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Links 11/28/2024

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Snow Leopard review – enigmatic tale of man v beast is late Tibetan film-maker’s final word Guardian

Realtor.com Reports Active Inventory Up 26.5% YoY Calculated Risk

Thanksgiving Day

Comedy interlude:

Northern lights may be faintly visible across parts of the US this Thanksgiving AP

Preventing holiday illness and navigating an ‘Ozempic Thanksgiving’ FOX

Climate

COP-out 29: The Baku Betrayal Climate & Capitalism

COP-out 29 The Next Recession

After the Deluge Harpers

Exclusive: Exxon lobbyist investigated over hack-and-leak of environmentalist emails, sources say Reuters

Global emergence of regional heatwave hotspots outpaces climate model simulations PNAS

Water

How paying water users to use less of the Colorado River is working out Colorado Sun

China?

Top PLA general Miao Hua under investigation for ‘serious discipline violations South China Morning Post

Decoupling industrial and supply chains is not the solution CGTN

China’s market targets are ‘just psychological’, says former regulator FT

India

Charting the future of India’s carbon market S&P Global

Adani Group says it lost nearly US$55 billion as US charges sparked rout Channel News Asia

New Not-So-Cold-War

How The New Russian Missiles Are Changing The Game Moon of Alabama. “[Russia] now has non-nuclear weapons, (the Oreshnik will not be the only one), which allow it to apply the equivalent of nuclear strikes without the dirty side effects of actually going nuclear.”

Nuclear attack unlikely despite Putin’s warnings, US intelligence says Reuters

Putin’s game is hypersonic: Is that why we can’t see it? Responsible Statecraft

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Ukraine settlement ‘long way off’ – Lavrov RT

A Trump-Sized Hole Is Looming in Ukraine’s Defenses Against Putin Bloomberg

Biden administration won’t be able to send Ukraine all planned aid – WSJ Ukrainska Pravda

* * *

US tells Ukraine to lower conscription age to 18 to stem manpower shortage FT

Russia advancing in Ukraine at fastest pace since start of war The Times

At least one million people without power in Ukraine after ‘massive’ Russian attack France24

Syraqistan

What we know about Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal BBC

Shaky Lebanon ceasefire rests on Netanyahu’s restraint and Hezbollah’s firepower Middle East Eye

Israeli army acknowledges killing Hezbollah operatives despite cease-fire agreement Anadolu Agency

Syrian opposition forces claim seizing 32 villages, areas in western Aleppo Anadolu Agency

Trump team says Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal brokered by Biden is actually Trump’s win Associated Press

* * *

Israel to appeal International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant Anadolu Agency

* * *

‘I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, but the Only One Who Can Save Them Is Donald Trump’ Haaretz

* * *

Merkava IV Barak Down: How Israel’s Enhanced New Tank Was Designed to be Near Indestructible Before Being Taken Out Military Watch

South of the Border

Trump claims a win on immigration after a call with Mexico’s president. But she suggests no change AP. Commentary:

Trump Transition

Slashing $2 Trillion from “The Swamp”–Three Things Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds

Florida’s takeover of the GOP is about to transform Washington Politico

* * *

FBI confirms Trump cabinet picks targeted with bomb threats, ‘swatting’ Al Jazeera

Trump selects longtime adviser Keith Kellogg as special envoy for Ukraine and Russia AP. Commentary:

Trump turns to outsider to shake up Navy, but his lack of military experience raises concerns AP

Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He’s Eager To Be America’s Top Censor TechDirt

* * *

Marc Andreessen: Biden-Harris Administration Used ‘Raw Executive Power’ to Debank ‘Disfavored’ Tech Startups, Political Opponents Tennessee Star. Commentary:

Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, and all the other VCs reportedly in the running for DOGE and other Trump committees TechCrunch.

Musk Wants to Abolish Consumer Agency That Has Been a ‘Model of Efficiency’ Common Dreams

Zuckerberg meets with Trump in Florida Politico

* * *

WSJ’s Peggy Noonan shares recent encounter with Trump after avoiding him for 8 years: ‘He was hilarious’ FOX

Democrats en déshabillé

Stoller on Greenwald:

Anti-trust

Texas, what?

Digital Watch

Uber Faces FTC Consumer Protection Probe Over Subscriptions Bloomberg

Tesla Is Looking to Hire a Team to Remotely Control Its ‘Self-Driving’ Robotaxis Gizmodo

Microsoft hits back at claims it slurps your Word, Excel files to train AI models The Register

Are Overemployed ‘Ghost Engineers’ Making Six Figures to Do Nothing? 404 Media

Healthcare

A new view on the gut microbiome and the social contagion of health 3 Quarks Daily

Health Equity Capture The New Inquiry

Boeing

Airbus struggles to capitalise on rival Boeing’s difficulties FT

Class Warfare

A Major Victory at the NMB for Airport Workers On Labor. NMB = National Mediation Board.

You’re Already On Strike. How to Turn Up the Heat? Labor Notes

Can businesses flourish in a world with a cap on personal wealth? Crooked Timber

Socialist politics and revolutionary compromise Links

Antidote du jour (© Frank Schulenburg CC BY-SA 4.0):

Bonus antidote:

Double-bonus antidote:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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29 comments

  1. The Rev Kev

    ‘Aaron Maté
    @aaronjmate
    Trump has appointed Ret. Gen. Keith Kellogg, an ex-advisor to Mike Pence, as his special envoy on Ukraine. If Kellogg’s previous views are any guide, that is a sign that Trump intends to continue the Biden policy of using Ukraine to fight Russia.’

    No real surprise here. Putin himself has said that it does not matter which party is in power in the US as the bureaucrats will continue the same policies – pushing Russia on every front, trying to block China to its coastal waters and trying to financially strange Iran. You could have Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein as President and still the same policies would continue. And these policies are all variations of the same core aim – having American dominance throughout the world. It sounds like something that a James Bond villain would say and yet here we are.

    Reply ↓
    1. Carolinian

      Meanwhile on the other side of the world the Russians are winning the war and have no reason to compromise. So it may not matter who is negotiating if there’s nothing to negotiate. It seems like the only real question is whether Trump would want to escalate and that decision will be made in DC.

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      1. The Rev Kev

        I’ve read that that Kellogg’s idea is to freeze the conflict in place. As that would be tantamount to a Russian defeat and a guarantee a new Ukrainian war in a coupla years time, there is no reason like you say of the Russians compromising here. But will Trump understand that?

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        1. Carolinian

          I’m no mind reader but I don’t think Trump for all his bluster is interested in being a war leader. Just look at how he buttered up Noonan after being–her words–clubbed like a baby seal (???).

          Battle of the trash talk.

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      2. NotTimothyGeithner

        Moscow won’t care. The GOP types operate from the assumption Team Blue types aren’t deranged thugs but DFHs. When Putin learns of American resolve, he’ll crumble is how they think. Trump like Biden is quite ignorant and might buy this for a time.

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  2. VTDigger

    Rest and vest is a real thing at many legacy tech companies, hence twitter doing just fine after losing thousands of engineers. But that’s an extreme case.

    What I read this as is there is a glut of low-skill engineers from “code schools” sloshing around and therefore HR is getting cocky. People are still afraid of losing top talent but pretending like engineering is as fungible as sales is a stretch. The takeaway here is entry level tech jobs are going away. The ladder is being pulled up.

    Analysing commits with “ai” gave me a chuckle. Talk about navel gazing…

    Reply ↓
    1. aleric

      Agreed, one of the more complex changes I committed this year ended up being a single comma in a batch file – that took weeks of debugging and testing to find and verify it as fixing the issue. OTOH I could crap out hundreds of lines of pretty code in a few hours (as could any moderately experienced developer). That’s without using AI, which I haven’t found to be very helpful, as it has a tendency to create ‘almost-correct’ code that needs to be carefully reviewed which eliminates any saved time and effort.

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    2. Jesper

      I’ve seen similar to this in accounting:

      The takeaway here is entry level tech jobs are going away. The ladder is being pulled up.

      Entry level accounting jobs were once upon a time repetitive and boring (I suppose the ones that remain still are) but IT has automated away a lot of the repetitive tasks and what have not been possible to automate has been looked at to be off-shored.
      What accountants have been told is that even though a lot of their tasks have been automated they will still have jobs as they will instead get to do more ‘value-add’ tasks. For some it might well be true, for others they see colleagues being made redundant and/or colleagues not being replaced if those colleagues have moved to other positions.

      I believe that while farmworkers might have had a tough time but when mechanization removed their boring and repetitive tasks at least they did not have to hear: “Don’t worry you’ll still have a job, we’ll just have more value-add and creative tasks for you to do”….

      It seems to be that companies are more and more moving towards rewarding efforts over results (at least for the lower ranks). Effort can be measured quickly and cheaply while results might be slow in appearing and at times also difficult to measure. What happens in the short term is therefore measured, what happens in the long term? I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone and situations might have changed so it is irrelevant.

      Reply ↓
    1. Emma

      Going to listen to Justin Podur’s discussion (with Jon Elmer, who does the excellent Resistance recaps in the Wednesday Electronic Intifata broadcasts – probably the best English language source for what’s happening on the ground in Gaza) about Lebanon next.

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oNQO6QgDPPg

      In my opinion Justin is always worth a listen or two. Justin brings a deep amount of compassion and broad historical understanding of the region into his discussions.

      Justin is a “Tankie” which means he unambiguously supports Hezbollah and Hamas as national liberation movements (just like most Arabs in the region) whereas Western “left” commentaries and Gulf supported channels are crypto/liberal Zionist and highly anti-Axis of Resistance.

      Reply ↓
  5. The Rev Kev

    “US tells Ukraine to lower conscription age to 18 to stem manpower shortage”

    Now if i was – heaven forbid – a cynical person, I would put the reasons for this push to get Ukrainian teenagers into battle under general suspicion. Zelenski doesn’t want to do it because there would be enormous push back against this idea and it might be enough to make him lose power which would make him vulnerable to getting killed by one of the many factions in the Ukraine. But this push is coming from the US and not really from the Ukrainians. Sure, the reason might be to plug the many manpower holes at the front as the Ukrainians are losing tens of thousands of people each and every month. Saw a video the other day where this Ukrainian company had only three guys in it. Three! But I am thinking that the real reason is Biden. The Ukrainians are on the verge of collapsing and there is no way in the world that Biden wants this to happen over the next sixty odd days while he is still President. It cannot be allowed. It was bad enough to be called the President that lost Afghanistan but no way will Biden tolerate also being called the President that also lost the Ukraine. So if this means sending Ukrainian teens to their deaths in order to protect Biden’s reputation, then so be it. If Project Ukraine collapses, let it be then on Trump’s watch, not his.

    Reply ↓
    1. Emma

      In my more light-hearted moments, I think the Ukraine conflict is just a cynical plot by Western Incels to get access to Ukrainian war widows and girlfriends. In their own way the West is really annihilating Ukrainians every bit as thoroughly as the Zionists against Palestinians.

      If humanity survives this turbulent era, the Ukraine situation may be up there with the War of Triple Alliance or the Thirty Years War in terms of destruction of a population and ultimate pointlessness of it all.

      Reply ↓
      1. The Rev Kev

        I have seen adds for Ukrainian women on YouTube in the side bar from time to time but alas I am married. But to tell you the truth, I wonder how many of those women are actually Nazis like the Azov women are when I see their images.

        Reply ↓
  6. Emma

    Stoller misses the forest for the trees. William Jefferson Clinton broke whatever ties there were between the unions and the Democratic Party. Arguably the break started with Johnson, when Union workers migrate to the GOP and the Rockefeller Republicans started moving into the Democratic Party.

    Or we can go even further with the coup that knocked out Wallace in 1944 and then quickly purging the New Deal Democrats from positions of power within the party apparatus.

    Obama is a tool, not an instigator.

    Reply ↓
    1. Roger Boyd

      My thoughts exactly on reading the piece. Neoliberalism started with Carter in 1978, not Reagan. Then we got the “corporate democrats” and the Clinton 8 years which truly transformed the US into neoliberalism and uncontrolled financial looting.

      Reply ↓
  7. Carla

    “WSJ’s Peggy Noonan shares recent encounter with Trump after avoiding him for 8 years: ‘He was hilarious’”

    I don’t think the link given is correct. She said nothing about meeting with Trump.

    Reply ↓
    1. The Rev Kev

      The link I am reading is describing in detail the meeting, along with others, that she had with Trump a coupla weeks ago. But seriously, is Peggy Noonan a school girl? She avoided him for 8 years because she was afraid that she might be charmed by him and have her judgment clouded? That’s not how the real world works. In her job she is supposed to show some form of judgment but she is admitting that she can be easily swayed by meeting somebody she is suppose to be writing about authoritatively. Does she live in a mental safe space or something?

      Reply ↓
      1. Carla

        My bad. I watched the video instead of reading the text. Comes from waking up (or apparently not quite) with NC.

        Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate!

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      2. NotTimothyGeithner

        Yes. DC adjacent msm is largely Hollywood trade magazines. Trump didn’t tell them how great they were, and they hated him. They just want a red carpet event and to have the big celeb pretend they are stars too. Joe and Mika scored an invite to magro large or whatever and they want to slurp Trump now.

        Reply ↓
  8. Steve H.

    > A new view on the gut microbiome and the social contagion of health 3 Quarks Daily

    >> The most intriguing interpretation, though, is a hopeful one. If a diverse microbiome is good for your health, we may be able to boost our well-being by simply breaking bread with people we don’t know. That is a wonderful message to take into the upcoming holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving!

    What shite.

    > Understanding the link between long COVID and mental health conditions

    >> “Depression is the most prominent symptom we see,” said Dr. Jordan Anderson, a neuropsychiatrist and assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and neurology at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.

    Reply ↓
  9. .Tom

    We saw a falcon here in Boston this morning while walking the dogs. It was on top of a residential building and then flew to perch on a church steeple. Peregrines have been in the news and for a while I believe there were nest live cams including in Boston last year. The city used to be strict about trash storage but that all changed during covid so now there are lots of rats, which I suppose is what the falcons eat.

    Reply ↓
    1. johnnyme

      Urban Peregrines typically feed on rats with wings (pigeons). We’ve got several breeding pairs nesting on buildings in the area and if you see a flock of pigeons swirling, keep an eye out for a nearby raptor.

      Reply ↓
  10. Carolinian

    Moon

    “As there is no defense possible against Oreshnik type weapons Russia could announce a strike on the U.S. controlled Redzikow base in Poland days or hours before it would take place. As the strike would be announced, conventional in type and would cause few if any casualties it seems unlikely that NATO would apply Article 5 to it and to hit back with force.

    Such would become a moment where the boiling of the frog would start again but this time with the U.S. being the frog inside of the vessel. Russia, by hitting U.S. bases in Europe by conventional means, would increase the temperature day after day.”

    The frog boils the boiler–what a concept. Switching metaphors it maybe the US deep state that is stuck to a tar baby.

    Reply ↓
  12. pjay

    – ‘Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He’s Eager To Be America’s Top Censor’ – TechDirt

    Expect a lot of these types of stories now. All of the sudden liberal Democrats and their spokespersons will be *really* concerned about censorship and “free speech” issues. One person’s censor is another’s “free speech” champion. The fact that they are probably right doesn’t reduce the hypocrisy.

    Reply ↓
  13. The Rev Kev

    “Microsoft hits back at claims it slurps your Word, Excel files to train AI models”

    Microsoft really has an obsession with AI so I would not be surprised that they use people’s personal files to train their AIs with. But I was surprised to see another link on that age saying that Microsoft has also – get this – has also bolted on an AI to both Notepad and Paint. Who asked for that? Those programs used to be tiny in size-

    https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/07/microsoft_ai_notepad_paint/

    Reply ↓

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