Poverty in America

Michael Green discusses better measures of the poverty line 

More discussion 

For our economy to provide a nice life for all we will need structural reform. How bad is it? This bad.

COVID, analogous to smoking

ACE receptors everywhere

Coronavirus does permanent damage 

Lots of links to sources

It’s pretty discouraging…. 

Smoking took decades to reveal its true cost. COVID is speedrunning the whole thing. We’re seeing the consequences in real-time, and we’re still pretending we don’t.

Your body doesn’t forget. Every infection leaves a mark. Every “mild” case adds to the pile. You might feel fine now. You might feel fine for years.

But the bill always comes due.

How the CIA invented the woke narrative

Commies everywhere

 

From heated debates over critical race theory and gender ideology to the perpetual skirmishes on university campuses and social media, it appears as a fundamental schism between a “woke” progressive left and a traditionalist conservative right. The standard narrative, particularly on the populist right, often frames this as a long-term victory for a form of “Cultural Marxism”—a deliberate, subversive plot to undermine Western civilization by attacking its core values and traditions.

But this narrative, while compelling, misunderstands the true origins of this ideological conflict. The roots of the modern “woke” left are not found in the halls of the Kremlin, but in the boardrooms of Washington, D.C., and the covert operations of the CIA.

The bitter polarization we see today is not the culmination of a Marxist conspiracy, but the unintended consequence of a different, largely forgotten war: America’s Cold War campaign to save the West from communism.

Dark patterns

A taxonomy

 

Catalog of Dark Patterns

Discover a variety of dark pattern examples, sorted by category, to better understand deceptive design practices.

Important discussion about the polycrisis

Systems are failing

Gramsci channelled by Streeck

 seeks to “inspire more concrete thinking on how the modern-capitalist global system might in the not-to-distant future come to an end, even without a successor regime in sight, as a consequence of its internal contradictions unfolding.”  The eleven essays include “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism,” “Citizens as Consumers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption,” “Why the Euro Divides Europe,” and “The Public Mission of Sociology.”  All of them repay reading.

In his description of capitalism lie the seeds of its instability and ultimate decline and dissolution:

Capitalism promises infinite growth of commodified wealth in a finite world, by conjoining itself with modern science and technology, making capitalist society the first industrial society, and through unending expansion of free, in the sense of contestable, risky markets, on the coat-tails of a hegemonic carrier state and its market-opening policies both domestically and internationally…Capitalist society is distinguished by the fact that its collective productive capital is accumulated in the hands of a minority of its members who enjoy the legal privilege, in the form of rights of private property, to dispose of such capital in any way they see fit, including letting it sit idle or transferring it abroad…(thus)…the vast majority of the members of a capitalist society must work under the direction, however mediated, of the private owners of the tools they need to provide for themselves, and on the terms of those owners in line with their desire to maximize the rate of increase of their capital.

This, of course, has led to precarity for the masses (including the Professional Managerial Class/PMC, much to their coming surprise) who are becoming less and less comfortable with their position as contingent beings at the mercy of “The Economy.”  But more fundamentally, infinite growth is not possible in a closed material system.  It may seem strange that this simple accounting error, described by Alyssa Battistoni in Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (2025), may lead to the end of the world.  But this is a possibility.  And the commodification of all life – food, family, work, community, recreation, business, entertainment, education, health, science, art – has led to alienation and anomie that consumerism cannot relieve in either the short term or the long term:

The vast majority of…members [1] of a capitalist society must…convert their ever-present fear of being cut out of the productive process, because of economic or technological restructuring, into acceptance of the highly unequal distribution of wealth and power generated by the capitalist economy.  For this, highly complicated and inevitably fragile institutional and ideological provisions are necessary…(including)…the conversion of insecure workers – kept insecure to make them obedient workers – into confident consumers happily discharging their consumerist social obligations even in the face of the fundamental uncertainty of labor markets and employment.

“Consumer” is Neoliberal-speak for “citizen.”  The systematic disorders of capitalism covered by Streeck include stagnation, oligarchic wealth redistribution, plundering of the public domain, corruption, and global anarchy.  Secular stagnation is inevitable as the previously empty world fills up with our products and our waste.  For example, more carbon has been emitted since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that in all previous human history.  And then there is plastic.  The transnational fossil fuel corporations knew long ago what would happen to the ecosphere of planet Earth as a result of their output.  As a friend who worked for one of the largest oil companies put it to me once, they did not hire stupid engineers and chemists.  However, they did hide their research.  Is it any wonder that the predicted effects of anthropogenic global warming are arriving now to some surprise?  Or denial?

Process knowledge

From Programmable Mutter

He like Dan Wang’s book Breakneck

Breakneck is about America nearly as much as it is about China. The book is fascinated with how America and China resemble each other, their sharp differences, and how both help fuel their mutual incomprehension. I imagine that most responses* will focus on two big questions: how America’s misunderstanding of China fuels geopolitical confrontation, and how America’s misunderstanding of itself leads it to miss out on material abundance. 

However, the best reading of the book, in my biased opinion, starts not with these questions, but the alternative perspective that lies behind Dan’s answers. The biggest lesson I took from Breakneck was not about China, or the U.S., but the importance of “process knowledge.” 

Xu Guo on Dalio and MMT

Chinese discussion 

Dalio is a star but Guo argues (and I agree) that he’s wrong on macroeconomics

 Economic debate continues to simmer in China between deficit hawks and doves, as Beijing lifts its deficit ratio to record highs and embarks upon its biggest fiscal stimulus campaign since the Global Financial Crisis.

Partisans on either side of China's fiscal policy debate have drawn inspiration from heterodox macroeconomic opinion derived from overseas sources.
Chinese deficit hawks find support for their arguments against fiscal spending in the popular works of storied hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, who contends that excess debt accumulation inevitably results in financial crises.
Doves, on the other hand, are making recourse to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to support their arguments in favour of deficit spending as a safe means of sustaining the Chinese economy.
This divide is best embodied by a vicious attack against Ray Dalio's works that was recently launched by Xu Gao (徐高), chief economist at Bank of China International.
Xu cites MMT in arguing that China needs to dial up its debt levels, instead of pursue a "beautiful deleveraging" as prescribed by Dalio.

JK Galbraith lessons

From NC

Creating a static website

Helpful guide !

Haters guide to AI

Ed Zitron compiles his thoughts

Good journalism is making sure that history is actively captured and appropriately described and assessed, and it's accurate to describe things as they currently are as alarming.

And I am alarmed.

Alarm is not a state of weakness, or belligerence, or myopia. My concern does not dull my vision, even though it's convenient to frame it as somehow alarmist, like I have some hidden agenda or bias toward doom. I profoundly dislike the financial waste, the environmental destruction, and, fundamentally, I dislike the attempt to gaslight people into swearing fealty to a sickly and frail psuedo-industry where everybody but NVIDIA and consultancies lose money.

…

I believe the AI bubble is deeply unstable, built on vibes and blind faith, and when I say "the AI bubble," I mean the entirety of the AI trade.

And it's alarmingly simple, too.

But this isn’t going to be saccharine, or whiny, or simply worrisome. I think at this point it’s become a little ridiculous to not see that we’re in a bubble. We’re in a god damn bubble, it is so obvious we’re in a bubble, it’s been so obvious we’re in a bubble, a bubble that seems strong but is actually very weak, with a central point of failure.

I may not be a contrarian, but I am a hater. I hate the waste, the loss, the destruction, the theft, the damage to our planet and the sheer excitement that some executives and writers have that workers may be replaced by AI — and the bald-faced fucking lie that it’s happening, and that generative AI is capable of doing so.

And so I present to you — the Hater’s Guide to the AI bubble, a comprehensive rundown of arguments I have against the current AI boom’s existence. Send it to your friends, your loved ones, or print it out and eat it.  

COVID is not over

June 2025 update

Twitter thread on long COVID with links to papers

The problem with free riders

Research

I’m of the opinion that exploitation is innate.  Parasites and predators are two distinct forms. Free riding is parasitic, primarily, and natural. 

Organisms try to take advantage of the work done by other organisms to create order from entropy… herbivores take advantage of plants, carnivores take advantage of herbivores…