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Links 12/28/2024

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Does Morality Do Us Any Good? The New Yorker (Anthony L). Yes, it often makes decisions easier. And you also typically create fewer enemies.

Spaces between the Stars London Review of Books (Anthony L). On Kubrick.

The torture of an unphilosophical life Unherd

FDA Rethinks Phenylephrine Cold Remedies Effectiveness Naveen Sankar

Milan, from January 1st absolute ban on smoking outdoors L’Unione Sarda

#COVID/Pandemics

Covid Pregnancies May Have Boosted Autism Risk, Study Shows Bloomberg (ma)

Climate/Environment

Hochul Signs Law That Penalizes Companies for Greenhouse Gas Emissions New York Times. Lambert ran a similar story yesterday. Over my pay grade, but I don’t see how this survives a legal challenge. Trying to say this is like the Superfund law, of discrete actions that caused damage that could be traced to a particular perp, does not make it so.

China?

China pushes ahead with huge — and controversial — dam in Tibet Washington Post

Will China let the yuan go in 2025? Asia Times (Kevin W)

Trump asks Supreme Court to pause TikTok ban, while Biden admin says app poses ‘grave’ threat CNN (Kevin W)

Temu’s Takeover Is Now Complete Wired (Kevin W)

India

India: It’s Worse Than You Think American Renaissance (Li). Hoo boy. I am certain a lot of readers will take issue.

Israel v. The Resistance

Children are freezing to death in Gaza Mondoweiss (guurst)

WHO chief says he was at Yemen airport which Israeli strikes targeted CNN (Kevin W)

Houthis claim to have targeted Ben Gurion airport after Israel hits Sana’a Guardian (Kevin W). FWIW, Ben Gurion regularly takes military flights, so it is a legitimate target.

New Not-So-Cold War

Taras Chmut: We have chaos in the military command Ukrainska Pravda

EU state threatens Ukraine with power cuts RT (Kevin W)

Plane crash in Kazakhstan was due to ‘physical, technical external interference’: Azerbaijan Airlines early findings Anadolu Agency

Leaderless Uprising in Georgia? Sopo Japardze

Syraqistan

Syria will never be unified Edward Luttwak, Unherd

A Requiem For Ba’athism (Part 1 of 2) Niccolo Soldo

Turkish analyst taken off air after calling for killing Syrian Kurdish militants on BBC Turkish Minute

Behind Afghanistan’s Fall, U.S.-Backed Militias Worse Than the Taliban New York Times (Kevin W)

Chuck L:”Haven’t seen any confirmation as yet but it’s something to watch.” Moi: Big if true.

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

Former NSA cyberspy’s not-so-secret hobby: Hacking Christmas lights The Register

The Paper Passport Is Dying Wired

Imperial Collapse Watch

The West Dismantles Itself: Liberalism in Theory and Practice György Varga, Nachdenkseiten via machine translation (Micael T)

Why world’s economic powers could find 2025 a year of great struggle South China Morning Post

1/6

Inside how the Capitol Police has changed since Jan. 6, 2021 Politico (Kevin W)

Trump 2.0

TRUMP REDUX New Left Review

From Panama Canal to Greenland, Trump defines a ‘new geography’ for American security Just the News. Yes, Trump wants his pony, just the way Biden wanted his pony of regime-changing Russia.

Trump’s Tariff Threats Are Setting Off a Global Supply Chain ‘Freakout’ Bloomberg

Trump’s Plans to Scrap Climate Policies Has Unnerved Green Energy Investors New York Times (Kevin W)

Democrats en déshabillé

DNC powerhouse fundraiser announces exit from Democratic Party following attacks: ‘It’s like leaving a cult’ Fox (ma)

Immigration

Shortsighted tech bros seek to leave American STEM talent even further behind. Jordan Schacthel (Micael T). Lambert says the Twitterverse fight of the MAGA types v. the Musk/Vivek fans is impressive and the MAGA crowd is making very good arguments….including ones that come very close to the commodification of labor.

Our No Longer Free Press

CNN Loses Chunks of Viewership as Ratings Dive Into Death Spiral Sputnik

Kari Lake sparks concerns at Voice of America The Hill. As if there isn’t “partisan meddling” now?

Sports Desk

Why college football is becoming harder to love Seattle Times (Robin K)

Mr. Market is Moody

Credit markets’ calm veneer will crack in 2025 Reuters

Antitrust

Microsoft Bundling Practices Focus of Federal Antitrust Probe ProPublica

AI

Microsoft Is Forcing Its AI Assistant on People – And Making Them Pay Wall Street Journal. BWAHAHA. This is why I bought my Microsoft rather than subscribing over the objections of my tech woman.

Nothing Is Sacred: AI Generated Slop Has Come for Christmas Music 404 Media (Micael T)

Chinese Firm Trains Massive AI Model for Just $5.5 Million TechCrunch

How to fix computing’s AI energy problem: run everything backwards New Scientist (Dr. Kevin)

The Bezzle

Even Apple Wasn’t Able To Make VR Headsets Mainstream in 2024 ProPublica

Guillotine Watch

The Game Theory of Giving Up Private Justice or Ending The State Monopoly On Violence Ian Welsh (Micael T)

What’s life like in the Brooklyn jail where Mangione awaits trial? Really bad, experts say. Gothamist. MDC is famously horrible.

Class Warfare

The Global Fertility Trade: A Story of Extraction, Exploitation and Opportunity Bloomberg (ma)

‘Living proof that you can spend money on the poor’: Utopia comes to Mexico City Guardian (Allen K)

US homelessness up 18% as affordable housing remains out of reach for many people Associated Press

Flying Was Already the Worst. Then America Stopped Using Headphones. Wall Street Journal

If you have time for leisure viewing: Sandel and Piketty Parts 1-3, YouTube. Robin K:

Part 1:

https://youtu.be/WTW1Eoec4Ew?si=U-sSwZ4Rx8J7rYKn

Part 2:

https://youtu.be/yclCoWrvp-M?si=IgF-bOs2fRviS-vD

Part 3:

https://youtu.be/iv4379S4tVg?si=QKGTsGamL9h0YLOE

Piketty’s ethereal vision of globalism–a united states of the world with progressive taxation–and Sandel’s identitarianism make for an oddly interesting exchange. Sandel comes off better when he just asks questions. When he tries to expound, he blathers, repetitive and incoherent. Piketty stays on track with a clear defense of leftist political economy.

Major takeaway: big money is all about globalism with free movement of capital and, um, free trade, while relying on those who get left behind to fight one another at borders over free movement of labor, i.e., either by being emigrants or anti-immigration nationalists. Buffet nailed: there is class warfare and his class is winning.

Antidote du jour (Tim H):

And a bonus (Chuck L):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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312 comments

    1. The Rev Kev

      Not to worry, Flora. I am certain as we speak right now, that Rafael Grossi is getting ready to lead a crack team of investigators for the International Atomic Energy Agency to work out what actually happened there and if it was a nuke. Just as soon as he recruits his team from Vienna’s Imperial Royal Institute for the Education of the Blind that is.

    2. wendigo

      If you look at the levels recorded by that station in Cyprus you will see other days with gross gamma spikes.

      https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Advanced.aspx

      In any event, enough air samples would have been analyzed by enough different groups that this would be widely known by now, like every nuclear power station downwind.

    3. ilsm

      Radar sets in the vicinity would have picked up first the EMP burst and later the “clouds”.

      Initial radiation spread looks like a tear drop the neck at the detonation and the area widening as it moves from center. Based on prevailing winds.

      Tartus is near the sea the winds daytime should have been to the east….

      US observations would likely not be shared.

      No pictures like Hiroshima hitting the X …..

    1. The Rev Kev

      Wait! Did Lindy Li just say that Kamala Harris is thinking of making a political comeback by staging a 2026 gubernatorial or 2028 presidential run? Seriously? That is like Lazarus with a triple bypass that.

      1. none

        The idea of Kamala running for CA-gov or for pres again has been going around for a while. She’s ready for her close-up, Mr. de Mille!

      3. Ben Panga

        The Democrats could really wither away into irrelevance.

        Although they are currently fighting about Indians, the election winners have some vision. Where the hell do the Democrats go? The world is on fire, people can’t afford to live, and they served up that demented excretion. The Washington Consensus era is fully dead. Wokeism (I hate the word woke) is defeated. They had nothing but Brat Genocide and “Tim Walz as your loveable Dad”.

        They are epistemologically bankrupt. And that makes me wonder what they could ever offer in the future.

          1. Milton

            Ouch. Green party among the listees. We’ll, they are about as relevent as the Whigs or Greenback parties so they might as well be included on that list.

            1. Daniil Adamov

              Different Green Party, apparently: “The Greens/Green Party USA (G/GPUSA) was a political organization formed out of the Green Committees of Correspondence in 1991 and was recognized as a national political party by the FEC from 1991 to 2005. It was based in Chicago. Synthesis/Regeneration, an affiliated journal of green social thought, was published in St. Louis. The now predominant Green Party of the United States split from the G/GPUSA in 2001.”

            3. scott s.

              I don’t think the Know Nothing movement ever had intentions of forming a party organization. Instead party-builders attempted to co-opt the movement. Most successful were some “economic” or conservative Whigs who viewed nativism as a cross-sectional alternative to the politics of slavery expansion. Led by former Pres Fillmore they created an “American Party” to exploit this issue.

          1. Pat

            As my state is almost entirely Democratic, and considering how Sanders and Teachout were screwed in multiple primaries here, I can unequivocally say they can win a rigged election in Tijuana as long as they are doing the rigging.

            1. JMH

              Just as the Federalists retreated to their New England redoubt before their final demise, so the Democrats exist in their coastal archipelagoes and isolated islands for a time.

              1. John Wright

                The Democrats will exist while they provide “concrete material benefits ” to their donors.

                Kamala helped further their demise by being a lame, poorly prepared candidate despite a lifetime in politics.

                And she blew through a billion dollars of donor money.

                If she has any future in the Democratic Party will tell us more about the depth of the rot.

            2. Joe Well

              But back then they had the senior voting bloc firmly under their MSNBC/CNN/NPR/NY Times/Facebook control. Is that still the case?

              Literally everything hinges on that. They can only outvote change in the primaries by controlling the olders and disenfranchising the youngers.

              1. Pat

                And by controlling the vote counting and late alternative candidates. Thousands of votes were thrown out just in Brooklyn in the 2000 primary under murky circumstances. For Teachout’s AG primary, congressman Sean Maloney was a late entrant into the race while continuing to run in his own primary. He then ran a somewhat similar campaign to Teachout splitting her vote, which is how we got Kamala wannabe Leticia James. Good soldier Maloney later became the head of the DCCC, until voters rebelled and voted for the Republican (helped by redistricting). But Biden helped him transition to Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

                I don’t think Harris will have a second chance. She embarrassed a whole lot of rich donors, many of whom have wasted money on her twice. That doesn’t mean will be rid of her, like Hillary she’ll still find a way to be in the public eye unfortunately.

              2. fringe element

                Well, speaking as a boomer, we are shuffling off this mortal coil at an accelerating pace. Won’t be much longer before all of us are gone.
                Ironic really that toxic food and healthcare profiteering are killing off their last gullible voting base.

                1. Joe Well

                  Younger-than-Boomer people are also dying at an even more accelerated rate than historically, which messes with the numbers a bit.

    3. Mikel

      “I think I’m too big to fully exile from the party,” Li said of her contributions to the DNC at the time, seemingly signifying a change of heart in the short time between both comments were made. “The leadership knows that.”

      Is she trying to leave a “cult” or change one?

      And is she thinking the only other option is going Republican? That’s like telling your ex, “I don’t ever want to see you again” and then you move out, but move across the street or next door.

  3. flora

    Paul Krugman retired from the NYTime opinion page. The Hill remarks on his final column.

    Krugman laments ‘age of resentment’ in final NYT column

    https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5034409-paul-krugman-new-york-times-retirement-final-column/

    ‘ “What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment,” Krugman wrote Wednesday.

    ‘ He noted that “people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper,” in the early 2000s.

    ‘ “Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest,” Krugman added.’

    2. chris

      Or rather, we see the elite class as it is now. A group of people who would sacrifice anything to maintain their position and wealth in the current order. Children, the law, secure borders, national strength, scientific advancement, global health, peace… nothing is sacred to them. There is literally not one thing they would preserve for others. We will be lucky if the next order develops without someone doing something incredibly stupid. I am afraid the Muses and others in the world will destroy whatever it is they can’t have, rather than share or cede ownership.

    3. brian wilder

      I find myself cocking my ear to try to understand what Krugman is saying or not-saying.

      “we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith “

      Why can’t he say, “elites have betrayed the trust of the public”? Why isn’t the corruption and incompetence the main issue?

      Is it so he can take a swipe at Trump with his reference to kakistocracy, rule by the worst?

      What is the mental process of narcissistic self-delusion that produces this tripe?

        1. flora

          Imo, Krugman’s work wrt comparative advantage, as in Adam Smith’s understanding, was fine until Milton Friedman’s neoliberal bastardization of Adam Smith took over the idea of comparative advantage and made it into something else. Too bad.

    4. Duke of Prunes

      I’d say it all began in a big way when O failed to deliver on his “hope and change”, and instead gave us more of the same (and arguably worse sameness). At least this killed it for me – although I was already pretty skeptical by this point… O was the last chance to keep me even a little optimistic, and he utterly failed so im no longer trying to kick Lucy’s football.

      1. albrt

        Same here. I am interested in figuring out how things went so wrong and how bad it will get, but I am not interested in supporting politicians or pretending that our politics can make things better.

      2. Jason Boxman

        I was high as a kite on liberal Democrats back in the day. I truly believed as soon as Pelosi became speaker, she’d end the Iraq War… LOL. Yeah, I bought it hook, line, and sinker. It was clear when we saw Obama’s cabinet pickets right after the election that we were all screwed. How those 8 years played out doesn’t surprise. So I guess Obama radicalized me to socialism.

        1. playon

          Me as well. Obama was to the right of Nixon by his own admission, it was after his presidency that I decided to become an independent voter & socialist.

          1. James Cole

            Same, especially with the up-close blow-by-blow tracking of the GFC and its aftermath right here on NC.

        2. Pat

          Funny how Bush’s Iraq war wasn’t a high crime but made up Russian interference anda spook incited riot were enough to impeach Trump twice. I also “enjoyed” Holder going after Californian medical marijuana dispensaries rather than bankers and financial manipulation.
          Watching the Democrats lie like rugs throughout Obama’s administration might not have been the final straw but it was enough to finally cure me of the idea that there was a lesser evil. Nope evil is evil.

        3. fringe element

          It was clear when we saw Obama’s cabinet pickets right after the election that we were all screwed.

          That was my moment too when I knew we were betrayed.

          Sad to say though, it took Russia-gate to push me all the way out of the party. I thought that the shock of losing to an insane clown in 2016 would make them finally engage in some honest self examination.

          When, instead, they rolled out the ‘Putin ate my homework’ nonsense, I not only stopped being a Democrat, but also undertook a massive purge of my blogroll. It was chastening to see so many websites I had trusted make fools of themselves echoing that gibberish.

          At least the process gave me a big lesson in humility, which is actually a good thing imo.

    5. spud

      he was and still is a fool. whom never should have been given a public soapbox.

      https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalization-trade-paul-krugman-china/

      Economists on the Run

      Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought it would. Did America’s free market economists help put a protectionist demagogue in the White House?
      By Michael Hirsh
      October 22, 2019

      “Paul Krugman has never suffered fools gladly. The Nobel Prize-winning economist rose to international fame—and a coveted space on the New York Times op-ed page—by lacerating his intellectual opponents in the most withering way. In a series of books and articles beginning in the 1990s, Krugman branded just about everybody who questioned the rapid pace of globalization a fool who didn’t understand economics very well. “Silly” was a word Krugman used a lot to describe pundits who raised fears of economic competition from other nations, especially China. Don’t worry about it, he said: Free trade will have only minor impact on your prosperity.

      Now Krugman has come out and admitted, offhandedly, that his own understanding of economics has been seriously deficient as well. In a recent essay titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” adapted from a forthcoming book on inequality, Krugman writes that he and other mainstream economists “missed a crucial part of the story” in failing to realize that globalization would lead to “hyperglobalization” and huge economic and social upheaval, particularly of the industrial middle class in America. And many of these working-class communities have been hit hard by Chinese competition, which economists made a “major mistake” in underestimating, Krugman says.

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR
      Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent and deputy news editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @michaelphirsh.

      It was quite a “whoops” moment, considering all the ruined American communities and displaced millions of workers we’ve seen in the interim. And a newly humbled Krugman must consider an even more disturbing idea: Did he and other mainstream economists help put a protectionist populist, Donald Trump, in the White House with a lot of bad advice about free markets?”

  4. The Rev Kev

    “Nothing Is Sacred: AI Generated Slop Has Come for Christmas Music”

    Sounds like that AI is being used to not only pollute the internet for temporary financial gain but every niche that it can find such as Christmas music here. So will AI be used to pump out Classic music, Country & Western, Rock & Roll, etc, anytime soon? If this keeps up I can see a schism opening up on what people are willing to buy or download. So everything up until AI came on the scene would be OK if not valued while anything after that date would instantly become suspect. This might be a call for the return of CD recordings of older music as well but Google via YouTube is really crapping into their own water supply here. Remember that Gordon Gekko quote in the 1987 film “Wall Street?” That has not aged well-

    ‘The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.’

    1. Ben Joseph

      And remember how Metallica went after teenagers and grandparents over Napster? Where did they go now that megacorp is ripping them off?

        1. ChrisFromGA

          I used to think it was ridiculous for rockers to keep going past 40. They don’t age well, and it’s a young person’s career. However, Joe Eliott from Def Leppard once made a remark to the effect of, “what are we gonna do, go back to working in a factory?”

          He has a point. They all went through some lean years in the 90’s and 2000’s but then nostalgia kicked in along with Ticket Bastard charging exorbitant fees and baby boomers paying them. Why not just keep on going? Beats having a 9-5 job.

          I did read that the guitarist from Queensryche (another 80’s metal band) actually did re-invent himself, gave up the fame, and became a pilot. Good for him.

          1. Yves Smith Post author

            Well Michael Jackson basically killed himself trying, and Madonna has messed up her face trying to look 30 rather than merely attractive and not too aged, and her body too, but then you have the Stones.

            But the economics of the industry have changed. You used to make money from your catalog. Now you can make it only by touring.

            1. ChrisFromGA

              That’s very true … none of the groups I used to enjoy (mostly 80’s hard rock/metal) have released any new music of note in years and years. Plus, as you say the economics changed. They’re living off their fame and through touring.

              The Stones are in a class by themselves.

                2. fringe element

                  Unlike rock and roll, straight blues ages like great wine.

                  Richards said that when they launched the band, before they hit the fame jackpot, their dream was to be the best blues band in the UK.

            2. Mikel

              “Now you can make it only by touring.”

              It’s always been harder scraping for everybody else out there that never had any benefit of a major marketing machine behind them.

            1. jonboinAR

              He looks great in that photo on his Wikipedia page. I vaguely remember some early Steely Dan guitar-work by him and that it was really good.

          4. hk

            One of my friends was the drummer in a “moderately successful” band before going to grad school and became an academic…

      2. Ann Uumelmahaye

        The Dude: Uhh…and then (I was in) the music business, briefly.
        Maude: Oh?
        The Dude: Yeah! A roadie for Metallica…
        Maude: Oh.
        The Dude: Speed of Sound tour.
        Maude: Mm-hmm.
        The Dude: Bunch of assholes.

      3. playon

        Much of the blame for Spotify and the other streaming services ripping off artists and writers must go to performing rights organizations like BMI and ASCAP who negotiated such shitty royalties for digital music.

    2. Mark Gisleson

      I cannot guarantee that all of Lofi Girl’s stream is AI-free but I think it is. Everything I’ve listened to is kosher albeit near muzak. Their Xmas mash-up album was actually pretty good (two schock songs artfully mixed together and then electronically smoothied).

      I would call this ultra-chill but I think that implies a certain type of techno beat and this music is far from techno. Constant stream to stop YouTube from inserting commercials and the anime is like a Gen Z fireplace video. Tech in service to talent, not AI.

      2. Mikex

        You know that is a pretty good analogy, Ben. Every time I turn around I run in to some new form of AI come-on that seemingly no one was asking for. It’s crazy annoying, and there is no escape from it. In fact, if I wasn’t told differently, I know I would have 100% assumed the picture of the black leopard in the antidote above was some AI slop. My apologies to the actual photographer assuming the picture is real, but that is where I am at nowadays.

        2. Posaunist

          I felt the same way about the Leopard photo. I hope it’s real – the lighting must have taken a lot of experimenting to get right.

          I’ve been thinking that news organizations that want to be known for their veracity will be tempted to return to paper and film – much harder to fake. Of course, they would be hours behind the competition.

          It’s a bit like sports. Used to be that the reaction to a great performance was amazement. Now it’s “what are they on?” or ” who is their doctor?”

          1. playon

            Not only the lighting would have be right, but the exposure would have to be perfect, although that is much easier now with digital cameras that can combine multiple exposures into one image. And then you can tweak further if you wish.

            1. juno mas

              View the image in a separate tab then magnify it 400%. The black panther is actually not really solid black. The moist nose would be hard to replicate.

              My first thought was the image was faked.

        3. Tom B.

          I love the cat pic but had to check that that the starfield was real and viewable from Africa. Went to https://nova.astrometry.net/ which does star field matching from upload images. Tried the full pic with cat first – gave up after 10 minutes. Cropped to upper right section of image, just the stars, and it came back within 30 seconds with a match. Image contains constellations Leo and Cancer, Leo’s head over the cat – nice touch.
          Center was RA 139.173, dec 20.44 degrees – low enough to be visible from Africa. So test passed. Star images also looked realistic for a fast camera lens shot with a fairly short exposure so no star trails – 10 seconds?

  5. Bugs

    “Microsoft Is Forcing Its AI Assistant on People – And Making Them Pay Wall Street Journal. BWAHAHA. This is why I bought my Microsoft rather than subscribing over the objections of my tech woman.”

    This! Never, ever submit to the MSFT subscription software scam. First, they are making you an unpaid QA tester, eating the dogfood as it’s referred to internally. Second, they will cut out functionalities and interface attributes that are part of an established workstream and cause enormous headaches. Third, they’ll use every trick in the book to con you into syncing your data to OneDrive, which will quickly fill up until you get told that you now need a subscription to access the files already uploaded – and they make it very difficult to tell whether files are stored locally or online, so you risk losing important work and personal data.

    You can buy a license Office for Mac or Windows on eBay, usually for a decent price. You need to dig through a lot of pages on the Microsoft site to find the single license offer though.

    I was in the meetings when they came up with this recurring revenue model, long before the bandwidth existed to make it viable. It was among other things, a way to get around the DOJ consent decrees on product bundling. It’s worked out very well.

    1. Carolinian

      I really don’t get “the cloud” or why anyone would want to make use of it. Physical storage is now quite inexpensive.

      My brother just gave me yet another Windows computer and I activated it in the usual way–by unchecking every MS permission box suggesting necessary features for “my” benefit.

      Hardware is good. Software should be treated with all the skepticism that we can muster.

      1. YuShan

        I totally agree. Hardware is more powerful that ever, and storage is cheaper than ever. It is simply weird that we have reverted to the 1970’s when computers were expensive so we used terminals connected to mainframes. This changed during the 1980’s when it became affordable to have your own computer. But now we are once again paying third parties to store and compute things for us! I want none of that.

        Regarding suppression Windows spying, there is a good (free) program for that: “O&O ShutUp10++” Instead of having to dig up all privacy settings yourself, this program takes care of that.

        1. Huey

          I second using O&O, ideally on a Pro version for control of the OS updates.

          Even if the boxes are unchecked on setup of a new PC a lot of data will still be collected and sent to MS.

          I use other programs as well and the end result is I’ve basically fully disabled onedrive/copilot/Edge/Cortana.

      2. Mikel

        Your activation sounds like mine.
        I still get the pop up message that I need to complete the set-up for my computer.

        And it’s annoying and invasive. They don’t want to be told “no” to the invasive features. It’s like they need to convince themselves of some fake universal acceptance and don’t give you the option of deciding when your set up is complete for one’s own needs.

        And I’m glad I don’t have to use my personal computer for work. I think company IT people and marketing people push a lot of features or systems for others to adopt. Then they use this on their performance reviews or resumes as some kind of metric like “increasing company efficiency”. Most of the time they’ve just added another middle man between you and getting work done.

      3. Hepativore

        Part of what is taking me so long to get a different computer after my last one died is that Windows 11 is malware masquerading as an OS and I have some programs that only work on Windows so I cannot use a Linux PC as a “daily driver” unless I dual boot. For now, I am looking at something like the custom builds of Windows 11 that some people have made like Superlite by Ghost Spectre which removes all of Microsoft’s ads, bloatware, and telemetry and actually turns it into a useable OS.

        My hard drive is still good, I think, so now I have to figure out how to copy its file tree to a computer with a different OS.

        1. scott s.

          My home theater HTPC is still on Win 8.1 mainly because of Windows Media Center that I was using to view/record over the air TV. It had a “lifetime” subscription to tv guide data, lifetime of course being defined by MS. Now that that’s gone and MS gave up on WMC (wasn’t a bad bit of software, actually but I guess they figure the market has mostly moved to cheap Chinese android boxes or AirPlay), I use a freeware backend. The whole time I’ve used XBMC/Kodi as player/library.

          While Win 8 got a lot of negativity, for just running Kodi and a few background helpers it’s fine.

          1. Procopius

            That’s not quite right. Many (most?) of the applications listed have problems trying to run on Wine. Granted, a lot work perfectly, but I found that Microsoft Train Simulator and Total War wouldn’t work at all — they’re both listed, but the best rating is Bronze. I regretfully had to give them both up when I switched to Ubuntu. [Note: They don’t work in Windows 10, either]

      4. Vandemonian

        I occasionally get superannuated Windows boxes from my SIL. First step in making them useful is to start the machine from an Ubuntu ‘live USB’, and click ‘Install’.

        I have one running a VPN (currently connecting to the World in Iceland). I use this to harvest movies, TV and music with Transmission (which I share locally from Plex server) and ebooks from Anna’s Archive (which I share from Calibre, and transfer to a Kindle as needed). I store nothing in the cloud (AKA on someone else’s computer).

        I have a visceral dislike of streaming services and subscription models.

        1. Jason Boxman

          Highly recommend the Usenet game, if harvesting is your thing. You need a couple of good indexers, and Frugal Usenet subscription for like $50/yr. Use something like Sonarr or Radarr running under Docker, and you just put in what you want, and it’ll magically find it on Usenet and begin the process. It’s virtually as easy as having a streaming service, with a bit of technical proficiency.

          I’m amazed all Usenet binaries aren’t shutdown worldwide at this point. But whatever.

          1. scott s.

            Usenet binaries. That’s a blast from the past. Still have SABnzbd installed; haven’t used it in years.

            1. Hepativore

              There are two websites I go to for free streaming, one for movies and television and one for animated shows and cartoons. I will not say what they are as I do not want us to get in trouble and they are not torrent sites, but streaming from servers based in countries who are not bound by US and EU copyright law. As many streaming services are permanently taking down content or a lot of this stuff is region-blocked on Netflix like Blake 7 (UK Netflix only), “the high seas” route is often the only option to watch a lot of this stuff. I do recommend you get a decent adblocker like Ublock Origin or Adnauseum for the first one I mentioned, though, since some of the page-embedded ads on the website are rather questionable but the quality of the uploaded material is very good on both of them.

          2. playon

            I use newshosting.com and love it, but many things can still only be found on sites like piratebay.

            Ditto on Linux – been using Linux Mint for about three years now. I finally got it installed on my wife’s laptop and she’s happy. It’s free and not difficult to use and I’m sooo happy to be out of the MS ecosystem. Still need it on my studio computer though, as Linux is not that good for audio.

        2. Skk

          Yup, been running Ubuntu since 2006. And the libraoffice suite . The calc program does just fine for me, I just did my end of year tax simulations just fine with it.

      5. scott s.

        I’ve been in the flight sim hobby since FS2 on the original IBM PC. MS have moved to a full-up cloud model. They just released the latest FS 2024 in November and had a total server melt-down.

    2. Mikel

      May as well give a heads up to about one of the one drive cons. On the latest windows computer you also have to avoid saving to desktop to avoid their cloud where they can lock you out of your files. There is a set up (done your own, MS won’t show you how) to make the desktop location a default local drive destination.

      But I remember reading about some youth these days not understanding file folder directory systems.

      1. Bugs

        the average user of a personal computer can in no way avoid the scams that these companies use to ruin the computing experience.

        There is a way of setting up Windows 11 where you turn off wifi or any network connection, and make very specific choices during installation, including never giving an email address, that allows you to use the operating system on a stand alone basis. If you buy a laptop/PC with Windows on it, you will probably need another one next to it during activation and installation in order to avoid the scams.

        You can find this information on the web, but Google is less and less useful for it – the best (easily accessible) source right now is YouTube videos.

    3. ilpalazzo

      If you reckon BSA goons visit at your place is unlikely, type massgrave dot dev and go from there. Tried and tested, works like a charm. Supposedly MS techs were caught using it themselves when fixing people’s activation problems remotely.

    4. redleg

      I simply switched to LibreOffice and don’t have to deal with it anymore, except to save copies as .docx, xls, etc. for the folks using Office.
      Not a seamless change, but the 2003 Office I bought in, um, 2003 couldn’t open newer docs after 15 years. LibreOffice can, and it’s free.

  6. Ben Joseph

    Re: bemoaned diminishing headphone usage.

    Blame Apple for dismantling the universal headphone jack.

    1. ana

      If you can afford Apple products (a pure social signifier at this point since Apple has reduced their products’ functionality so much) you can afford an extra set of cheap Bluetooth headphones or a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter. Most Android phones still have 3.5mm jacks btw. Or they could just *not* use speakerphone and hold the phone up to their ear like a normal person (unless Apple removed that functionality too it’s hard to keep up lol).

      People talking on speakerphone in public are doing so purely out of trashy American rudeness. And as always in this country, the richer they get the more feral they get with their behavior towards others. It’s about signifying dominance. Wealthy Americans are now on par with white South Africans, Israelis, Saudi Royals, or Hindutvah Brahmins in terms of sheer “I belong to the upper caste” rudeness. And that horrible attitude – unlike their wealth – trickles down to the rest of a population that idolizes privilege and status.

      1. Vandemonian

        I wonder what the response would be if you stood next to the offender, and joined in the conversation with the person on the other end of the call?

        1. Randall Flagg

          I started doing that while waiting in a doctor’s office recently, Saying yes or no to every question asked by the person with the phone until my wife asked me to quiet down. The person using the phone was too oblivious to notice what I was doing. Pretty funny I thought.

          1. The Rev Kev

            True story here. There was this guy sitting in a restaurant talking very loudly into his mobile and big-noting himself doing so about this big deal he was doing with the guy on the other end. It would have worked but then while he was talking to this other “guy” his mobile starting ringing. Do’h!

      2. XXYY

        Most Android phones still have 3.5mm jacks btw.

        For Android phones introduced in the last few years, this is mostly not true, though you can certainly find some Android phones with conventional headphone jacks.

        On the other hand, the dongles you mentioned are really cheap now, three or four bucks, so this is probably the way to go. I just bought a dongle for each of my headphone devices so I can generally plug them in where needed.

        It’s something of a pain, but there are decent workarounds now.

        1. johnnyme

          The $9 Apple 3.5mm headphone adapter performs exceptionally well. Apparently there is an EU specific version that has some power/volume limitations that the U.S. version does not have so that’s something to keep in mind if you go this route.

          Chinese headphone manufacturers have also been introducing high quality, inexpensive earbuds/IEMs with USB connections so dongles are no longer needed.

      3. eg

        When I ended up with a phone without a dedicated headphone jack for the first time last year, I got some of those USB-C to 3.5mm adapters, but found them to be very susceptible to moisture (when walking in the rain), so I got a 1Mii Bluetooth 5.3 Transmitter Receiver which works a charm.

      4. AW

        “It’s about signifying dominance.”

        Maybe, but it has little to do with being wealthy American. The strong always pick on the weak; be it wealthy human, poor human, righteous human, human in a Gulag, dog, cat, lizard, or fish. Especially when the weak are unable to escape: pigeons, symbol of peace and tranquility, will fly away when threatened by another, but unable to flee, the dominant will peck the weaker until it is a bloody mess and dead. It takes empathy to overcome this primal urge, an urge that every totalitarian knows instinctively to exploit. It brings great profit to the strong, and thus it is imperative that empathy is legislated by complex rules, and suppressed in the weak with brutality if necessary.

        Propaganda is a powerful tool, and once it reaches a critical threshold, those able to resist it need hide, and sadly often in plain sight. Generalising white South Africans and Israelis together with the three exclusive examples you give is unhelpful.

    2. Mikel

      Yes, that’s the case where you can literally see someone charging their phone while they use it.

      And I think it would have been great to include a rant about the sound quality of the smaller ear buds/head phones these days. Yikes!

      When I’m in my room at home, I’ll have phone conversations on the speaker phone and have clearer conversations.
      With my laptop, I luckily have sets of higher quality head phones. I would use them with travel if not so bulky.

  7. The Rev Kev

    ‘Vivek Ramaswamy
    @VivekGRamaswamy
    The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH’

    Vivek Ramaswamy last seen smearing blue paint on his face and shouting to a crowd of his cheering fellow tech billionaires ‘They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our cheap H-1B workers!’

    1. flora

      The truth is, H-1B workers are cheaper workers and they don’t unionize. They are at-will employees meaning they can be quickly fired for any or no reason. / ;)

      1. NotTimothyGeithner

        My gut is Trump’s political team said no to an ask for more H1Bs, and Ramaswamy thinks he can take this push public and reach Trump that way.

        1. Neutrino

          Generate a lot of discussion across media and kitchen tables to push the issue awareness out to make people more aware of who is doing what to whom.

        2. MT_Wild

          Seems like he’ll get quite the opposite result. Ramaswarmy torpedoed his own agenda by attacking the high school quarterbacks and prom queens. Likely not only stopped any increase in H1B visas, but also put the whole program in the spotlight.

          Thankfully for us all, there’s a better chance of reviving the thylacine than his political career after this episode.

          1. ana

            You’d think this would be a good opportunity for Dems to attack Trump on his class bonafides and say “look, Trump wants to put these two deranged billionaires in charge who think you deserve to be poor and want to replace you with cheap, exploited labor from overseas. He hates workers.” Especially since Trump is silent on the issue, leaving Dems to seize the initiative and shape the issue in his silence. What are they saying instead? “It’s awful these racist MAGAS want to take away poor Elon’s indentured servants :(”

            You just can’t help a party this stupid. Like, Oracle was literally sued for discriminating against Asian-American candidates in favor of H1B holders in 2019 – the tech companies are the racists here. And no mention that the H2B keeps expanding either, of course. Those are largely jobs in things like hospitality and construction being taken by indentured servants – I’m sorry, “guest workers.” These are not “jobs Americans don’t want.”

        3. playon

          Some of what he says is correct though. In the US it’s much cooler to be a basketball player than an engineer. Compare that to China or India where value is placed on smarts.

        4. Emma

          On a topic that’s about as popular with the public as health insurance executives and US Congress. We really need to convince them all to move to Mars ASAP, no matter how much it costs.

      2. Milton

        I always wanted to see what an H-1B pay statement looks like. Are the social security and Medicare deductions the same or is there a savings for the company in that area?

        1. JustTheFacts

          You pay Social Security and Medicare, even if they can kick you out of the country. A far cry from the “No Taxation without Representation!” ideal.

        2. InquiringMind

          H-1B workers get paid like everyone else and
          deal with their tax liabilities on their own…but mostly end up taxed like normal US residents including receiving Social Security payments even if/when they move back overseas. (Ie, they are not exempt from paying into those entitlement programs & can collect when they retire wherever they end up)

          Some countries have a reciprocal agreement where you can get an exemption from Social Security if you can prove that your home country will cover you. (Presumably that country will want their cut of your US earnings, though). That’s on the worker to arrange and none of ours have pursued it.

          https://www.irs.gov/individuals/taxation-of-alien-individuals-by-immigration-status-h-1b#:~:text=An%20H1%2DB%20alien%20who%20is%20paid%20wages%20in%20exchange,employment%20that%20under%20U.S.%20law

          For my company, the H1B visa employees are subject to US mandated salaries for their position which is at least on par if not higher than the company could pay a US originated worker. H1B is not a cost cutter for us. We’ve used it in cases where we hired a recent college grad of foreign origin who turned out to be a very talented and hard working team member. (I’m reluctantly in the vicinity of Elon Musk’s characterization of the program here).

          The win-win would be for our H1Bs to move back to their country of origin (Taiwan, Korea) & work remotely for us: high salary in lower cost of living country, etc…but they all prefer the US.

          1. Duke of Prunes

            I think most of the h1b abuse is perpetrated by the big Indian IT consulting firms, just like we’re finding out a lot of blue collar illegal immigrant abuse is perpetrated by “staffing agencies”. Gives the big corporations plausible deniability, yet they still benefit from the sweet indentured servitude.

            1. Skk

              Exactly. On both aspects, who does the actual H1B hiring, it’s Accenture, Cognizant etc and on giving the corporations plausible deniability

            2. SocalJimObjects

              My take on this is that H1B visas should not be tied to a particular employer. Once that loophole is closed, most Indian IT consulting firms would not even bother bringing their “talents” over.

              1. The Rev Kev

                Not many years ago Silicon Valley was found guilty of colluding so that each corporation agreed not to poach the other’s employees in order to keep the wages down on all on them. Your idea is entirely correct but I don’t think that Silicon Valley would go for it based on that recent past. But it would be entertaining to see Vivek’s face if that was offered to him as a compromise to keep those H1B visas going.

                1. SocalJimObjects

                  Come on, it was just Apple, Google and a couple of other big companies, and not Silicon Valley as a whole. Anyway, the kind of “talent” Indian IT consulting companies have been bringing over is not on the same level as an engineer typically found in those elite companies. Employees at those consulting firms often work for less than 100K a year (and that’s all), while total compensation for starting developers at elite companies was/is around 180K to 200K. Facebook used to pay their interns a bonus of 100K (thank you for working for us for 3 months, here’s 100K). Indians from India are willing to work for Infosys etc for substandard wages because doing so provides a path to obtaining a Green Card, that’s all, and because the queue for Indians is so very long, an employee has no choice but to stick with his/her company.

        3. Jokerstein

          I worked two separate H-1B visas, separated by eight years. I don’t remember the first one, but for the second I paid both Medicare and SS. That ended in 2004, when I got my work permit after getting married and applying for LPR status.

          1. Jokerstein

            This was a small biotech, BTW. Salary was commensurate with US workers. The same was true at Amazon, where I managed several H-1Bs between 2007 and 2019. The same was NOT true at T-Mobile us in 2004-2005. H-1Bs were abused there.

      3. Victor Sciamarelli

        The H-1B program is not the problem. It’s CEOs like Vivek who do the damage.
        The H-1B allows you to hire foreign workers only if Americans are not available, still they must be paid what an American would earn.
        If a foreign worker realizes they are being cheated, their only option is to file a complaint with the Department of Labor which will handle the case within its own mediation process. The H-1B worker does not have access to federal court.
        Yet, the uniparty will make sure the appointed Secretary of Labor will not bring a case based on a clear and blatant salary dispute. The DoL will obfuscate the case by making it about secondary issues.

        1. albrt

          In theory the H1B workers are being paid the same as their American colleagues, but the salaries are not competitive in the normal free marketeer sense that a sufficient supply of Americans will apply for the jobs at those wages, not even after an adjustment period for the Americans to learn to code (or drive a truck, or whatever).

      4. IM Doc

        It has been fascinating to watch what is going on in Big Hospital in the past 20 years vis a vis immigrant doctors and nurses.

        A generation ago, there were committees of doctors who ran almost every aspect of the hospital but the finances and executive functions. In most of America, those two were done largely by orders of nuns, or by other religious groups. There were very few public hospitals and certainly nothing run by for profit corporations.

        In those days, patient care issues were handled by these committees of doctors and nurses and they were strictly beholden to generations of medical ethics and history. Therefore, the vast majority of what happened in a hospital comported to compassionate and appropriate care. The nuns were in charge of the purse strings, and that venue too was handled much more morally than it is today. I am certainly not making the claim that everything was perfect, but it was much more aligned with the traditions of the profession of medicine than literally anything we have now.

        About 10-15 years ago, maybe a bit sooner, largely in the name of “equity” and “diversity”, the old patriarchal system was decided to be beyond hope and efforts were made to begin ditching it. One of the very first things done by MBAs and CEOs was to begin to replace the committee members with immigrant doctors who were here in the USA at the pleasure of the employers. Very soon, the MBA types began to ram things through these committees with the votes of these J1 and H1B docs, and many of these things were absolutely antithetical to the history of the profession. When the immigrant failed to comply they were fired in spectacular fashion and sent home. Making sure that they were humiliated as much as possible – an example to all the others. Slowly but surely over time, the MBAs and CEOs have completely usurped the entire governance structure. I would never have believed it possible had I not lived through this for the past decades and seen it with my own eyes in every hospital system in which I worked.

        And I believe it is plain for all to see the devastation this has wrought in our hospital systems. Medical care in this country is a dim shadow of what it used to be. Many of these doctors are really very bright and incredible – but they have zero clue of American cultural norms and traditions. It is very very difficult to take care of a 400 lb McDonald’s addict if you have not a clue where any of their behavior comes from, as just one example. The dying/hospice situations under their care are often just tragic. You can call me all the names you want, but I would never deign to think I would be an effective healer if I was transplanted to Karachi and thrown in an office all alone.

        1. JL

          About those nuns, a personal anecdote from the early 1980’s. I took office typing jobs through a temp agency for a part time job when I was in school. In them earlier days of computing, word processors were entering the office world. They were mostly limited to straight forward typing applications (if only computing had ceased there what a better world it would be, we’d still be bemoaning the pernicious impacts on mind and sociality of TV–which used to be pervasive for the young readers out there). A variety of corparations produced their own machines and their typing programs were incompatible so one had to be proficient at each machines programs to use them. By a quirk of life I had learned Phillips’ Micon system so I had a specialty with which to get assignments.

          One day I was sent to a catholic hospital and my greeting supervisor was a nun, still habited.
          I was sent to fill in for an absent typist doing data entries and form filling in a very small, windowless, air deprived and miserably lit (by bare fluorescents) room. Set shoulder to shoulder were seven or eight middle aged, non-european immigrant women sequested for a long day in front of keyboards endlessly inputting grindingly mindless datums.

          Not generally an observer of the unspoken spirit lets call it of a place, the air of unhappiness, oppression and dispirited misery of those women was dramatic and palpable, and contagious. After a few hours of my first day the nun came and had me come with her.

          As we are walking down the hall and without any preamble or prompting she launches into a sustained tirade about how much scum those people (the typists) were, how they deserved to be tormented and how she despised them and did everything she could to make them miserable. the only reason that I can conceive of why she said all this to me was because I am a white male (e.g. of a different order and status of worthiness) though if she were from the old country she most likely would have intuited that I was the wrong order of white male but that’s another story. I don’t shock easily when it comes to employer, manager, personnel office viciousness, but this definitely stood out, as she did dressed as she was in the habit of a nun.

          My new and privileged assignment was typing the president of the hospital’s son’s high school paper. It happened to be an exceedingly excellent piece of work for a high schooler, bytw, so perhaps it too was from an outside specialist as well.

          Them was the good old days too. I don’t bring this up to deny the unmistakable devolution of all systems and relations since the onset of this libertarian utopia foisted upon us by the Regan/Thatcherites. E.g. the freedom to choose was always a code phrase for their freedom t abuse. But the constituents of the miserableness of the present existed back then too; ust not as developed and unconstrained.

      5. TheMog

        The big threat being that they have a very limited amount of time to find a new job, otherwise they have to pack up and leave. That’s not a threat when you’re a US citizen or an LPR.

    2. LY

      Indentured servitude. He’s really committed to the peculiar institution.

      As a US born engineer… there’s no tech career anymore. I just want to lie flat. Co-workers would rather work at a supermarket than deal with the Viveks of the world, except for the health insurance and kid’s college tuition.

      1. chris

        There is though. There is a lot of opportunity for engineers in the US right now. But you have to be the kind of engineer that works on real things, not just software. Can you turn a wrench, climb a ladder, do field service, diagnose signals, install sensors, run pipe, build prototypes, model things and then assemble them, perform field tests, lead a team of people, troubleshoot, etc. It’s hard to get even H1Bs for those kind of roles.

        I don’t blame people for not wanting to do this kind of work. It is hard. It’s hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. It’s dangerous carrying gear and climbing to elevated work platforms and then crawling along checking pipe 70 feet above the floor. It sucks putting on safety equipment and doing physical labor and then writing reports about what you did. Your hands get scraped to ribbons. Your back aches. You collect scars from burns. It’s no fair working night shifts and doing emergency response on holidays. Your other friends with college degrees who went into finance or medicine will look at you funny.

        This kind of position pays well and it is rewarding. I love thinking in my feet and solving problems with my body and my mind. It’s just not an easy office job. If you screw up there are real consequences. That’s why a lot of people don’t choose the same kind of career that I and my colleagues have chosen.

        1. Mikel

          You’re also describing work that would need to prioritize the health of workers (beyond the safety equipment).
          I think more people would look into that kind of work if they felt there was a healthcare system that had their backs.

          1. chris

            You’re right about that. It is stereotypical to suggest men take jobs where their body is part of the package. It’s also limiting in an age where we’re acquiring a lot of disabled people in society. The work also penalizes you for being sick or taking time to heal depending on your employer. But it offers a lot of opportunities and it’s done me well in my life. That might be survivor bias.

          2. Glen

            Bingo!

            I’ve been working as an engineer for over forty years doing much of the work chris describes above. It’s true I’ve watched the MBA/ management wreck the companies, wreck the work environment, wreck our technological edge, but that never did stop me from loving the work, or being very good at it. But I hurt my back and being on the factory floor became extremely painful and difficult, and given that American health care is such a crap shoot, I retired. If we had Medicare for All, I would probably still be working, but all the local doctors clinics are now owned by PE, the local hospital makes it on the national MSM for having to call 911 to get help so getting an appointment takes half a year followed by surprise billing that can wipe you out. Not worth the risk – call it done!

        2. Rick

          In my 35 year career as an engineer I always worked for companies that produced physical machinery, mainly industrial capital equipment. Of the three large companies I worked for where the workplace included building machines, one facility became an Amazon hub, one became an internet server farm, and one became the headquarters for an offshore apparel label.

          We don’t make make as much as we used to in the US.

      2. .TheMog

        I’m not sure if there really is no “tech career” anymore, at least if one is not yet on the wrong side of 50 as I am. If one is looking outside Silly Valley and maybe some of the other tech hot spots, there are jobs out there at smaller companies where one is solving actual business problems that aren’t how to keep people on your website for a few seconds longer.

        They do pay like normal jobs though, with very little chance of getting rich enough to retire at 28 with a bad case of burnout.

      3. ArvidMartensen

        You have to look at Vivek’s culture as well. What did he learn growing up as regards attitudes to those who work at menial jobs? My guess is that his mother was not a cleaner and his father was not a hawker.

        My sample is very small. When we lived in Asia it was usual for expat families to have at least one servant. A lot of expats had ‘quarters’ where their servants lived, tiny little rooms with a toilet room and a basin and no aircon in the stifling heat.
        We had an amah who came in mornings 5 days a week, then went home to her own family who was not badly off, the husband having a good technical job. She was a godsend because we had a toddler and a baby.

        It was known that the servants who worked for expats hailing from the two largest Asian countries were not well treated as a rule. Such expats were normally drawn from the upper, wealthy classes.
        Stories circulated of servants imported from home countries by their employers who worked 7 days a week, 18 hours or more a day, for a pittance. They also endured abuse of various kinds.

        The white expats as a rule were better employers, although not perfect by any stretch.

    4. hk

      I was thinking about something from the historical movies, but not Braveheart. Something 1860-ish.

      It’s “culture” alright: H1B’s don’t talk back. (Although the reason isn’t really “culture” from the workers’ side…)

    5. AG

      Vivek

      Sorry if this doesn’t aspire to the level of debate here, but Vivek is an idiot.

      And I congratulate Bertrand for argueing the way he does. Because NOT engaging into the proto/krypto-fascist redderick of Vivek’s is exactly the way it has to be done.
      Vivek is a fraud. And I’m sure he knows it.
      Problem: This is the kind of ideology that will take off in the West. I was confronted with this – China! – bullshit in Germany 25 year ago. The everything-is-a-contest-madness. It was minority view then. But one response to the downfall materializing now will be this conflict over educational culture that will increase. Nationalism, army draftings, discipline, building a new MIC. Back into 19th century class warfare. Do everything for king and country. Biologism meets the fakery of capitalist meritocracy. The players’ names might change The national flags remain the same.

      p.s. from Helmer a few days ago:

      “President Vladimir Putin gave a party rally speech in Moscow on Saturday in which he omitted to mention seven of the eight domestic issues most troubling Russian voters – inflation; high interest-rate caused stagnation in the economy; corruption; low quality education; poor public health care; terrorism; and illegal immigrants.”

      Any thoughts?

      1. chris

        The problem is that by any practical definition, Vivek isn’t a fraud. He is wealthy. He is successful. He has worked through a number of opportunities. He is currently tapped by the president to do something other people recognize as important. Because he isn’t a fraud, but his success was built on things most would consider fraudulent, the dissonance is killing this discussion. Because the people commenting that the TechBros who destroyed the system are now complaining about it being destroyed are correct.

        Vivek is also wrong about his diagnosis here. If we want US citizens to advance tech and become better employees with better skills, we need to advance play. People need to learn to play with numbers and machines and code and modeling and construction. Project Lead the Way, an engineering curriculum available in some US high schools, is a great start for accomplishing this. But practicing it at the level intended to get the most benefit, and giving students the capstone internship experience, is limited to wealthy schools with students coming from families who are already tech focused. These kids are building robots to play musical instruments and then writing the code so that all the robots in the class coordinate to perform music as an orchestra. That is the kind of play that builds skills to run a state of the art factory. We need more support to make that happen in more places.

    6. Mikel

      Just think: getting even cheaper H1B workers could be in the works with an expanded global war. People will want to escape. All that is wanted is some kind of interchangeable flow of people like parts that can be thrown away when used up…then just import more.

      Just throwing that out there.

  8. flora

    Taibbi’s latest, public excerpt:

    2024: Year of the Coverup
    The most ignored real stories of 2024, a year in which national media made the mass production of “pseudo-events” a stand-in for news

    https://www.racket.news/p/2024-year-of-the-coverup

    The “Three others (plus an honorable mention)” he references include:
    Who’s Running The Country?
    How Was Joe Biden Induced To End His 2024 Campaign?
    Who Were Trump’s Would-Be Assassins?
    also
    Honorable Mention: What’s With The Drone Gaslighting?

    Pretty good questions.

    1. Carolinian

      My only quarrel with Taibbi is that he treats the elite incompetence and malfeasance story as new whereas George Carlin was making it the basis of his comedy back in the 1970s. And let us not forget “the best and the brightest” who weren’t or those American WW2 generals who made horrific mistakes that somehow escaped later John Wayne movies.

      Maybe what is new is that the current crop of deceivers aren’t even trying very hard. Hence Kamala.

        1. Kouros

          Iraq war was not authorized…

          From a legalistic perspective, Russia’s SMO is much more defensible than the Iraq war.

  11. Irrational

    “The paper passport is dying.”
    Very valid privacy concerns.
    What about large scale data breaches? What happens if you lose your phone? What happens if you change your phone?
    I can see my native country (which last charged EUR 120 for a passport for those living outside the country) wanting to charge every time they can. And I am sure they can manage to develop an app that does not work with overseas phone numbers. It’ll be great!
    /s

    1. The Rev Kev

      What happens if you turn up to an airport with your family to go on vacation, your plane boards in 20 minutes, you whip out your mobile to identify yourself and your family members at the check-in counter – and your mobile says that it has only 3% charge left. You know that it is going to happen.

      1. Neutrino

        Alaska Airlines ran some humorous ads a few decades ago.
        One was the pay toilet ad.
        From memory
        Guy needs to use the toilet.
        Price $.25 for three minutes.
        Guy doesn’t have any quarters.
        Asks fellow passengers for four quarters for a dollar?
        Without success, begins squirming.
        Squirming discomfort continues.
        Two quarters for five dollars?
        Squirming intensifies.
        A quarter for ten dollars?
        Squirming practically aerobic.

        And that was in an era where there were still meals of a sort provided. Now, you pay for whatever. Crapification, indeed.

      2. Jessica

        Charger cables and outlets at the check-in counter would solve this.
        Not that I expect that to happen. Just wanted to point out that this is another case in which the problem isn’t physical but social.

      3. cpm

        What does fully vaccinated even mean now, first shot and booster or some undetermined number of seasonal shots?

        1. Mikel

          Now that authorities have rid many of the idea that a vaccine is something that PREVENTS disease in the grand majority of recipients, the sky’s the limit.

  12. Xquacy

    RE: India: It’s Worse Than You Think

    I agree with comments about people in the west not having much of a clue about life in India. Indian bureaucracy is hopelessly corrupt. It’s a dog-eat-dog life. But most of the essay springs from the state of being blinded by the light when first leaving Plato’s allegorical cave. It’s become something of a hobbyist indulgence in professional class Indians aspiring to life in the west to valorize developed country ‘living standards’ while scorning the conditions in India. There is far too little understanding or patience to investigate how India has reached this position, let alone how to fix its problems.

    India has experienced something of a prolonged neoliberal shock therapy, starting in 1991, having accelerated through Modi’s successive terms since 2014, after a brief hiatus in 2004-2014. It’s had a decimating effect on the social fabric; much of the amoral attitudes the author describes are real. There is not a class in India who aren’t trying to escape, many of whom are just looking for a way to leave behind the insurmountable toxicity of life in India. But this has been imposed, and is not some intrinsic quality of Indianness.

    China and India are great case studies for what happens when you take divergent paths to development; industrial capitalism vs neoliberalism. Starting from a similar place, China has all but eliminated absolute poverty. India is a wasteland.

    1. CA

      https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qmXS

      August 4, 2014

      Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China and India, 1977-2023

      (Indexed to 1977)

      https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qmXN

      August 4, 2014

      Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China and India, 1977-2023

      (Percent change)

      https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1BNOk

      January 15, 2018

      Life Expectancy at Birth for China and India, 2000-2022

      https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1BNOu

      January 30, 2018

      Infant Mortality Rate for China and India, 2000-2022

    2. Raymond Carter

      The author goes on for pages about how Indians are universally ruthless and amoral. But he and his family? Well, they are amongst the “handful” of decent people in India.

      Give me a break.

    3. Kouros

      The problem with India now is that, albeit exhibiting all the traits of a sociopathic polity, it might have reached an equilibrium that can continue for a long time.

      Early simulations in cooperation/sciopathy show that both types can establish stable equilibria.

      But India sounds indeed f&$#ed for a couple of generations. And then the water in the Punjab will dwindle and the monsoon will become less wet and the heat will become more umbearable and India will trully be f&$#ed.

  13. The Rev Kev

    “Leaderless Uprising in Georgia?”

    The author – Sopo Japaridze – really has it in for the government. Goes on how all those arrested by the police were not released. Perhaps they were the ones throwing Molotov cocktails or were shooting fireworks cannons at the police. Would you call them ‘moderate’ protestors? One thing that the police and government were determined not to have was their own personal Maidan. They see how well that worked out for the Ukraine. And this guy bemoans the workers not turning up to support these protestors. Perhaps it as because they recently voted for the government in the last elections. Something seemed off about this whole article so went looking for more info on the author and found that ‘Sopo Japaridze (was) a representative of former president Mikheil Saakashvili.’ Oh, that explains it then. I guess that he wants his old boss back in power again.

    1. Jessica

      Sopo Japaridze is on my Twitter feed. She has been skeptical of the protests and of the role of the West in Georgia and opposed to another Maidan and another Ukraine.

      Example:
      Sopo Japaridze
      @sopjap
      ·
      22s
      It’s always these southern US politicians who are braindead who to make it their pet project (usually paid to) to intervene in other countries. Sooner or later you will be held accountable for intervening and destabilizing Georgia.
      Quote
      Joe Wilson
      @RepJoeWilson
      ·
      29m
      Next week, I will introduce the Georgian Nightmare Non-Recognition Act, which will prohibit U.S. recognition of the illegal dictatorial regime in Georgia and recognize @Zourabichvili_S as the only legitimate leader in Georgia until such a time as free and fair elections are held.

      To be honest, the article in the link seems a bit different from her tweets.

  14. MaureenO

    “Covid Pregnancies May Have Boosted Autism Risk, Study Shows”

    Does anyone have a link to this study? I could not read the article and other news articles I found do not reveal the study. I am wondering (not to sound like an anti-vax RFK, Jr. conspirator) how they factored out the mRNA vaccine as a cause since literally everyone had the vaccine and literally everyone had COVID?

    1. ambrit

      I don’t know about “…literally everyone had COVID?” but there is a fairly large population of we who refused to take the mRNA “vaccines.” This is yet another factor in the ‘normalization’ of the American (Globalist?) policy of creating First-class and Second-class Citizens.

        1. Joe Well

          Yves and a lot of the guest bloggers and commenters, a large majority in fact, at least got the 2021 shots, because the reward-risk was so skewed in favor of the shots. Yves wrote movingly about the challenges of getting her mother vaccinated.

    2. Yves Smith Post author

      Please do not Make Shit Up. Only 70% of Americans are fully vaccinated. It is admittedly anecdata, but IM Doc reported that nurses in his hospital threatened to quit over the reproductive effects of the Covid vaccines (changes in frequency and intensity of menstruation; some women stopping menstruation altogether). So it is possible that reproduction-age women are over-represented among the unvaccinated.

      And it is also not true that everyone has had Covid. The CDC estimates that 1 in 8 haven’t.

      1. juno mas

        No kidding? I’ve never had Covid. Didn’t recognize how lucky I’ve been. (I’m regularly on a college campus.)

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          You do not know if you have not had Covid unless you have been getting PCR tests weekly.

          Many got asymptomatic cases. Even in wild type there were a lot and even more since Omicron, probably half.

          And the at home tests have high false negative rates, even when you test 2x on successive days.

          1. BeenThere

            Physician here: Nonsense. The IgM and IgG3 serology tests measure whether you’ve had Covid. The PCR test is purported to reveal whether you have a current infection, a dubious proposition given that the false positive rate of the PCR test is not published, unique among all medical tests. A “positive” PCR test without symptoms should be considered a false positive. Given that Covid symptoms are indistinguishable from cold/flu, a positive PCR test is hardly trustworthy.

            1. Yves Smith Post author

              Sorry, you are not a scientist and you also did not read what I wrote with care or are choosing to misrepresent.

              I said if you are not tested every week with a PCR test you will not know for sure if you had Covid. I stand by that. You need to be tested with a very accurate test on an ongoing basis.

              For the last two years or so, to the extent people are getting tested, they are the high false negative at home antigen tests. Even if you take the at-home test two days running, it reduces the high false positive rate to less high. Moreover, the antigen tests are notably not reliable in asymptomatic cases. See this among many studies https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/spectrum.01295-23

              The only possibility for determining if someone had Covid, as opposed to has antibodies from a vaccine, the vaccine has to be spike-only, as in mRNA, viral vector, or Novavax, as opposed to an inactivated virus vaccine like Sputnik or Sinovac (so yes, this means an antibody as opposed to antigen test). And then you have to test for anti-S + anti-N antibodies. Those who have had Covid will have both anti-S and anti-N, but the spike-only vaccinated have only anti-S. I wanted to get tested to see if I had anti-S and anti-N, and I was told it’s pretty much impossible for a normal retail patient to get that sort of test done.

              On top of that, some people serorevert. And it’s not just the immunocompromised. Even the FDA has found this to be an issue:

              It is unknown if all people who have a SARS-CoV-2 infection will develop antibodies in their bodies in an amount that can be detected by a SARS-CoV-2 antibody test. Also, even if people do develop antibodies, the antibody levels may decrease over time to levels that can’t be detected by a SARS-CoV-2 antibody test. It is also important to note that different antibody tests may detect different antibodies and different levels of antibodies.

              And IM Doc has seen it in his practice:

              I have recently had patients who we know had Covid recently and a few years ago whose N Ab is negative. I am not sure if this is a faulty test or if immunity wanes after awhile.

              The manner that the difference is being discovered in large centers has to do with brown stains and other immuno tests in actual tissue. This is in no way commercially available, is often very cumbersome, and expensive.

              So please do not make assertions that among other things contract what the FDA says and other careful clinicians have found.

    3. CA

      “Covid Pregnancies May Have Boosted Autism Risk, Study Shows”

      As asked, I searched but could find no link to such a study beyond a UCLA recruitment notice. I am unable to explain why.

    4. Rick

      It isn’t “the” vaccine – I had J&J/Janssen in the first round and most recently had Novavax. And, as others have noted, many were not vaccinated and recently the rate has dropped a lot.

      I’ve also not had a SARS infection to my knowledge and test fairly often.

      1. CA

        “Story is also available at…”

        Forgive me, but there is only the Bloomberg article on a claimed UCLA study. There is apparently no published study to be found.

      2. jrkrideau

        There are a number of pre-pub sites where the draft could be posted. IF\f it has been the article should cite it. IF not, why not?.

        A N = 250 sounds rather tiny.

    6. ACPAL

      Any time I read the phrase “May Have,” “Could,” “Might” or the like I think of the phrase “If pigs could fly.” The universe is full of “May Have’s,” the vast majority of which are pure BS. But then, Martians “May Have” colonized ancient Earth.

  15. YuShan

    “Microsoft Is Forcing Its AI Assistant on People – And Making Them Pay”

    Adding unwanted AI crap was the last straw for me to finally move even my main PC to Linux. Apart from the spying and AI crap, I had always been quite happy with Windows 10, I’m done with it now. I’ve finally bit the bullet 6 months ago.

    If I really must use Windows for anything now (e.g. Adobe Photoshop), it runs on a neutered Windows 10 version (no internet access) in a virtual machine on my Linux system.

    Btw, I also want to fight against everything being a subscription nowadays. It’s ridiculous that we run stuff in the cloud (i.e. somebody else’s computer) while our privately owned hardware is more powerful than ever! This really doesn’t make any sense.

    One of the most ridiculous things is Spotify. Instead of storing your music locally on your own hardware (even the cheapest phone has >64GB storage space), people are now paying for this twice! 1) Monthly fee to Spotify, and then 2) Pay for data to transfer it to you phone every time you listen.

    End of rant

    1. timbers

      A few yrs ago I had a chat with the IT support office because my laptop had a failed battery. Attempts to replace it failed but they had to try to before replacing the laptop. So I was at their window several times and they got to know me slightly. I made a comment something to the affect I’m surprised they upload all their product test data to Cloud or One Drive or whatever it was. “Why?” “It’s not secure. It should be on hard drive.” “But it’s reviewed by lawyers and tech department. It’s legal and secure.” “Not from Microsoft/Google it’s not. What if they decide they like what your tests show? Who has more $$ and lawyers and access to governing elites…you or Microsoft? And how would even know it’s been copied or stolen by them?” I don’t know if they were secrectly laughing about me all the way to the bank thinking me a fool, or we’re impressed, but after that they always recognized me as I approached.

      1. The Rev Kev

        Probably after you left, the penny dropped for them both in an ‘Awww, crap!’ moment. How can having all your critical data be on somebody else’s servers ever be secure? Especially when those people always seek to monetize your data as that is their business model? That’s probably why they recognized you whenever you approached them afterwards. They must have had some hard, serious talks after you left based on what you said.

        1. Neutrino

          A variation on the saying If your business depends on a platform, you don’t have a business.

          Or you are in a platform business where everything looks like a monetizable nail.

        2. urdsama

          I wouldn’t bet on it. When national governments keep key data in the cloud, good luck on convincing people it’s a foolish idea.

        3. Polar Socialist

          My sample size is small and biased, but in my experience it’s almost never the local IT that pushes for the cloud solutions – at least not the ones in the trenches. You have all the same responsibilities but less control, and the budget/resources ratio becomes quite unpredictable.

          Not that long ago I was part of an IT team, and we took a group of collaborators on a tour to our server room, and many of them were astonished as we pointed to our rack of 40+ servers running hypervisors and presented it as our “local cloud”. In a few seconds it dawned on them that the Cloud itself is actual hardware running somewhere and a lot of nodding and amused laughter ensued.

          1. matt

            the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
            i used to be skeptical but after breaking too many phones, laptops, and backups, i now trust someone else’s computer more than i trust myself. (to an extent ofc.)

              1. Taurus

                This!

                Physical possession of the hardware is 90% of reliability :)

                Running a RAID is another 9.9%.

                If you are a little technically inclined, invest in a synology box with a couple of drives. RAID the drives to mirror each other.

                As an extra bonus point (to really mitigate the remaining 0.1% reliability risk – e.g. your house burns down – set replication to the cloud of your choice.

      2. Duke of Prunes

        Companies that care use a feature called Bring Your Own Key or similar that means the cloud provider is storing your data encrypted with your key. Since they don’t have your key, they can’t read your data or be compelled by a court order to share your data with LE. Of course they charge more for this.

        1. jobs

          Sync is an example of such a service.

          Also, tools like CloudMounter and Cryptomator can be used to store encrypted files on cloud drives such that Microsoft, Google, etc. cannot read the contents of those files.

        2. Tim

          BYOK, as I know it, is just that, you upload your key to the cloud provider, and the cloud provider uses it to ecrypt and decrypt.

          Which means you still send files unencrypted to the cloud provider. And your key is also stored at the cloud provider (either on a permanent storage medium or in working memory).

          If the data needs to be processed by the cloud provider (f.e. to read the content of a file and search it), it needs to be, at least partially, decrypted, as there is no way to process encrypted data.

          The cloud provider off course promises it will not abuse this. Often only in marketing materials, not in contracts.

          This is not cheap.

          A lot of window dressing if you ask me.

          1. Taurus

            Actually – Proton now has a Proton drive – it is not exactly cheap, but then nothing is unless you and your data are paying the cloud costs.

      3. SocalJimObjects

        Ehrm, there’s this thing called encryption. You can encrypt your data before uploading them to the cloud, and if you use a strong enough key, then in theory no one can read your data. The strongest encryption algorithms are backed with really solid mathematical proofs, so in practice someone will need a supercomputer in order to process all those encrypted data.

    2. AG

      I am running still on a very outdated OSX for various reasons.
      However the day will come I cannot keep this up any more.
      With Macs glued together I might have to switch everything. Is Linux ok for non-buffs? Since MS is no option. And what machine I wonder? I like my DVD built-in…

      1. .human

        Just get an older, quality machine that meets your requirements, a Linux distro on disc (hundreds!) and follow the instructions.

        Shout out if you have questions or problems.

        2. TimH

          My 2c… set up the machine with 2 drives. A small (128GB) SSD for the boot/OS drive, and a second drive (any type or size) for your work files. Image the first drive periodically so you can reproduce it on a replacement SSD very quickly if it dies. The image is an exact copy of the structure of the drive, not a list of files. The work drive can be backed up easily and often by simply copying important files off to an external drive often. If familiar with running linux, the dd command is very easy to use to image a drive.

        3. Jokerstein

          I recommend starting with Mint Linux or Pop_OS! (or however the orthography is), which comes from System 76.

          1. AG

            Wow. Thanks for all the rich info here!
            I might use that for setting up my parents’ machine. Once Win 10 runs out of support they will need something instead and I never wanted them to have Win 11. A Mint Linux with Win-looks might sound just like the answer. I always feared them getting used to a new OS surface, being older now. I remember my initial qualms when switching to Apple 20 years ago.

      2. YuShan

        The problem with Linux is not (anymore) that it is complicated for non-geeks. There are distros like Linux Mint that look very much like Windows and you hardly need the command line. That transition can be very smooth.

        The main problem with switching to Linux is that much of the (Windows, Apple) software that people use is not available for Linux. So you’ll have to find alternatives. And sometimes that can be difficult, depending on what you do.

        You can try out a live image of a distro without installing anything, just to try it out. (Download, make a bootable USB stick and start your PC from there).

        1. TimH

          Actually it’s not necessary to find alternatives to Windows software that doesn’t require the internet, such as the version of MS Office that you are used to. Install Virtualbox , which is free, and then a guest OS such as WinXP. This can be configured so that it sees your host computer as a networked drive, but is not given internet access. 1GB RAM is enough to assign in most cases, which is fine if you’re running linux with 8GB or more.

          1. YuShan

            This is basically what I do. For the programs that have no (decent) Linux equivalent, I’m running them on a neutered (no internet access) Windows 10 install inside a virtual machine on my Linux system. But it comes at a performance penalty, so I first look for native Linux solutions

            Btw: instead of MS office I now use LibreOffice. But I still want to use Adobe Photoshop and LTSpice (circuit simulator) so those two are currently running on W10 in a virtual machine.

          2. Jason Boxman

            For a Windows 11 VM, I think you really need 4-6GB of RAM available for the VM. And now you’re dealing with VirtualBox.

            Every time I install a Windows VM, I have to Google and fight for an hour to figure out how to get the window to dynamically resize the resolution based on the size of the VM window. A real pain.

            Seamless and easy I would not say it is. Doable, sure.

            You’re much better off finding native software that does what you need. LibreOffice is serviceable, not great. Google Docs is, well, Google. But it works.

            Desktop Linux itself is serviceable, for the most part. But you will eventually have to drop to the command line to deal with/fix some annoyance or another. None of which is a challenge for me, just a hassle, so I decamped to Apple back in 2016 and have never looked back.

            For those with less technical expertise, when a Linux distro does go crazy, a resolution is not necessarily to be easily had or understood.

            ymmv

            1. TheMog

              There are other solutions for the VM quandary like virt-manager, but they’re not the easy button like VirtualBox is. OTOH, they’re also not owned by yet another Megacorp.

              Admittedly I’ve been using Linux since the early 90s, but I don’t think Windows 11 is any easier to fix issues with than something like Linux Mint.

              I’m about to play family sysadmin on my mom’s laptop, and I suspect that unless she needs any commercial software I’m not aware of, I’ll switch the machine to Linux Mint if it’s not upgradable to Win11.

      3. Alice X

        What do you mean with Macs glued together?. You can trick your Mac (post 2008, except iMacs late 2009-2011) into accepting even the latest OS, I’ve done it several times, it’s called Open Core legacy patcher. Another option is from someone whose handle is dosdude. I’m still running 10.12.6 since I have old 32 bit software which cannot be upgraded and I refuse to do without. When I need something later I have several other old machines that are souped up which can easily be networked. And they run Windows 10 just fine though I have no use for that.

        I can run Linux but no use for that either.

        1. AG

          I am with 10.12.6 too.
          To my knowledge the later MBPros are glued together so that DIY-repairs become problematic.
          Thanks for the software info!!

          1. Alice X

            Starting in 2012 with the Retina models (which ditch the DVD drive) and thereafter the batteries are glued in. It’s a messy procedure to replace them. Apple was just saving a few pennies. I have a 2012 MBPro with a DVD drive and non-glued replaceable battery. Repairing the other components really means swapping boards. :-/

            1. Yves Smith Post author

              The Apple Techs (independent shops) lie like crazy. They say you cannot replace the battery on a Macbook Pro (mine 2015) w/o replacing the entire top part of the machine, as in the keyboard section too. The claim they are one unit.

              1. Alice X

                Yup! A woman and her laptop and they see $$$. To replace your battery you do have to take out most of the components but you just put the same ones right back in. It’s time consuming but not hard. There are videos out there. It’s the toxic adhesive solvent that I don’t like. Yuck!

      4. Bsn

        Yes, me too (“It’s a movement, and everyone needs one, every day” ~ H. Shearer). Had an older Mac and only used one favorite software on it. The disk drive finally failed so had to move on. Long story short, hubby and I are making pro/con lists on how to get off the internet. One problem, how to access NC and a few other treasures. Once a week to the local library with a thumb drive? Being retired helps. I’m glad I’m not 30 anymore and looking for work. Not rich by any means, but this is a bit of a 1st world problem.
        No internet = more garden, more music (without AI), more reading, many more “more” and a lot less surveillance and propaganda.

      5. Glen

        Here’s a good starting point for selecting a distribution:

        https://distrowatch.com/

        Plus, you should be able to download an iso image of the distribution to a thumb drive or burn a DVD, and run it (boot off the image) prior to actually installing it on your hardware. This allows you to check/test that the distribution identifies and uses the hardware correctly. Note that under Linux, selecting older hardware will more likely ensure that everything works correctly; bleeding edge hardware may not yet have drivers.

        If there is critical software that you need, check around and see if it’s possible to run a virtual machine (VM) and keep using that software or see if there is replacement software in the open source software world that would satisfy your requirements.

        1. Skk

          Thanks. I stayed with Ubuntu 18.xx because I found 22 appreciably slower, but it’s getting really long in the tooth now so I’ve got to do something about that. That link you provide helps.

          1. AG

            …in fact there is this group of artists now 80-85 years old. And they are working out how to use Ubuntu. I found that fasincating. They use it to do mashups of their paintings with single parts taken from those to do animations with them. Great stuff.

          2. Glen

            I finally had to upgrade my PC (used the same one for over ten years) because of software that needed higher versions of SSE and my old CPU didn’t have it. You maybe close to that same issue depending on your CPU.

      6. Vandemonian

        If you put “osx like linux distro” (without the quotes) into your favourite search engine you’ll get quite a few links for “X Best OSX-like Linux versions. Check the reviews, and pick two or three you like the look of.

        Using your OSX machine, you can make an installation USB or DVD for each of the ones you’d like to try, without too much trouble

        You can then boot the new machine from a USB/DVD, and try out both the OS and the machine. When you find a combination you’re happy with, go ahead with the installation.

    3. SocalJimObjects

      Everything has its pros and cons. One argument for storing things in the cloud is that your data is backed up through multiple copies stored in different servers, so the chances of losing your data is really really minimal. This has nothing to do with how powerful your computer is, it’s a matter of having the right tools and the discipline to back up your files regularly. The rule of thumb in the cloud is that your data will be copied at least 3 times, which means 3 different hard drives at the very least (there could be more but I am trying to make this as simple as possible). Are you willing to buy 3 different hard drives in order to store your songs? Whenever there is a security patch for Windows, Linux, what have you, cloud companies are also quick to apply it to all their computers. Again, do you have the discipline required to do this regularly?

      I am not saying the cloud is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but people really don’t understand the amount of effort required for a single person to maintain a secure properly backed up computer environment.

      1. The Rev Kev

        ‘One argument for storing things in the cloud is that your data is backed up through multiple copies stored in different servers, so the chances of losing your data is really really minimal.’

        But it does happen such as when Google Cloud accidentally deleted an $83 billion Australian Superannuation fund’s data-

        https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/09/unisuper-google-cloud-issue-account-access

        Luckily the head techie had that data stored online with another company as a backup. Must be a suspenders and belt man.

        1. SocalJimObjects

          Hence I used the word minimal instead of zero. There’s so much data out there in the cloud that in comparison the amount of data that has been lost is much, much, much less than 1%, it’s pretty close to zero (but not zero) in practice. And here’s the thing, there’s a saying in the computer industry about “eating your own dog food”, and I can assure you companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook also store their data in the cloud. The technology is the same, but in practice they can lock customers out of their own data given sufficient reasons, while the same does not apply to them.

  16. DJG, Reality Czar

    Theo Wold. The twiXt is fairly long, but it is worth reading all of it.

    From the twiXt: “What they have is a tangled morass of visa classes that are carve-outs, handouts, and special favors to particular industries, bought and paid for through decades of lobbying feckless members of Congress and presidential administrations.”

    What’s going on is regulatory capture. From the point of view of someone on the left, I re-cast the discussion thus: What is the point of preserving these visa programs if their purpose is to abuse U.S. employment law? Which is crappy to begin with.

    The answer is: These visa programs have to go, whether or not you think that Trump is a narcissistic blah blah blah.

    We’re talking public policy here, and since the Democrats somehow can’t get their union-organizing bills through the Congress (yeah, yeah, ProAct, Joe Manchin, the parliamentarian), it is intriguing that hard-core MAGA people are now in the lead of re-balancing worker/employer relations.

    As any number of people have pointed out, the reason the Republicans have the upper hand is that they seem to be the party of change. The Democrats could one-up the Republicans, but no, the Dems are all worried that Nancy Pelosi may do a Dianne Feinberg (how unsightly) and that Steny Hoyer may or may not exist.

    From faraway, I am also enjoying Musk and Vivek and their meltdowns. First, if Musk is already losing his mind over visas, just wait till he tries to negotiate by means of the (toothless) DOGE-o-ganza. (Giorgia Meloni sta per eliminare un amico “stretto,” ne. Purtroooooppo.)

    This little dustup is a signal of the beginning of the end of two clown princes of capitalism. And you thought there is no Santa Claus.

    1. Erstwhile

      Steny Hoyer may not exist? But, but, I saw a photo of him once with Joe Biden. It was real, I tell you, it was real. The photo was real, man. I held it in my hands. It was real.

    2. Pearl Rangefinder

      Yes, the dust-up has been amusing to watch over this Christmas break here in Canuckistan, where we’ve been had in a similar way via our temporary foreign workers programme and foreign “students”, largely desperate people from India in both cases, who employers just absolutely love because they can work them 80 hours a week for minimal pay. Even employers who don’t hire them win because the sheer mass of these people suppress wages all across the board, not to mention boosting housing and rental prices to the stratosphere. So much winning.

      I’ve come to the conclusion a while ago now that immigration and the various similar programmes surrounding it like ‘temporary’ foreign workers etc, is almost entirely a scam for the citizens of the country being subjected to it. That neoliberal scum/elites in the Western world all seem to love it and push for it nonstop is the major tell. Another tell is that their arguments (ie: “we need to import the ELITE HUMAN CAPITAL to WIN and stay WINNING”, “Best and Brightest” etc) fall apart at even the most cursory glance at the jobs being outsourced to foreign scab labour. ( accessible nitter version here )

      Follow the money. Never fails.

      1. jrkrideau

        Some of the foreign worker/student programmes are almost certainly a scam but our internal birthrate has been below replacement since 1972 according to World Bank figures. So if we want to maintain our current population or increase it, we need “legal” immigrants.

        This is true of any number of countries. Japan birthrate has been below replacement since 1975. In fact it looks like Japan’s population has been declining slightly since about 2010.

        1. Pearl Rangefinder

          Sure, but why do we want to *increase* our population? Who wants that increase? Who benefits? I sure as hell don’t benefit in any way from Canada’s population increasing, and certainly not increasing at the rapid rate of the past few years. My housing has gotten ridiculously expensive, hospital care wait times are worse every year, traffic is worse and worse, job prospects and wages tighter and tighter. What’s the upside?

          Seriously.

          Do you support having your wages suppressed? Do you support your housing costs tripling? Do you support your environment being destroyed for GDP *groaf* (GDP per capita has even gone down the past ten years!)? When you include the caveats, that equation ain’t looking so grand anymore.

          Canadian’s are practically brainwashed when it comes to immigration, we aren’t even allowed to ask ourselves what the point is or what the costs are to us. Or *why* the cosmopolitan globalist oligarchs who rule us are so desperate to import infinity more people, forever. The answer to that has been made abundantly clear via the US H1B debate; the oligarchs see our living standards and our ‘outrageous’ demands, like a 40-hour work week, as impediments to extracting ‘value’ from us. We are just fungible “human capital” that stands in the way of extracting profits out of our societies. Now they have discovered a new cheat-code, they are just going to replace you with ten desperate indentured foreigners instead. And we are just supposed to love that?

          ¯\(ツ)/¯

    3. SocalJimObjects

      We need a stock market crash right about now because that will take Musk down a couple of pegs in the pecking order.

  17. Wukchumni

    The authorities might not be doing much in regards to H5N1, but Wal*Mart is…

    Paid $8 for a dozen eggs yesterday in Visalia

      1. hk

        CA has laws that prohibit non-cage free eggs (or something like that, same with pork and other stuff.) Meat and eggs (like gas) are way more expensive here than elsewhere.

  18. DJG, Reality Czar

    India: It’s Worse Than You Think.

    I highly recommend reading this article by Bhandari. I also highly recommend wading into the comments.

    The reason is this: Now that I live overseas, I can assure you that the protestations of Americans that the U S of A really, really isn’t a racist society are falling on my deaf ears. Americans are addled by centuries of racism.

    Here’s a “mission statement” from the sponsoring organization of the blog: “We also believe that whites, like all racial groups, have legitimate interests that must be defended. The defense of those interests is white advocacy. We seek to advance only those interests that we recognize and would defend for all other racial groups. We seek no advantages as whites — only the expression of preferences for our own people and culture that are taken for granted by people of other races but denied to us.”

    Tell that “preference” stuff to the five Italian immigrants lynched in Tallulah, Louisiana, in 1899.

    Oh. Not only must the rest of the world put up with such U.S. bloviation about the nonexistent categories that are the basis of U.S. racial hysteria — now, the U.S. culture wants to export these categories. So you end up with earnest BookFace posts about “brown Arabs” (and, presumably, beige Persians).

    Living as I do in the Chocolate City, I can assure you that it is hard to tell the beige Persians from the beige Italians.

    And, no, Cleopatra wasn’t “really black.”

    So: Look at this article as still another sign that the self-created nightmare of race in America isn’t over. And to join this to today’s MuskVivek-a-thon, the historic reason for the importation of people enslaved in Africa into the American colonies was that “labor shortage.” Before special visas, one had slave ships. Now, there are visas.

    1. Pat

      Not for nothing, I do want to point out that the visa holders are not being brought to America in chains after having been kidnapped. They were not drugged and taken. They are not physically beaten and abused. There is a difference. Are they being exploited. Yes. But it is still a very big difference. And as actual slavery has not entirely disappeared anywhere in the world, I have a problem equating the two. Now if you want to talk about indentured servants…

      1. hk

        Many people before Civil War opposed slavery mainly because the institution degraded tje rights of free workers rather than the immorality per se. In this logic, H1B works the same way: if the capital can access foreign workers without rights, the harder it becomes for the “free” workers to insist on their rights.

        When labor becomes scarce, the capital have two options: they can give concessions to workers or they can enslave them (at least, this is the 2 second version of the argument made about post Black Death labor markets in Western and Eastern Europe–I’ve seen the same argument made about medieval West Africa, too–slavery necame institutionalized because labor was scarce and undeveloped land was not. Then the Portuguese came and they were willing to pay well for the slaves…)

    2. matt

      i think an important dimension here is that indian students want to come here because the opportunities are better. the pay is better. it’s exploiting immigrant labor at a higher payscale, not slavery. indian immigrants in tech are like mexican immigrants working farms, just with cs degrees.
      makes me think of that story where limiting the amount of overtime made things worse for immigrant laborers because they could no longer make overtime pay. (at my current job, most of our employees work overtime because it’s the only way to earn a living wage.) being exploited in america is still better than working in their home countries. that’s why they’re here.

      1. cfraenkel

        This discussion of ‘they want to come here’ (sotto voce: so it’s ok to exploit them…) is missing the point that it’s tearing apart our society.

        The bosses lobbying for visas are doing the same as the plantation owners hiring ships.

        And remember that much of the racial culture came from poor whites being fed a line of BS to keep them down and accepting their lot instead of demanding a share of the pie.

        How is that all that different from Vivek telling native engineers ‘your culture sucks’ when he’s actually more interested in union busting and buying a subservient workforce?

    3. Mikel

      “…now, the U.S. culture wants to export these categories. So you end up with earnest BookFace posts about “brown Arabs” (and, presumably, beige Persians)….”

      There are plenty of warnings about this throughout the decades – often by black academics or writers that are now bizarrely labeled as promoting racism by giving the warning.

      This isn’t the most thorough or academic discussion of the problem, but contains an important sentence when considering this subject:
      https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-colorism-2834952

      “In the United States, colorism evolved when the enslavement of people was common practice.”

      I’ll add that’s the case for the rest of the Americas as well. Others may have examples from other regions in the world, but I’m just talking about what I’ve learned living on this continent.

      There are still many all over the world who want their slaves (of a variety of races) back.

    4. Vandemonian

      Here in the under Down Under I spoke to a senior nurse managing a hospital ward about nurses from India (about a quarter of her staff). They don’t always get on well with each other, based on which part of India they’re from. She needs to be careful constructing a roster – a nurse from Kerala won’t necessarily work harmoniously alongside a Punjabi.

      Does that sort of disdain count as racism?

      1. hk

        This is interesting: one obs that Western military officers experienced in peacekeeping operations often made was that Indian and Pakistani officers work together extremely well on UN operations (I recently heard it from Col Baud on one of those podcasts, but I heard something similat from an Irish diplomat in the past also). I know I’ve seen Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi students work extremely well together when I was in college. Given their histories, you’d think otherwise. WRT, I’d have wondered if the old “Martial Race” bit from the Raj is still there…but that wouldn’t apply to the science students?

    5. Jonathan Holland Becnel

      Thank you for your comment!

      Literally just read a passage today in Adolph Reed’s book 📕 The South 📖 about him driving in the 90s through that section of Louisiana.

    6. gk

      > Tell that “preference” stuff to the five Italian immigrants lynched in Tallulah, Louisiana, in 1899.

      And 11 in New Orleans. But you did get Columbus day as compensation.

  19. The Rev Kev

    “Former NSA cyberspy’s not-so-secret hobby: Hacking Christmas lights”

    Such a feel good story about a guy that worked for the NSA. For Christmas he has the hobby of having his house as a light and sound show for the neighbourhood. Awww! Of course the rest of the years for s**** & giggles he hacks into his neighbours home devices, their Ring doors, their internet, reads through their emails, checks out what is on their mobiles. Hey, everybody has got to have a hobby, right?

  21. Wukchumni

    Milan, from January 1st absolute ban on smoking outdoors L’Unione Sarda
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    It’s an odd benchmark, but did democracy really start heading downhill when smoking cigarettes became Taboo?

    2. cousinAdam

      I remember, living in Brooklyn at the time when the indoor smoking ban went into effect, reading an absolutely livid op-ed in the NY Press (a free weekly tabloid conceived as an alternative to the Village Voice) written by singer/songwriter/composer Joe Jackson about how he was leaving NYC (and likely the country) for good (he was an expat Brit) because he could no longer smoke at his preferred pubs. Always brilliant if a bit arrogant, I remember him implying that this was the beginning of the end……

      1. KLG

        Beginning of the end of what? Adventitious lung cancer and cardiovascular disease? When the indoor smoking ban went into effect where I lived at the time, the howling was long and loud. Then the owners of bars and restaurants saw their traffic and income rise and the result wasn’t even a dull hum…The only establishments not enforcing the ban were the “gentlemen’s clubs” out on the highway. They just paid the fines and went on their merry way.

        1. Wukchumni

          Not defending cigarettes-a lifelong ‘Tartotaler’ here…

          I’m thinking more of a reflection of how they played a pivotal role in the rise of the American Empire, go look at any WW2 photo with say 10 GI Joes, 3 or 4 of them will have a lit cancer stick in their hands, and musicians, writers, actors and artists were quite accomplished in the 50’s to 90’s, under the influence.

          1. The Rev Kev

            In WW2 Winston Churchill argued that tobacco was a strategic war material and he may have even been right. Can you imagine those GIs fighting a war bu without coffee?

  22. Wukchumni

    In aviation news, a Boeing plane flying from Australia to New Zealand suddenly goes into a nosedive, injuring 50 people. Another Boeing plane, taking off from the San Francisco airport, loses a piece of landing gear. A Boeing spokesperson says that the company, after conducting an in-depth review, has tentatively identified the root cause of the recent problems.

    “We think it’s gravity,” said the spokesperson. “It seems to be getting worse.” As a safety precaution, Boeing is advising pilots to avoid taking off, and simply taxi the planes from city to city, which the spokesperson says “may result in delays, especially to overseas destinations.”

    https://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article296995874.html

    2. Acacia

      Another Boeing 737 just crashed in Korea. Nearly all passengers reported dead. 😢

      Preliminary reports suggest the front landing gear failed to deploy.

  23. pjay

    – ‘Behind Afghanistan’s Fall, U.S.-Backed Militias Worse Than the Taliban’ – New York Times (Kevin W)

    Once again, intrepid reporters for the NY Times trickle out the truth – long after it would make any difference. Infuriating, but par for the course. This stuff has been known for decades – literally. Hell, it was basically a repeat of what we did in our earlier dirty war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. The Taliban had already fought a civil war against these “warlords” once, after the Soviets withdrew and we lost interest. Actually, this basically describes the type of paramilitaries we support in *all* of our dirty wars. And if we are lucky we can read a little about them in the Times – years later. “Democracy dies in Darkness” – oh yeah, that’s the other Paper of Record that published the Afghanistan Papers once we decided to cut our losses in that poor country.

    1. Bsn

      Agreed. Was it any surprise that heroin availability and use went up after we invaded Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos? Then crack and coke when we “entered” Nicaragua. Then heroin again when we visited Afghanistan? ‘Tis a mystery (or history).

      1. pjay

        I actually read this article a second time to see if there was ANY mention of the CIA (which actually ran this war and its most important “warlords”) or of the US’s own special operations forces that carried out their own midnight raids and operated their own death squads and interrogation centers. As usual there was not. The main American protagonist in this story was “a lieutenant colonel from the Georgia National Guard.” LOL! There are always a few low-level military types, the William Calleys or Lynndie Englands, who take the heat while those actually calling the shots get away scott free. As usual, though we meant well, we poor naive Americans just didn’t grasp the degree of corruption by those to whom the Afghan government was giving our money! Gosh, who knew?

  24. pjay

    – ‘Syria will never be unified’ – Edward Luttwak, Unherd

    The Yinon Plan is just a “conspiracy theory.” The fact that US/Israeli policies seem to mirror its recommendations is just coincidence. And as Luttwak says, a “confederated” Syria fragmented into its various sectarian divisions is “a much better alternative.” He doesn’t quite say for whom. But I’m sure he’s only thinking about the Syrians themselves.

    1. Mikel

      So, you don’t think the current policies and actions are a rebrand of or inspired by such ideas?
      Does the name of an imperial land grab really matter?

        1. Mikel

          I wondered if that was the case. So I went for the hopefully less confrontational sounding questions as reply….

  25. Pearl Rangefinder

    Buffet was absolutely right on the class warfare. Just watching this latest H1B scam kerfuffle has been amazing in the brazenness. Offshoring industry wasn’t enough, they literally want to replace you now with foreign scab labour. We are getting absolutely f***ed, and to add insult to injury, it’s not even our own ruling classes f****ng us alone anymore, they have invited their foreign ruling class friends to f*** us too.

    1. TheMog

      The H1B temporary importation of cheaper (usually tech) worker drone has been going on since I’ve been in software development (over 35 years now). A very high percentage of the time it was the megacorps that brought in a ton of people on H1Bs with the same justifications they’re using now.

      So it’s now “now”, but I think the general population is seeing more of it these days with the big beneficiaries being more household names than they used to be, plus people realizing that the youth cult in IT leaves highly competent people on the sidelines because they have a grey hair or two.

  26. Carolinian

    Re ProPublica Microsoft tricking the government into paying for enhanced security

    “Some of those incursions were the result of Microsoft’s own security lapses.”

    Ya think? It would be an interesting study to see how many ramsomware attacks track back to Windows based computers. The Bill Gates mantra that software must be paid for becomes a tad suspicious when you are also paying for Microsoft’s mistakes. It almost self licks.

  28. Es s Ce Tera

    re: Covid Pregnancies May Have Boosted Autism Risk, Study Shows Bloomberg

    The medical model always treats difference as disorder, something to be prevented, fixed or corrected.

    And I find the antivax crowd obsessing over autism to be misguided, it’s not such the horrible thing they make it out to be, but the medical model foments it.

    1. Mikel

      Maybe there should be a theory formulated about neoliberalism’s contribution to autism?

      And, dare I say, vice versa…

  29. AG

    KOMMERSANT interview with Ryabkov on nuclear deterrence

    “Today, a deeply alarming situation has developed”
    Deputy Head of the Russian Foreign Ministry Sergei Ryabkov on the situation in the sphere of strategic (in)stability

    https://archive.is/CDJou

  30. Es s Ce Tera

    re: Trump asks Supreme Court to pause TikTok ban, while Biden admin says app poses ‘grave’ threat CNN (Kevin W)

    From the article:

    “Congress passed the ban with bipartisan support in response to years of concern that TikTok’s Chinese parent company poses a national security risk because, as the Biden administration warned in its own brief Friday, it can both collect data on users and manipulate the content those users see.”

    If the ban goes ahead, I hope we also see a ban of Facebook and Twitter on the very same grounds. The nationality of the owners is irrelevant.

    Wouldn’t it be a good if the supremes set a precedent that collecting data on users and manipulating content was a Bad Thing ™?

  31. Es s Ce Tera

    re: Microsoft Is Forcing Its AI Assistant on People – And Making Them Pay Wall Street Journal.

    That subscription model and cost is why some corporations are building their own in-house AI now. They see the benefits of Copilot but refuse to pay MS for the same. I think it wasn’t a good business decision on MS’s part to go with a subscription model for this. MS thinks because Copilot is hooked into the Office 365 apps it has achieved customer lock-in, that customers have no other options if they want the benefits.

    1. cfraenkel

      Eh, nothing new in terms of business models. There’s always been perfectly good alternatives to the MS sludge, but they require knowing what you’re doing, or more importantly, paying people who know what they’re doing. And corporate bigwigs would rather pay MS than pay their own people.

      1. Es s Ce Tera

        Not this time, though. When your number of employees is in the 10’s of thousands the price tag for the Copilot subscription model doesn’t look so great, and certainly not when the accuracy is 60% or less and your own teams are telling you not to use it for anything sensitive or critical, to use it only in limited use cases. You as an executive are thinking no way you’re putting this POS in front of employees where they’re guaranteed to create friction everywhere, bringing down the company, let alone paying for that. And most of these same companies have perfectly capable dev teams which can be retasked, tech resources and priorities are easy to adjust, AI is available to anyone to source and build, MS doesn’t have a lock on it, so now you as a executive are thinking here’s an opportunity to build something proprietary, your competitors are already working on top secret projects doing the same.

    2. Jason Boxman

      Funny Microsoft comes up today in links, as I was just thinking when I couldn’t sleep how monopolist and criminal Bill Gates basically nuked alternative Operating Systems effectively back in the early 2000s. We had IBM OS/2 Warp and BeOS, but with exclusively Windows licensing, new PCs of course had to ship with Windows only.

      And thus our nightmare 20 years later, and his extraordinary wealth.

      Of course you can still use MacOS, if you buy a Mac, or Linux/BSD if you’re into that route of free software. But you’re still paying the Windows tax if you don’t build your own PC generally.

      What a sad state of affairs. Can also thank W. Bush administration for settling the MS monopoly case.

      1. Jokerstein

        Check out System 76 (several types) and Framework (laptops only) for decent spec computers at fair prices w/out the Window$ tax. Framework is unique in having EVERY component completely replaceable by the end user. Long may they prosper!

  32. Anand Shah

    On India, being Indian, I agree with every paragraph Jayant Bhandari wrote… particularly on families

    I think he has been a long time columnist on these issues over the last 15 years @ The Advisor Perspectives sites…

  33. Martin Oline

    Zelinsky le Pew
    This is based on the song by Ben Sidran
    Song For A Sucker Like You

    You got a thing for playing
    Piano keyboards with your tool
    The audience was braying
    You thought your comedy was cool
    Your little head was fraying
    And NATO found a useful tool
    But baby
    They don’t have a song for
    Zelinsky le Pew
    Zelinsky le Pew

    What’s that you’re saying
    Your lust for peace is so profound
    But the price you’re paying
    A million dead, some in the ground
    The tragic role you’re playing
    The curtain’s starting to come down
    But baby
    They don’t have a song for
    Zelinsky le Pew
    Zelinsky le Pew

    Well you had your Boris
    He tried to show you how to deal
    You got yourself a Biden
    His schooling showed you how to steal
    Now you want a miracle
    Life is getting all too real
    But baby
    They don’t have a song for
    Zelinsky le Pew
    Zelinsky le Pew

  34. juno mas

    re: Milan: No Smoking

    Santa Barbara, CA has invoked an outdoor smoking ban for years. No meter limits whatsoever—total ban! Even has signs on pedestrian crosswalk actuators. No enforcement, No compliance, Milan’s 10 meter restriction is a joke: the acrid aroma (smell) of cigarettes are palpable at 100 meters outdoors. Non-smokers can identify a smoker simply by the smell of their clothes.

  35. Jonathan King

    Per Carolinian’s comment:

    I really don’t get “the cloud” or why anyone would want to make use of it. Physical storage is now quite inexpensive.

    One size doesn’t fit all. I’m an avid collector of musical genres, with a mllion-plus MP3s aggregated over time. I run my PC with five external hard drives attached to keep it all updated and organized, yet live in fear that my geographic location (crest of the Oakland/Berkeley hills opposite S.F.) is sufficiently disaster-prone that on any given day they could all go missing in an earthquake, fire, or landslide. So I pay $100 a year for 10GB of cloud storage that backs up the backups, as it were, and also makes the files available remotely (albeit via download to a local device). Worth it to me, at least until the cloud provider goes under! .

  37. Carolinian

    Good article on Kubrick. I have the miniaturized version of The Kubrick Archive that someone gave me and a friend had the expensive full sized version. Pauline Kael didn’t like him much and at one point said he was like “a cold German pornographer.” But in my far more humble opinion Strangelove and 2001 are perfect combinations of his wit and visual panache. Who cares whether 2001 really makes much sense? (and far too many do care).

    Kubrick himself seems to have had trouble with his stellar reputation and the years between films grew longer and longer. When people call you a genius you don’t want to let them down.

    1. IM Doc

      The wife and I went to a 25th Anniversary screening the other night of “Eyes Wide Shut”. I have seen this several times over the years – and found it alarmingly confusing. And watching it again now after all that has happened in the past 25 years was an experience. There was a critic’s discussion before and after the film and something was mentioned that I found fascinating.

      Kubrick died, I believe, immediately after the film was totally complete but before any kind of rollout. There was apparently some extreme concern on the content in the studio and they really wanted some things changed but were not willing to take him on. Once he died, changes were apparently made.

      They described this issue as being an open rumor that is widely acknowledged as being a fact. According to them, there was but one big change made. There is a scene where the Tom Cruise character goes back to the mansion where the big orgy occurred and the girl was sacrificed, and he is blocked by the driveway gate. An ominous man shows up and hands him a letter through the gate. In the movie – the letter is opened and it says something like “This is your last chance. Drop your investigation or we will take matters into our own hands.” Something like that. These critics stated that the letter in Kubrick’s version actually state – “Hand over your daughter to us as penance for your sins – and you and your wife will be spared.” There was apparently great concern about the suggestion of child abuse and the “elites” and they had it changed.

      This was told to everyone in the audience before the screening – and I must say that the alleged original letter contents makes so much more sense – the entire rest of the film ( about an hour) makes much much more sense. I had been very confused before. In the toy store near the end – the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman couple literally hand their little girl over to two strangers. Their dialog after that was done suddenly makes perfect sense where before with the letter from the movie – what happened in the toy store and immediately beforehand makes absolutely no sense at all.

      I find Kubrick films to be very compelling. I find something new and different every time I watch one.

      1. Carolinian

        Interesting and thanks.

        However I’m not sure how finicky Kubrick was about the underlying material and he may even have accepted the change. His thing was iconic imagery and it’s why so many current directors consider him a great. He didn’t write his own stories and was quite open to contributions from his actors like Sellers or even the crew. For example he let Lee Ermey make up his own dialog in Full Metal Jacket. Ermey had been the character he played.

        The linked article quotes Kubrick as saying a film is the “photograph of the photograph.” In other words the fictional world is a step removed from reality and is a form of heightened reality–at least the way he saw it. To me as someone who also loves photography this was his great talent. But there were other hands at work on his very collaborative art.

    3. AG

      Today I find myself rather lonely in my criticism of Kubrick wherever I look online. It’s different with my old colleagues but that’s easy since we have shared same views for decades.
      Not to mess too much with anybody’s passion for “Eyes…”, back then I felt it to be a proof of Cruise’s limitations and that his former wife was the better actor – and that I was never sure if I prefer Sydney Pollack as an actor or a director. Which is a coward’s way to got out of the way of articulating my criticism (I haven’t seen “Eyes” in 20 years.)

  38. AG

    re: COVID Germany/Berlin – investigation:

    2 MPs of the Berlin parliament have made 40 inquiries on how COVID was handled.
    Based on the official records they thereof received (sort of an FOIA-action) they wrote this article for BERLINER ZEITUNG:

    Corona investigation: Berlin BSW politician submits 40 inquiries to the Senate – this is what came out
    How deadly was Covid-19 in Berlin? How busy were the hospitals? BSW MP King and health expert Albers asked for data. A guest article.

    by Wolfgang Albers, Alexander King
    28/12/24
    Engl. translation
    https://archive.is/AoRb5

    1. Skippy

      I should elaborate further … circular firing squad thingy considering Anderson’s priors … what a show lmmao.

      I would also make it a two’fer with Lambert’s expose in yesterdays cooler of Elons meltdown, even before Trump is in office. Same goes for Vivek and how the salt of the earth MAGA sorts are responding. On that note I did link the old NC post –

      https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/guess-who-is-responsible-for-the-corporations-exist-to-maximize-shareholder-value-myth.html

      On Elons X account after he – again – promoted Milton Friedman as a genius –

      Elon Musk
      @elonmusk
      Wise words from a true genius
      From
      Students For Liberty

      https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872855650394619946

      Happy to report the NC link on shareholder value was well received and reposted on X accounts. It seems the MAGA mob is not beholden to Corporatists talking down too them or promoting their own ideological headshrinkers after drinking the self serving kool-aid.

      1. steppenwolf fetchit

        There may well be two different and non-related group of MAGA movement people.

        One such group may be the Qanons who worship their God-Emperor Trump.

        The other group may be unhappy campers who want America to be great again in certain basic material and life-worth-living ways again. That other group might not want Musk to be the president.

  40. steppenwolf fetchit

    Here’s something from the economicCollapse subreddit, suggesting another reason why Saint Luigi has been charged as a “terrorist”. I hadn’t thought of it, but it is worth considering. It is to establish a precedent for “terrorist-jacketing” any American citizen the government feels like so as to be able to guantanamize them and padillafy them.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/economicCollapse/comments/1hod38i/go_straight_to_terrorist_jail_because_we_say/

    1. Jason Boxman

      President-elect Trump told The Post Saturday he supports immigration visas for highly skilled workers, appearing to side with Elon Musk in the roiling intra-MAGA debate on the issue.

      “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump said by phone, referring to the H-1B program, which permits companies to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations.

      “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” added Trump, who restricted access to foreign worker visas in his first administration and has been critical of the program in the past.

      It was always wishful thinking that Trump would do anything worthwhile for the working class in his administration anyway.

      Oh well.

      The real question, for me, is what MAGA does in response, if anything. The Left would be, as usual, impotent, and nothing would happen. Will MAGA do the same? Or will there be electoral consequences in the Senate and House?

      Should be interesting.

    2. steppenwolf fetchit

      In the first Reddit-hosted item on this, one of the commenters on its thread claimed that Trump didn’t even have H-1B Visa people on his properties. What he had were H-2B Visa people. The commenter opined that Trump was not smart enough to know the difference. I myself might suspect that Trump is not honest enough to admit the difference, if indeed that commenter was correct about Trump’s H-2B Visa people.

      I very recently saw, but can’t find it to link to it, a bumper sticker saying President Musk ate my cat.

      What if bumper stickers started appearing everywhere saying: “President Musk is eating the pets.”

  43. Wukchumni

    Memories of a horseplayer…

    Watching a dead boring game-LA Rams vs Az Cardinals @ SoFi Stadium, built on the grounds of Hollywood Park, easily my least favorite ‘oval office’ in the City of Angles, it was right under the flight path to LAX and it wasn’t uncommon to have a 737 or 747 a few thousand feet thundering above on final approach during a race-the ju-ju being completely out of kilter.

    It was very much the flipside to majestic Santa Anita-with the San Gabriel mountains as a backdrop, stunning!

    Built in 1938, the same era as Santa Anita, it closed down in 2013, and a friend was there the last day of racing, and related that it felt like any other ending after the 9th and last race on a racing day, no nostalgia or words said over the PA thanking patrons for 75 years of horse racing, he related that it felt like a unannounced funeral in a Potter’s Field, so much for the Sport of Kings, eh?

    Horse racing was pretty much only a sport for gambling, and the NFL is getting there, too. Every other TV commercial is for a betting site.

      1. Wukchumni

        It’s an interesting trade in that 100 pound jockeys dripping wet have been replaced by 327 pound linemen…

  44. AG

    …now with a South Korean plane having crashed apparently I remember the franchise “Mission Impossible”‘s concept of a “Syndicate” of rogue agents attempting to engulf the world in chaos with terrorist acts.

    Actually the Syndicate needn’t be invented it has already been there all the years…

    I don’t know if Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise as creators of this new generation of MI-films were thinking of film history (not “impossible”) – one German pre-war Classic had a prototype-evil organisation sowing chaos in Weimar Republic Germany, lead by the sinister “Doktor Mabuse”.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Testament_of_Dr._Mabuse

    Allegedly director Fritz Lang and his wife and collaborator (later working for the Nazis) Thea von Harbou were anticipating the NSDAP’s terror against German public in the shape of Mabuse’s terrorist network. i.e. a terror group would turn into a legit government.

    This interpretation was made popular by Siegfried Kracauer which would be a reason to discard the idea. He already spread nonsense about other films such as “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” arguing, again, in favour of pre-Nazi premonition.

    However Fritz Lang by the 1920s was well aware of the destructive forces in the country. Although I doubt this was intended as specific reference on what would happen. That just is argued by hindsight’s benefit. But the narrative tradition to some degree remained. “Rogue Nation”, the franchise installment in question, in fact does state that the British PM and MI-6 are responsible for the Syndicate’s existence.

    Said scene revelation:
    Mission Impossible | Rogue Nation | British PM Kidnapping | Scenes Master
    6 min.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT_gzpKtdRQ

    p.s. 1812 anti-British sentiment in full swing! 😂

  46. AG

    So much bullshit in a single TWITTER-thread, impressive:

    On what we are fighting for in the West:

    https://nitter.poast.org/andrewmichta/status/1872343381810331732#m

    by Andrew A. Michta

    Director of the GeoStrategy Initiative and Senior Fellow at @ACScowcroft at @AtlanticCouncil
    He wrote a really cool book about NATO which I won’t link here. It’s too valuable for that.

    https://nitter.poast.org/andrewmichta/status/1872343381810331732#m

    “Dec 26
    Over Christmas I’ve been thinking about the reasons why Western societies have forfeited so much of their erstwhile resilience. The problem is not money or technology, for we have them in spades. And yet we seem no longer able to accept that resilience stipulates risk. 1/10

    Resilience is not just about plans and provisions. It’s at its core about a deeply held conviction that what we represent is worth defending whatever the risk; that should we fail, we’ll not give up but persevere to victory. In our relativized West such binaries are no more.2/10

    In a nutshell, as I see it, we no longer feel bound by the grand narrative of the Western world. We teach our young men and women in our colleges and universities about all the transgressions of the West, while barely mentioning our great achievements as a civilization. 3/10

    And though in our postmodern narrative everything is supposed to be relative, still, when it comes to the history of the West only sheer perfection seems to be acceptable. Increasingly, overwhelming doubt/poignant rejection is what we’ve been teaching our next generations. 4/10

    We have alliances aplenty, buttressed by treaty-based organizations and supranational structures. We have the how, but we seem to be increasingly lacking the what. What is it that we are supposed to fight for, instead of merely preserving the status quo which is failing us? 5/10

    We talk about the rules-based order, but I have yet to hear what the end state is to be-not in normative, but in specific geopolitical terms. I hear constantly about “great power competition” and “strategic competition,” but I have yet to hear what winning looks like. 6/10

    Rome didn’t collapse because it had a high standard of living. It failed due to political and economic decline, overexpansion coupled with military weakness and invasions across open borders. In the end, what it stood for seemed not worth defending. Let it not happen to us. 7/10

    What is our vision of victory? We need to restore that grand narrative of what we fight to protect. If we are to be resilient, we have to believe at our core that what the West has to offer-while far from perfect-is nonetheless and emphatically better than the alternative. 8/10

    Can we restore our resilience? Are we still able to pass our cultural DNA through our Western institutions? Do young American men and women still “hold these truths to be self-evident,” or have we failed our young because we teach less and less of our grand narrative? 9/10

    I don’t have simple solutions to what is ailing the West, but we need to find ways to restore pride in our heritage and start communicating it again to our young men and women. It will take families and schools–all of us as citizens–to rebuild civic pride and patriotism. 10/End”

    Pavel Podvig on whose TWITTER I found this at least with this great question as response:
    It’s rather telling that the entire thread does not mention what it is that “what we fight to protect.” What is your “vision of victory””

  48. Grateful Dude

    re: “FDA Rethinks Phenylephrine Cold Remedies Effectiveness”

    Before the crankers discovered the similarity between ephedrine and meth, herbal ephedrine was available in natural foods stores and quite effective for nasal/sinus congestion. This was after the Senator from Utah stood up and stopped big pharma’s attempt to outlaw all alternativeherbal medicines.

    Maybe ‘Mormon Tea‘ figures in there somewhere. I wish I could get some, my sinuses revolt from any kind of animal food. I use fenugreek seed now. It works, but it’s work to brew it up – a very powerful whole-body demulcent. This is not apparently well known. Wikipedia reflects the conventional wisdom of “no scientific evidence…”, but with no testing as a demulcent; that isn’t a pharmaceutical pursuit, I guess.

    1. kareninca

      You can get Mormon Tea, in capsule form. It is on Amazon (and elsewhere, I assume) and it is called “Dr. Christopher’s Sinus Plus.” It works much better for my husband’s sinus migraines than the prescribed med does. Ask your doctor first as with anything of the sort, of course. The Dr. Christopher’s line contains some weird ingredients, not all of which I would feel comfortable consuming, but I am glad to have the options.

  49. Saurabh

    India: It’s Worse Than You Think

    It actually isn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact.

    India has a lot to offer. If you’re a first-timer, and you want to do business, travel for recreation/leisure, or to just learn more, reach out to Indians (first generation) in your network, through common friends, or through LinkedIn, and you will be surprised by the help/support you will get.

    That experience should be enough for you to consign this (hit) piece into the trash (where it deserves to be).

    You could also read a few online media sites (these are the top 3 to my mind): https://www.hindustantimes.com/, https://www.thehindu.com/, https://indianexpress.com/

    Or, simpler still, just reach out to me…

    :-)

  50. Richard H Caldwell

    An article from “American Renaissance” — really? I read this piece out of curiosity, wondering how ever it made it into links. This site is filled with articles blandly asserting that race is a thing, scientific, even, and that non-western ‘races’ are, by definition, inferior to ‘western european’ ‘races’. Vitriol, ignorance, and smug superiority fill articles and comments both. Truly a home for people terrified of other cultures and value systems and insecure in their own selves. It is useful to know, definitively, where this kind of thinking is being whipped up. Beyond that, only sad.

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