two parts: a horizontal speed, parallel to the wing, and a vertical speed, perpendicular to the wing. Increase the horizontal speed of air molecules above the wing, and the vertical speed of those molecules must decrease. Lower speed of molecules striking the wing from above means less pressure, or less push. The molecules on the bottom of the wing, moving slower in the horizontal direction but faster in the vertical direction (with greater upward pressure), lift the wing upward.

The lift is greater the larger the wing area and the faster the speed of air past the wing. There’s a convenient trade-off here. The necessary lift force to counterbalance the bird’s weight can be had with less wing area if the animal increases its forward speed, and vice versa. Birds capitalize on this option according to their individual needs. The great blue heron, for example, has long, slender legs for wading and must fly slowly so as not to break them on landing. Consequently, herons have relatively large wingspan. Pheasants, on the other hand, maneuver in underbrush and would find large wings cumbersome. To remain airborne with their relatively short and stubby wings, pheasants must fly fast.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

There are, however, limits to this factorial conversation between surface and speed. Alan considers why there are no birds the size of elephants:

As you scale up the size of a bird or any material thing, unless you drastically change its shape, its weight increases faster than its area. Weight is proportional to volume, or length times length times length, while area is proportional to length times length. Double the length, and the weight is eight times larger, while the area is only four times larger. For example, if you have a cube of 1 inch on a side, its volume is 1 cubic inch, while its total area is 6 (sides) × 1 square inch, or 6 square inches. If you double the side of the cube to 2 inches, its volume goes up to 8 cubic inches, or 800 percent (with a similar increase in weight), while its area goes up to 24 square inches, or 400 percent. Since the lift force is proportional to the wing area while the opposing weight force is proportional to the bird’s volume, as you continue scaling up, eventually you reach a point where the bird’s wing area is not enough to keep it aloft. Although birds have been experimenting with flight for 100 million years, the heaviest true flying bird, the great bustard, rarely exceeds 42 pounds. The larger gliding birds, such as vultures, are lifted by rising hot air columns and don’t carry their full weight.

But all this elaborate molecular and mathematical aerodynamics of upward motion is not enough to make flight possible — birds must also propel themselves forward without propellers. For a long time, how they do this was a mystery. (The mystery was even deeper for the singular flight of the hummingbird, hovering between science and magic.) It was the birth of modern aviation that finally shed light on it. In the early nineteenth century, watching how birds glide, the pioneering engineer and aerial investigator George Cayley became the first human being to discern the mechanics of flight, identifying the three forces acting on the weight of any flying body: lift, drag, and thrust.

Art by Keizaburō Tejima from Swan Sky

Alan details the physics of drag and thrust that allow birds to move forward:

Birds do in fact have propellers, in the form of specially designed feathers in the outer halves of their wings. These feathers, called primaries, change their shape and position during a wingbeat. Forward thrust is obtained by pushing air backward with each flap. In a similar manner, we are able to move forward in a swimming pool by vigorously moving our arms backward against the water.

All of this helps explain why larger birds often fly in a V formation — each bird benefits from the uplifting air pockets produced by the bird in front of it, conserving 20 to 30 percent of the calories needed for flight compared to flying solo. Because the lead bird takes most of the aerodynamic and caloric brunt shielding the rest from the wind, the flock takes turns in the frontmost position.

This, too, is the physics of any healthy community, any healthy relationship — the physics of vulnerability and trust. Because life always exerts different pressures on each person at different times, internal or external, thriving together is not a matter of always pulling equal weight but of accommodating the ebb and flow of one another’s vulnerability, each trusting the other to shield them in times of depletion, then doing the shielding when replenished. One measure of love may be the willingness to be the lead bird shielding someone dear in their time of struggle, lifting up their wings with your stubborn presence.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Couple this fragment of The Miraculous from the Material — the rest of which explores the science behind wonders like fireflies and eclipses, hummingbirds and Saturn’s rings — with the peregrine falcon as a way of seeing and a state of being, the enchanting otherness of what it’s like to be an owl, and the science of what birds dream about.

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Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:33:53 GMT

Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan walk into a bar. The bartender serves them tainted alcohol because there are no regulations. They die.

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:33:51 GMT

I started a feature list on the About WordLand page.

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:24:46 GMT

What matters with social networks is what you can get done there, not so much the features of the network. Bluesky has the same features today it had a month ago. The difference is we had an election in the US, I guess that was the catalyst. The presence of Elon Musk so close to Trump says there is a need for a Musk-free place. I've kept my account on Twitter. I started there in 2006, and I love the web more than I feel it would do any good to erase my presence there. It's pretty much against my religion to deliberately erase bits of the web. And whatever you think of Twitter, it is most definitely part of the web.

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:22:59 GMT

It's noteworthy that we haven't seen many outages as Bluesky scales. On Twitter they had fail whales for years.

November 19, 2024 (Tuesday)

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:21:44 GMT

For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.

A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.

They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.

And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.

On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began. While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their enslaved Black neighbors—Lincoln dated the nation from the Declaration of Independence.

The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed to be “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

He noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”

“It is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and to vow that “these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

[Image of President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, center-left, with his head tilted downward. Work is in the U.S. public domain, obtained here from Wikimedia Commons.]

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 15:11:39 GMT

On Bluesky, inbound RSS is becoming a thing.

18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 18:24:52 GMT

Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another.

This is all to say: Ever since I first began reflecting on what I have learned about living with each passing year of writing The Marginalian (because writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life), these learnings have always been profoundly personal — not overt advice to anyone else, but notes to myself about what I have needed to learn and keep relearning. I write them and share them for the same reason I read — so that we may feel less alone in our individual experience, which is just a commonplace fractal of the total human experience. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin reflected in his finest interview, “but then you read.”)

On this 18th anniversary of the birth of The Marginalian, here are all of these learnings so far as they were originally written in years past, beginning with the present year’s — the most challenging and most transformative of my life.

18. How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage. (Only strong people are safe people, the measure of strength being not the absence of vulnerability — and “weakness” is just a judgment term for vulnerability — but the ability to carry one’s vulnerability with such self-awareness and valor so as not to harm other lives.) Seek to be such a person.

17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.

15. Outgrow yourself.

14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

And here, drawn from the archive, are 18 pieces consonant with these learnings — readings and writings that have fomented these reckonings with how to live.

1. Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss

2. An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days

3. How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

4. Love Anyway

5. The Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence

6. What Happens When We Die

7. Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

8. A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

9. The Missing Piece Meets the Big O: Shel Silverstein’s Sweet Allegory for the Simple Secret of Love and the Key to Nurturing Relationships

10. The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular

11. The Eternal Lyric of Love and Loss: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Poems for the Tragic Love of Her Life

12. What Birds Dream About: The Evolution of REM and How We Practice the Possible in Our Sleep

13. The Bittersweet Story of the Real-Life Peaceful Bull Who Inspired Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand

14. A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want

15. An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection

16. The Monarchs, Music, and the Meaning of Life: The Most Touching Deathbed Love Letter Ever Written

17. How to See More Clearly and Love More Purely: Iris Murdoch on the Angst of Not Knowing Ourselves and Each Other

18. The Donkey and the Meaning of Eternity: Nobel-Winning Spanish Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Love Letter to Life

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Pluralistic: Of course we can tax billionaires (15 Oct 2024)

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 01:25:38 GMT

Today's links Of course we can tax billionaires: They disguise their demands ("don't tax billionaires") as observations ("it is technically impossible to tax billionaires"). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest.

Of course we can tax billionaires (permalink)

Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.

If it's impossible to tax billionaires, then anyone who demands that we tax billionaires is being childish. If taxing billionaires is impossible, then being mad that we're not taxing billionaires is like being mad at gravity.

Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that "there is no alternative" to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ("stop trying to think of alternatives") as a scientific truth ("there is no alternative") sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you're doing science.

Billionaires basically don't pay tax – that's a big part of how they got to be billionaires:

https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

By cheating on their taxes, they get to keep – and invest – more money than less-rich people (who get to keep more money than regular people and poor people, obvs). They get so much money that they can "invest" it in corrupting the political process, for example, by flushing vast sums of dark money into elections to unseat politicians who care about finance crime and replace them with crytpo-friendly lawmakers who'll turn a blind eye to billionaires' scams:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster

Once someone gets rich enough, they acquire impunity. They become too big to fail. They become too big to jail. They become too big to care. They buy presidents. They become president.

A decade ago, Thomas Piketty published his landmark Capital in the 21st Century, tracing three centuries of global capital flows and showing how extreme inequality creates political instability, leading to bloody revolutions and world wars that level the playing field by destroying most of the world's capital in an orgy of violence, with massive collateral damage:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Piketty argued that unless we taxed the rich, we would attain the same political instability that provoked the World Wars, but in a nuclear-tipped world that was poised on the brink of ecological collapse. He even laid out a program for this taxation, one that took account of all the things rich people would do to try to hide their assets.

Today, the destruction that Piketty prophesied is on our doorstep, and all over the world, political will is gathering to do something about our billionaire problem. The debate rages from France to a dozen-plus US states that are planning wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.

Wherever that debate takes hold, billionaires and their proxies pop up to tell us that we're Doing Ideology, that there is no alternative, and that it is literally impossible to tax the ultra-rich.

In a new blog post, Piketty deftly demolishes this argument, showing how thin the arguments for the impossibility of a billionaire tax really is:

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2024/10/15/how-to-tax-billionaires/

First, there's the argument that the ultra-rich are actually quite poor. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don't have a lot of money, they have a lot of stock, which they can't sell. Why can't they sell their stock? You'll hear a lot of complicated arguments about illiquidity and the effect on the share-price of a large sell-off, but they all boil down to this: if we make billionaires sell a bunch of their stock, they will be poorer.

No duh.

Piketty has an answer to the liquidity crisis of our poormouthing billionaires:

If finding a buyer is challenging, the government could accept these shares as payment for taxes. If necessary, it could then sell these shares through various methods, such as offering employees to purchase them, which would increase their stake in the company.

Though Piketty doesn't say so, billionaires are not actually poor. They have fucktons of cash, which they acquire through something called "buy, borrow, die," which allows them to create intergenerational dynastic wealth for their failsons:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/buy-borrow-die-rich-avoid-140004536.html

Billionaires know they're not poor. They even admit it, when they say, "Okay, but the other reason it's impossible to tax us is that we're richer and therefore more powerful than the governments that want to try it."

Piketty points out the shell-game at the core of this argument: the free movement of money that allows for tax-dodging was created by governments. They made these laws, so they can change them. Governments that can't exercise their sovereign power to tax the wealthy end up taxing the poor, eroding their legitimacy and hence their power. Taxing the rich – a wildly popular move – will make governments more powerful, not less.

Big countries like the US (and federations like the EU) have a lot of power. The US ended Swiss banking secrecy and manages to tax Americans living abroad. There's no reason that France couldn't pass a wealth-tax that applies to people based on their historical residency: a 51 year old French billionaire who decamps to Switzerland to duck a wealth tax after 50 years in France could be held liable for 50/51 of the wealth tax.

The final argument Piketty takes up is the old saw that taxing the rich is illegal, or, if it were made legal, would be unconstitutional. As Piketty says, rich people have taken this position every single time they faced meaningful tax enforcement, and they have repeatedly lost this fight. France has repeatedly levied wealth taxes, as long ago as 1789 and as recently as 1945.

Taxing the ultra-rich isn't like the secret of embalming Pharaohs – it's not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. This was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation's history. These are the "good old days" Republicans say they want to return to.

The super-rich keep getting richer. In France, the 500 richest families were worth a combined €200b in 2010. Today, it's €1.2 trillion. No wonder a global wealth tax is at the top of the agenda for next month's G20 Summit in Rio.

Here in the US – where money can easily move across state lines and where multiple states are racing each other to the bottom to be the best onshore/offshore tax- and financial secrecy haven – state-level millionaire taxes are kicking ass.

Massachusetts's 2024 millionaire tax has raised more than $1.8b, exceeding all expectations (it was originally benchmarked at $1b), by taxing annual income in excess of $1m at an additional 4%:

https://www.boston.com/news/business/2024/05/21/heres-how-much-the-new-massachusetts-millionaires-tax-has-raised-this-year/

This is exactly the kind of tax that billionaires say is impossible. It's so easy to turn ordinary income into sheltered income – realizing it as a capital gain, say – so raising taxes on income will do nothing. Who are you gonna believe, billionaires or the 1.8 billion dead presidents lying around the Massachusetts Department of Revenue?

But say you are worried that taxing ordinary income is a nonstarter because of preferential capital gains treatment. No worry, Washington State has you covered. Its 7% surcharge on capital gains in excess of $250,000 also exceeded all expectations, bringing in $600m more than expected in its first year – a year when the stock market fell by 25%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

Okay, but what if all those billionaires flee your state? Good riddance, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. All we need is an exit tax, like the one in California, which levies a one-time 0.4% tax on net worth over $30m for any individual who leaves the state.

Billionaires are why we can't have nice things – a sensible climate policy, workers' rights, a functional Supreme Court and legislatures that answer to the people, rather than deep-pocketed donors.

The source of billionaires' power isn't mysterious: it's their money. Take away the money, take away the power. With more than a dozen states considering wealth taxes, we're finally in a race to the top, to see which state can attack the corrosive power of extreme wealth most aggressively.

Hey look at this (permalink)

What It Means to Be "A Tad Radical" https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-it-means-to-be-a-tad-radical

Legal complaint filed against Fifa's 'abuse of dominance' https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c981203e61qo

Stop Project 2025 Comic https://stopproject2025comic.org (h/t Sumana Harihareswara)

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Why Your Idea to Save Journalism Won’t Work (a checklist) https://www.metafilter.com/85761/How-To-Save-Media#2776753

#15yrsago Brit copyright group says, “No laptops allowed in cinemas” https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/15/brit-copyright-group-says-no-laptops-allowed-in-cinemas/

#15yrsago Complex derivatives are “intractable” — you can’t tell if they’re being tampered with https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2009/10/15/intractability-financial-derivatives/

#10yrsago Jean Baudrillard predicted the Pumpkin Spice Latte http://www.critical-theory.com/understanding-jean-baudrillard-with-pumpkin-spice-lattes/

#10yrsago Obama administration has secured 526 months of jail time for leakers https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/leak-prosecutions-obama-takes-it-11-or-should-we

#5yrsago Samuel Delany’s 1977 Star Wars review: why is the future so damned white and male? https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/15/samuel-delanys-1977-star-wars-review-why-is-the-future-so-damned-white-and-male/

#5yrsago The rich poop different: measuring inequality with sewage https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1910242116

#5yrsago 1 in 14 Trump appointees is a former lobbyist, four times the rate under Obama https://www.propublica.org/article/we-found-a-staggering-281-lobbyists-whove-worked-in-the-trump-administration#169046

#5yrsago The first-ever mandatory California drug price report reveals Big Pharma’s farcical price-gouging https://californiahealthline.org/news/californias-new-transparency-law-reveals-staggering-rise-in-wholesale-drug-prices/

#5yrsago The far right is dominating the information wars through “keyword signaling” https://www.wired.com/story/devin-nunes-and-the-dark-power-of-keyword-signaling/

#5yrsago Medallion Status: comparison is the thief of joy, and John Hodgman is the thief-taker https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/15/medallion-status-comparison-is-the-thief-of-joy-and-john-hodgman-is-the-thief-taker/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18
https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/

SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn

Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23
https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow

TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
https://tusconscificon.com/

International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18
https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/

Recent appearances (permalink) Speciale intervista a Cory Doctorow (Digitalia)
https://digitalia.fm/744/

Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE

Go Fact Yourself
https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/

Latest books (permalink) The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 762 words (63956 words total).

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024)

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 01:24:18 GMT

Today's links You should be using an RSS reader: The one thing you can choose to do that will make your internet life better and make the internet better for everyone else, too. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest.

You should be using an RSS reader (permalink)

No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren't really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.

I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, "What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?"

It's frustrating, but my general answer is, "Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with EFF, with the FSF. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something systemic."

There's very little you can do as a consumer. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar and digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without. The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can't agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave for and so end up stuck there.

I've been experiencing some challenging stuff in my personal life lately and yesterday, I just found myself unable to deal with my usual podcast fare so I tuned into the videos from the very last XOXO, in search of uplifting fare:

https://www.youtube.com/@xoxofest

I found it. Talks by Dan Olson, Cabel Sasser, Ed Yong and many others, especially Molly White:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c

Molly's talk was so, so good, but when I got to her call to action, I found myself pulling a bit of a face:

But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable…

Are the platforms really that vulnerable? The collective action problem is so hard, the switching costs are so high – maybe the fact that "there's a lot more of us than there are of them" is a bug, not a feature. The more of us there are, the thornier our collective action problem and the higher the switching costs, after all.

And then I had a realization: the conduit through which I experience Molly's excellent work is totally enshittification-proof, and the more I use it, the easier it is for everyone to be less enshittified.

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.

It's RSS.

RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, "Really Simple Syndication") is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public "feeds." For example, rather than reloading the Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this very hard to do!), you can just sign up for Wired's RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they're published. Wired pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes Wired nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow Wired's feed without any cookies, and Wired gets no information about which of its stories you read. Wired doesn't even get to know that you're monitoring its feed.

I don't mean to pick on Wired here. This goes for every news source I follow – from CNN to the New York Times. But RSS isn't just good for the news! It's good for everything. Your friends' blogs? Every blogging platform emits an RSS feed by default. You can follow every one of them in your reader.

Not just blogs. Do you follow a bunch of substackers or other newsletters? They've all got RSS feeds. You can read those newsletters without ever registering in the analytics of the platforms that host them. The text shows up in black and white (not the sadistic, 8-point, 80% grey-on-white type these things all default to). It is always delivered, without any risk of your email provider misclassifying an update as spam:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you've read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is unbelievably gross, and you get to bypass all of it, just by reading in RSS.

Are your friends too pithy for a newsletter, preferring to quip on social media? Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to get an RSS feed from Insta/FB/Twitter, but all those new ones that have popped up? They all have feeds. You can follow any Mastodon account (which means you can follow any Threads account) via RSS. Same for Bluesky. That also goes for older platforms, like Tumblr and Medium. There's RSS for Hacker News, and there's a sub-feed for the comments on every story. You can get RSS feeds for the Fedex, UPS and USPS parcels you're awaiting, too.

Your local politician's website probably has an RSS feed. Ditto your state and national reps. There's an RSS feed for each federal agency (the FCC has a great blog!).

Your RSS reader lets you put all these feeds into folders if you want. You can even create automatic folders, based on keywords, or even things like "infrequently updated sites" (I follow a bunch of people via RSS who only update a couple times per year – cough, Danny O'Brien, cough – and never miss a post).

Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

Now, you sign up to so many feeds that you're feeling overwhelmed and you want an algorithm to prioritize posts – or recommend content. Lots of RSS readers have some kind of algorithm and recommendation system (I use News, which offers both, though I don't use them – I like the glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of the undifferentiated firehose feed).

But you control the algorithm, you control the recommendations. And if a new RSS reader pops up with an algorithm you're dying to try, you can export all the feeds you follow with a single click, which will generate an OPML file. Then, with one click, you can import that OPML file into any other RSS reader in existence and all your feeds will be seamlessly migrated there. You can delete your old account, or you can even use different readers for different purposes.

You can access RSS in a browser or in an app on your phone (most RSS readers have an app), and they'll sync up, so a story you mark to read later on your phone will be waiting for you the next time you load up your reader in a browser tab, and you won't see the same stories twice (unless you want to, in which case you can mark them as unread).

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here's the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being! The collective action problem that the publishers and friends and politicians and businesses you care about is caused by the fact that everyone they want to reach is on a platform, so if they leave the platform, they'll lose that community. But the more people who use RSS to follow them, the less they'll depend on the platform.

Unlike those largely useless, performative boycotts of widely used platforms, switching to RSS doesn't require that you give anything up. Not only does switching to RSS let you continue to follow all the newsletters, webpages and social media accounts you're following now, it makes doing so better: more private, more accessible, and less enshittified.

Switching to RSS lets you experience just the good parts of the enshitternet, but that experience is delivered in manner that the new, good internet we're all dying for.

My own newsletter is delivered in fulltext via RSS. If you're reading this as a Mastodon or Twitter thread, on Tumblr or on Medium, or via email, you can get it by RSS instead:

https://pluralistic.net/feed/

Don't worry about which RSS reader you start with. It literally doesn't matter. Remember, you can switch readers with two clicks and take all the feeds you've subscribed to with you! If you want a recommendation, I have nothing but praise for Newsblur, which I've been paying $2/month for since 2011 (!):

https://newsblur.com/

Subscribing to feeds is super-easy, too: the links for RSS feeds are invisibly embedded in web-pages. Just paste the URL of a web-page into your RSS reader's "add feed" box and it'll automagically figure out where the feed lives and add it to your subscriptions.

It's still true that the new, good internet will require a movement to overcome the collective action problems and the legal barriers to disenshittifying things. Almost nothing you do as an individual is going to make a difference.

But using RSS will! Using RSS to follow the stuff that matters to you will have an immediate, profoundly beneficial impact on your own digital life – and it will appreciably, irreversibly nudge the whole internet towards a better state.

Hey look at this (permalink)

* You Can't Make Friends With The Rockstars https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/

Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia (And Vice Versa) https://taylorjessen.blogspot.com/2024/10/tom-lehrer-tom-lehrer-discovers.html

Conceptual models of space colonization https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony bullies Retropod off the net https://web.archive.org/web/20041018040446/http://www.retropod.com/

#15yrsago This Side of Jordan – Violent jazz age novel by Charles M Schulz’s son Monte https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/16/this-side-of-jordan-violent-jazz-age-novel-by-charles-m-schulzs-son-monte/

#10yrsago FBI chief demands an end to cellphone security https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/politics/fbi-director-in-policy-speech-calls-dark-devices-hindrance-to-crime-solving.html

#10yrsago Please, Disney: put back John’s grandad’s Haunted Mansion tombstone https://thedisneyblog.com/2014/10/16/petition-to-return-a-lost-tombstone-to-the-haunted-mansion/

#10yrsago How Microsoft hacked trademark law to let it secretly seize whole businesses https://www.wired.com/2014/10/microsoft-pinkerton/

#10yrsago If you think you’ve anonymized a data set, you’re probably wrong https://web.archive.org/web/20141014172827/http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-passenger-privacy-in-the-nyc-taxicab-dataset/

#10yrsago The lost cyber-crayolas of the mid-1990s https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/16/the-lost-cyber-crayolas-of-the-mid-1990s/

#5yrsago “The People’s Money”: A crisp, simple, thorough explanation of how government spending is paid for https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2019/10/the-peoples-money-part-1.html

#5yrsago What it’s like to have Apple rip off your successful Mac app https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/what-its-like-to-have-apple-rip-off-your-successful-mac-app/

#5yrsago Blizzard suspends college gamers from competitive play after they display “Free Hong Kong” poster https://www.vice.com/en/article/three-college-hearthstone-protesters-banned-for-six-months/

#5yrsago Terrified of bad press after its China capitulation, Blizzard cancels NYC Overwatch event https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-15/blizzard-cancels-overwatch-event-as-it-tries-to-contain-backlash

#5yrsago A San Diego Republican operator ran a massive, multimillion-dollar Facebook scam that targeted boomers https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc

#5yrsago Britain’s unbelievably stupid, dangerous porn “age verification” scheme is totally dead https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/uk-government-abandons-planned-porn-age-verification-scheme/

#5yrsago Not only is Google’s auto-delete good for privacy, it’s also good news for competition https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/not-only-is-googles-auto-delete-good-for-privacy-its-also-good-news-for-competition/

#5yrsago Edward Snowden on the global war on encryption: “This is our new battleground” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/15/encryption-lose-privacy-us-uk-australia-facebook

#5yrsago In Kansas’s poor, sick places, hospitals and debt collectors send the ailing to debtor’s prison https://features.propublica.org/medical-debt/when-medical-debt-collectors-decide-who-gets-arrested-coffeyville-kansas

#5yrsago Want a ride in a Lyft? Just sign away your right to sue if they kill, maim, rape or cheat you https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/want-a-ride-in-a-lyft-just-sign-away-your-right-to-sue-if-they-kill-maim-rape-or-cheat-you/

#5yrsago #RedForEd rebooted: Chicago’s teachers are back on strike https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/union-strike-chicago-teachers/

#1yrago One of America's most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18
https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/

SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn

Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23
https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow

TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
https://tusconscificon.com/

International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18
https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/

Recent appearances (permalink) Speciale intervista a Cory Doctorow (Digitalia)
https://digitalia.fm/744/

Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE

Go Fact Yourself
https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/

Upcoming books (permalink) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 818 words (64779 words total).

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Judge Invalidates Georgia’s Election Certification Rules

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 01:22:50 GMT

“A judge invalidated seven new Georgia election rules Wednesday, including requirements for a ‘reasonable inquiry’ before elections are certified, hand counts on election night and additional access for partisan poll watchers,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.

CNN: “Among the rules Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox said violated state law are two that would require county election officials to conduct a ‘reasonable inquiry’ into election results before certifying them and allow them to ‘examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results.'”

files-to-prompt 0.4

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 01:22:41 GMT

files-to-prompt 0.4

New release of my files-to-prompt tool adding an option for filtering just for files with a specific extension.

The following command will output Claude XML-style markup for all Python and Markdown files in the current directory, and copy that to the macOS clipboard ready to be pasted into an LLM:

files-to-prompt . -e py -e md -c | pbcopy

Tags: projects, python, llms

How to Worry Less and Be Happier

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 14:24:35 GMT

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

Everybody has worries. In early 2023, according to the market-research firm Ipsos, the five most common worries of people worldwide were inflation, poverty and social inequality, crime and violence, unemployment, and corruption (financial and political). Such surveys ask respondents to choose from a list of typical global problems. In that regard, they no doubt diverge from your personal worries, which might be even greater: a perceived change in your partner’s affections, perhaps, or your child’s rather mixed performance in school, or that sore spot on the back of your leg.

Although worrying a bit is normal, for some people, worrying can be a dominant element of a generalized anxiety that steals their peace and sucks up valuable time. “I have been worrying and fretting myself, and I don’t know what I am doing,” says Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. “Yesterday and the day before yesterday and all this time I have been worrying myself.” If you too are a chronic worrier, this will ring familiar.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Sleep more and be happier]

Your loved ones have probably offered you all kinds of true but unhelpful advice, such as “Worrying won’t help”—as if that insight would make you slap your forehead and become worry free. Maybe you have at times despaired that this condition of anxiety is simply your lot in life. But the cause is not lost: With some knowledge and a bit of practice, you can make 2024 a far less worrisome—and thus happier—year.

Worrying is a recursive mental attempt to resolve a situation that has an uncertain, possibly negative outcome. As a mental operation, it is similar to rumination in that both are repetitive and self-focused, and feature an inability to shift attention from negative thoughts. Both activities also harm attention, erode problem-solving, and worsen mood. The distinction between them is that rumination typically involves brooding on trouble in the past, whereas worry usually focuses on events that, to your knowledge, have not yet occurred. You ruminate on a bad conversation you had yesterday; you worry about the conversation you need to have tomorrow.

A number of psychological theories have been advanced to explain chronic worry. One of the most prominent is called the avoidance model, which explains how worry can become obsessive and intrusive in our lives. This model argues that inveterate worriers replace thoughts of clear outcomes of problems, especially potentially catastrophic ones, with a hazy sense of negativity that’s harder to act upon. In support of this idea, subsequent research has shown that when people prone to worry are shown negative images, the parts of the brain normally associated with processing stimuli—the parietal cortex and the insula—are relatively disengaged. In other words, worrying seems to mute the vividness of our mental picture, interfering with some of the pathways that could help us devise real solutions.

[Derek Thompson: How anxiety became content]

Second, the avoidance model suggests that worriers hold a belief that if they think enough about a threat, they will manage to avoid it. Research has revealed that worriers believe that their worrying will help them learn how to handle a situation better or increase their control of it. This conviction also contains an element of superstition, as if worrying per se could somehow ward off negative events and prevent them from occurring. For some people, therefore, worrying is like wearing a pair of lucky socks or carrying around a rabbit’s foot. This is similar to the belief that you can “jinx” something by talking about it, and equally inefficacious.

Some evidence suggests that chronic worrying actually has a genetic component. The so-called worrier/warrior gene determines how well catecholamines—neurotransmitters and hormones released into the body in response to stress—are broken down. Worriers have a gene variant that allows them, researchers presume, to process excess dopamine efficiently in areas of the brain associated with working memory. The warrior variant has a different genetic characteristic that may enable superior absorption of neurotransmitters in regions that handle negative information; a person with this variant seems better equipped to be calm under fire.

Chronic worriers tend to be people who deal poorly with uncertainty, who struggle with narrowed focus, are self-conscious, and have social anxiety. The good news is that, generally, the susceptibility to worry declines as we age. According to a 2009 Gallup poll, 37 percent of people in their 40s report experiencing worry “a lot of the day yesterday”; for people in their late 60s, this falls to 23 percent, and to 15 percent for nonagenarians and older. We know that people tend to become less neurotic as they age, but it is also possible that they simply have less to worry about at 90 than they did at 40. (All the more reason to look forward to getting old.)

[George Packer: I worry we’ll soon forget about Ukraine]

A seeming exception to the downside is that worry is positively correlated with high performance—but only among people with unusual levels of ability. You might interpret this as evidence that worrying is good for top-notch performers, but much more probable in my view is that such people tend to be in extremely stressful situations anyway, which leads to a lot of apprehension—and, in fact, these talented individuals might do even better if they could control their worrying. For them, too, as for everyone, worry is terrible for well-being: It is linked to depression, it increases the perception of pain, and it’s associated with procrastination and perfectionism.

On top of everything else, worrying is not based in reality most of the time. As the stoic philosopher Seneca noted, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” His assertion bears up under empirical scrutiny. According to research from 2020 in the journal Behavior Therapy, 91 percent of the things studied participants worried about did not come to pass. This means that for every bad thing that happens, chronic worriers suffer for 10. If nothing else, this is a colossal waste of valuable time, and we should all find ways to avoid it.

Easier said than done. If you are a worrier, simply willing it away is something you have probably tried—unsuccessfully—many times. The science gives us a better strategy, based on worry’s component parts.

1. Write your worry down.
Anxiety, of which worry is a component, is essentially just unfocused fear. Without a true focus, fear is a phantasm that you will struggle to deal with adequately. Much better to focus the fear by articulating it to yourself. You can do this by making a list: When you are worried about a bunch of things, take a sheet of paper and write down the five that you’re most anxious about. This is an effective metacognitive technique—as I’ve written before, thinking about thinking—that defines and puts limits around the sources of your discomfort. Naming them in a list makes them emotionally manageable.

2. Focus on outcomes, not problems.
Remember that worry generally focuses on problems but avoids actual outcomes. So you worry about an upcoming medical test but don’t admit to yourself what the “bad” outcome you fear actually is. If you could voice that fear, you would give yourself a chance to think about what you could actually do in that case. So, on your worry list, write down the best outcome for each problem, the worst outcome, and the most likely outcome. Then add what you would do in each instance. This makes the source of worry specific and gives you a management plan. With that, you’ll be able to park the problem mentally and experience relief from worry.

3. Fight your superstition.
Give up the magical thinking that if you torture yourself enough about some uncertainty, you will somehow improve the situation. Perseverative worry will not give you some unique insight, nor will you alter the universe through the power of your thoughts. This is what your loved ones mean when they tell you “Worrying won’t help.” Make this more helpful by telling yourself “My worrying will not change the course of events,” and use the social science outlined in this article to reinforce this rational resolve.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The seven habits that lead to happiness in old age]

4. Seize the day.
Worry robs you of valuable time in your life. When you wake up in the morning, declare your intention to stop spending time this way. Here’s what I say: “I don’t know what this day will bring, but I am alive to experience it and will not waste it worrying about things I cannot control.” (Another good one is the Serenity Prayer.) Will you still worry some? Probably, but this statement of intent can set you on a better course. Research does in fact show that this type of mental exercise—which involves identifying specific alternate, goal-oriented behavior—promotes goal achievement.

One more point: Worriers often beat themselves up for their habit, as if worrying were a purely personal failing. One possible countermeasure for a chronic worrier is to ask yourself whether something or someone might be encouraging this in you for some gain of their own. Major economic interests, for example, reside in maintaining a worried population. In addition, activists, our political system, and news media foment anxiety to capture support, votes, or attention. That’s why doomscrolling—obsessively reading bad news—is good for business but bad for you.

The one profiting from your worry might be closer still. One of the hallmarks of a toxic relationship is one in which you are purposely and systematically made to feel anxious and fretful, making you more pliable and easier to manipulate.

No one is responsible for making your tendency to worry go away, but you in turn have no responsibility to give your support, votes, attention, or affection to someone who will use your anxiety to their advantage. If someone or something is prospering from your worries, 2024 might be the year to declare independence.

Language learning with AI: building an AI-powered Anki plugin

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 14:56:39 GMT

When I learn with Anki using decks prepared by other people, the thing I miss the most is examples. I like to see an example usage of the word. Also, learning the word in context works best. Therefore, assuming I want to learn the word das Waffenstillstand (ceasefire), I would prepare a card with the question:

ceasefire Die beiden Länder haben endlich einen [ceasefire] vereinbart. (The two countries have finally agreed to a ceasefire.)

and the answer

das Waffenstillstand Die beiden Länder haben endlich einen Waffenstillstand vereinbart.

It takes a lot of effort to prepare word decks like this. Even if you use ChatGPT to generate the sentences, copy-pasting them takes too long. Because of that, I wanted to automate the process.

I wanted an Anki plugin to retrieve an example sentence from ChatGPT, edit the card, and immediately display an updated card. I don’t need an example for every word, so generating a sentence should be an option I have to trigger manually, preferably using a keyboard shortcut.

The Anatomy of an Anki Plugin

An Anki plugin may consist of a single Python file. Anki will load the __init__.py file from your plugin directory and run whatever code Anki finds inside. You can split the plugin into multiple Python files or even include dependencies inside the plugin directory. However, if all you need is a single menu item, putting all of the code inside the __init__.py file may be sufficient. I also replaced the requests library with the built-in http.client so I didn’t need to include any dependencies.

Adding a Menu Option

To add a menu item in Anki, we must create a QAction and add the tool menu button. Anki triggers the edit_with_ai function when the user clicks the button. The same action gets triggered when the user presses Ctrl+G or Command+G.

from aqt import mw from aqt.qt import * ... def add_edit_with_ai_button(): edit_with_ai_button = QAction("Edit with AI", mw) edit_with_ai_button.triggered.connect(edit_with_ai) edit_with_ai_button.setShortcut(QKeySequence("Ctrl+G")) mw.form.menuTools.addAction(edit_with_ai_button) add_edit_with_ai_button()

Book a free call Preparing an Example with AI

The OpenAI API requires an API key, and we have to store the value somewhere. Putting it directly in the code is a terrible idea, so I stored the key in the ~/.anki/openai file. Therefore, the first part of the script, after the imports, opens the file and reads the API key:

import os with open(os.path.expanduser("~/.anki/openai")) as f: API_KEY = f.read().strip()

Finally, we can call the API. As mentioned earlier, I wanted to use only the built-in modules, so the code is a little bit more verbose than its equivalent written with the requests library would be.

In the function, I ask AI to prepare a JSON object containing the sentences I need. I ask it to create an example sentence at the A2 or B1 level because my goal is to make sure the word I learn is the most difficult part of the example sentence. Also, I use the in-context learning technique called one-shot learning to provide an example. Providing examples in the prompt works better than explaining the desired outcome in detail.

import http.client import json def chat_completion(api_key, front_text, back_text): message = f"""{front_text} {back_text}""" system_message = """Given a word in English and its translation in German. Return the following things as JSON: * a sentence (at A2 or B1 German level) in German showing the usage of the word * the same sentence as in the previous point but with the given word replaced by its English translation and put in square brackets, the rest of the sentence stays in German * English translation of the sentence Example: Given: beer coaster der Bierdeckel Return: { "sentence": "Bitte legen Sie Ihr Bier auf den Bierdeckel.", "sentence_with_translation": "Bitte legen Sie Ihr Beer auf den [beer coaster].", "sentence_translation": "Please place your beer on the beer coaster." }""" conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection("api.openai.com") headers = { "Content-Type": "application/json", "Authorization": f"Bearer {api_key}" } payload = { "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo", "messages": [ { "role": "system", "content": system_message }, { "role": "user", "content": message } ] } payload_str = json.dumps(payload) conn.request("POST", "/v1/chat/completions", body=payload_str, headers=headers) res = conn.getresponse() data = res.read() result_as_json = json.loads(data.decode("utf-8")) result = result_as_json['choices'][0]['message']['content'] result_dict = json.loads(result) sentence = result_dict['sentence'] sentence_with_translation = result_dict['sentence_with_translation'] sentence_translation = result_dict['sentence_translation'] return sentence_with_translation, sentence, sentence_translation Editing a Card

Finally, we can implement the edit_with_ai function. When we call the function, Anki will request the example from ChatGPT, edit the card, and update the UI to display the updated version:

def edit_with_ai(): current_card = mw.reviewer.card if not current_card: return # not in review mode note = current_card.note() front = note['Front'] back = note['Back'] sentence_with_translation, sentence, sentence_translation = chat_completion(API_KEY, front, back) front += f"<br><br>{sentence_with_translation} ({sentence_translation})" back += f"<br><br>{sentence}" note['Front'] = front note['Back'] = back mw.col.update_note(note) mw.reset() Installing the Plugin

In the local development mode, the plugin’s installation is both easy and annoying. We must open the Anki Add-Ons window and click the “View Files” button. When we do it, the plugin directory will open. To install a new plugin, we copy-paste our plugin code into the directory (every plugin needs a separate directory inside the plugin directory). After that, we have to restart Anki. As I said, it’s easy because all you need is to copy the files, and it’s annoying because you have to restart Anki every time you change anything.

In the case of my plugin, the user installing the plugin must also create the .anki/openai file in their home directory.

Plugin Source Code

I won’t publish the plugin to the official Anki Add-On repository because I’m not interested in providing ongoing support or adding more languages. If you want to use the plugin, copy the code from this article.

Do you need help building AI-powered applications for your business?
You can hire me!

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:47:04 GMT

Another time I blog about is when I figure something out that I've been trying to understand for a long time, in some cases my whole life. That still happens. The other day I found myself talking with a friend about love, why when someone says "I love you" it doesn't mean what it seems to. Love comes from understanding someone well enough that you know what they desire, what they ache to have, and you to try to help them get it. See all the qualifications in that. Try. Help. Them. In other words, you can love someone when you know them. And you don't give them what they want, you help them get it. You can't love someone who your whole idea of is based on a dream you have about them. That's different. Anyway, lots more to say about all this. It's a recurring topic. It might be the only topic. Someday they'll invent an AI that can analyze my writing and tell me if I've ever written for any other purpose than being worthy of love.

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:46:56 GMT

I miss Frontier so much. Debugging its database was several orders of magnitude less work than the Node+SQL setup where the runtime and the database are very far apart. In Frontier the database and the language are the same thing. And because Frontier did the rational thing with synchronization, it was handled in the kernel, the code you write doesn't have to worry about it, you can write reasonably readable code. In Node it's a real chore to come back to some code you worked on last a while back. Makes my mind tired, but I do it, because it's where I work now.

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 01:12:33 GMT

The mobile-ready FeedLand is ready to test.

The first screen shot

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 01:12:30 GMT

The mobile-ready FeedLand is ready to test.

New evidence shows acoustic resonance behind Devil's Church 'witchcraft'

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 17:41:46 GMT

In the heart of eastern Finland's Koli National Park lies a natural wonder that has intrigued locals and visitors alike for centuries - the Pirunkirkko, or Devil’s Church.

This 34-meter-long crevice cave believed to be a sacred space where local sages convened to connect with the spirit world, has long been a constant feature in local folklore. Practitioners of shamanism continue to flock to this mystical cavern today, organizing drumming sessions within its depths.

However, recent research by archaeologist Riitta Rainio of the University of Helsinki and cultural studies researcher Elina Hytönen-Ng from the University of Eastern Finland suggests that the unique acoustics may hold the key to understanding the beliefs and rituals associated with the Devil’s Church.

The acoustic wonders of Devil's Church.

Rainio and Hytönen-Ng dived into the acoustics of Devil’s Church, exploring whether its distinctive resonance phenomenon could explain the spiritual significance attributed to the cave. They discovered that the cave houses a unique acoustic resonance that amplifies and prolongs sound at a specific frequency.

Historical archives revealed that the Devil’s Church was not merely a gathering place for mystics but also served as a stage for healing rituals and drumming sessions.

Kinolainen, a renowned sage in the region, utilized the cave for magical practices, bringing his patients to converse with the Devil about the causes and cures of their ailments. “This kind of healing ritual often included loud yelling, stomping, shooting, and banging,” explained Rainio in a statement.

Hytönen-Ng's interviews with a contemporary shamanic practitioner further corroborated the connection between Devil’s Church and spiritual experiences. The practitioner emphasized the unique energy within the cave, particularly during drumming sessions at the back of the cavern, which, according to them, opened up "new horizons."

When the researchers conducted acoustic measurements in the cave's corridor-like, smooth-walled back, they observed a strong resonance phenomenon. According to Rainio, this is caused by a standing wave between parallel walls, generating a tone at 231 Hz, which is amplified and prolonged by the cave's natural frequency, adding a mystical dimension to the rituals performed within.

The acoustic recordings confirmed the vocalization of tones at 231 Hz, highlighting a fascinating alignment between the modern-day practitioner's experiences and the resonance phenomenon identified by the researchers.

A sonic bridge to the past.

The researchers noted that while resonance is a common occurrence in built environments, it is exceptionally rare in the natural world, especially within caves with smooth, solid, parallel surfaces.

Comparable resonances have been documented in Paleolithic caves in France and Spain, often associated with paintings on cave walls. Rainio and Hytönen-Ng suspect that the resonance-amplified, persistent tone in Devil’s Church might have been subtly present during ancient rituals, shaping the beliefs and experiences of those who gathered within.

"Where a researcher of acoustics hears as resonance, people of the past may have sensed the presence of a spirit, and a shamanic practitioner may feel the presence of an exceptional energy, each according to their background," added Rainio.

Devil’s Church, with its rare acoustic properties, emerges not only as a geological wonder but as a fascinating glimpse into the intersection of archaeology, cultural studies, and acoustics.

Rainio's and Hytönen-Ng's findings were published in the journal Open Archaeology.

Study Abstract

Pirunkirkko (“Devil’s Church”) is one of the famous caves in Finland. Tradition says that this crevice leading into the mountain was a meeting place for sages, who typically used sound to contact the spirit world. Today, the place is visited by practitioners of shamanism, who organise drumming sessions at the back of the cave. This article examines Pirunkirkko and the related traditions from the perspective of acoustics, hypothesising that the acoustic characteristics of the crevice might have played a role in the ritualisation of the place and the power of its rituals. Methods employed include impulse response recording, spectrum analysis, archival research, and interview of a shamanic practitioner. The results indicate that the back of the cave houses a distinct resonance phenomenon. A standing wave between the parallel walls generates a ringing tone at 219–232 Hz that stays audible after sharp impulses or vocalisations at the same frequency. The local folklore or the interviewed practitioner does not mention this phenomenon at all. Instead, they speak about the “spirit of the cave,” “special energy,” or “new horizons” opened up by drumming. This leads to reflection on cultural frameworks of thought that guide sensory perceptions leading to differing experiences and interpretations.