As usual, offering more long-form stuff here than any one should be expected to read all of, hoping that a few of the choices will improve your day. This time out it’s almost all politics, but that’s the way the world is. And some of the politics aren’t American!

Some of these are paywalled, sorry. And the whole thing is kind of long so if you’re in a hurry, you might want to jump to the last section, entitled Wonderful things.

Social media · Here’s a real treat. Perhaps the premiere example of a blog that’s grown happily from a one-man operation to a successful and sustainable small business would be Talking Points Memo. It provides what I think is about the deepest carefully-reported coverage of the American progressive scene available anywhere. I’ve been a subscriber for years.

They’re celebrating their 25th anniversary and, to celebrate, have been working on a history of blogging: Pivots, Trolls, & Blogrolls. Contributors so far: Sarah Jaffe, Matt Pearce, Brian Beutler, Kylie Cheung, Megan Greenwell, David Weigel, Jon Allsop, Adam Mahoney, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Max Rivlin-Nadler, Bhaskar Sunkara, Hamilton Nolan, Ana Marie Cox, Marisa Kabas, Kelly Weill, Aurin Squire, Marcy Wheeler, Andrew Parsons, Jeet Heer, and Sarah Posner.

It’s full of razor-sharp insights and nostalgic smiles. I think it’s paywalled? If so, and if you’ve got feels about the blog form, it’d probably be worth your while to sign up for a month just to read this collection.

And thanks to Josh Marshall of TPM for putting it together all these years and especially for this particular mind candy.

Politics (US) · The Trump administration is, generally speaking, strange. For a terrifying trip several standard deviations off the strange end of the strangeness, there’s Laura Loomer’s Endless Payback. At several points in my traversal of this piece I simply could not believe what I was reading. My guess is that it will regularly be cited by historians of the 23rd century, to add spice to their narrative.

Many commentators on the right have been horrified at Zohran Mamdani’s New York victory, seeing him as the white-hot pointy end of the “woke mind virus”. Well, what could be more woke, I ask, than the Department of Africana Studies at Bowdoin, a boutique liberal-arts college in Maine?

Mamdani was a student there, and now the former head of said department offers us Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani. Peter Coviello is not a moderate but is a formidable writer: “The storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism.” Despite that, it’s mostly written with a light touch, often amusing. Read it.

Politics (Other) · It’s not in the news much, but China is facing colossal economic challenges. Learn about “meijuan” (in English, “involution”) which might well put the nation on the path of deflation. That’s a path that, once an economy is on it, is very hard to get off; it took Japan decades.

While we’re looking at China… there used to be “Kremlinology”, a study of the entirely opaque workings of the top inner circles of the Soviet regime. In that spirit, here’s some 人民大会堂-ology: Forever Xi Jinping? Perhaps Not. I enjoyed it but have no idea if it’s, you know, correct. Nobody outside that inner circle does.

Now let’s jump seven time zones west, to France, where the redoubtable Thomas Piketty offers Le Pen’s RN has become the party of billionaires. Unlike the Beijing piece, Piketty’s is (as usual for him) supported by concrete data and I tend to believe it.

Last stop: Gaza, waiting to find out if an externally-imposed and leaky ceasefire will hold, and whether there is a path from where they are to something better. As for “where they are”, here’s The Gaza I Knew Is Gone by Ghada Abdulfattah. It describes life’s experience for the citizens of Gaza after all these endless months of brutality.

Politics (everywhere) · Pope Leo’s Apostolic Exhortation Dilexi Te of the Holy Father Leo XIV To All Christians On Love For The Poor got a short-lived run in the headlines, accompanied by “But that’s… socialism!” pearl-clutching from Stage Right. It deserves a read. The first three-quarters or so are a trip through Church history, starting in Nazareth, aimed at showing that concern for the poor has always been central to the faith. Which is fine, but eventually the Pope gets concrete about the twenty-first century, and is convincing whether or not you believe in any gods.

The next section is about Tech and while Radical CS is a presentation from “The Third NIST Workshop on Block Cipher Modes of Operation” it’s about politics, oh yes it is. We very much need more of this kind of thing.

Tech · A post from David Chisnall on Mastodon contains this gem: “Machine learning is amazing if … the value of a correct answer is much higher than the cost of an incorrect answer.” Which is one of those things that’s obviously true as soon as you hear it. The whole piece is good.

The churning debate around AI is full of arm-waving and relatively free of objective numerical data. So here’s Ed Zitron’s This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services. And I ask: How do the peole making these investments think they’re going to get their money back?

Speaking of things are obviously true: TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software. We could do so much better than we do, and in our hearts we know why we’re not, and it’s about money and power, not technology.

Bluesky has brought its AT Protocol to the IETF; let’s see what happens. Here are Authenticated Transfer: Architecture Overview and Authenticated Transfer Repository and Synchronization. The drafts have source-code repos.

Finally, here’s Spinel, which is trying to build a decentralized, transparent, and somewhat-democratic engineering resource for the Ruby and Rails platforms. This follows on a distinctly-stinky power play where people with money grabbed the steering wheel. Best of luck to Spinel.

Canadian health · Canada has “single-payer” public healthcare that comes with your taxes, which in my experience works well, see here and here.

This costs a lot of money, over $300B/year. Predictably, there are business types panting with eagerness to get their hands on some of that money. And they can; a lot of medical practices and clinics and labs are owned by private companies, apparently doing well while being restricted to billing the government for the standard fees. But what they really want is a two-tier system where they can directly charge rich people more for better care. It seems like every year someone thinks up a clever dodge to nibble away at the system. Fortunately, these people have, so far, ended up losing in the courts.

Here’s a news story: AI Could Save Canada’s Health-Care System. It’s actually pretty coherent and I found it plausible that this technology could maybe improve, for example, the agonizingly slow emergency-room experience.

But then I got curious as to the business angle and tracked the source of the story down to a business called called maple. Sure enough, here they are trying to siphon off direct payments for access to doctors. I predict they’ll end up in court, and lose.

And then there’s the government of Alberta, run by hard-right dipshits who hate most aspects of being Canadian and loathe the proposition that government can provide good and efficient services. Thus: Alberta government plans to allow residents to privately pay for any diagnostic or screening service. Feaugh. I hope this one ends up in court too.

Paying for Open Source · It is coming to the world’s attention that most of our tech infrastructure is radically dependent on open-source software maintenaned by a cadre of developers who are old, tired, and not getting paid for their work. I have direct experience with trying unsuccessfully to convince Big-Tech business leaders to invest in Open-Source maintenance and infrastructure. Here’s some of the coverage:

• In The Register: Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray.

• Open Source Security Foundation: Open Infrastructure is Not Free: A Joint Statement on Sustainable Stewardship.

• Nils Adermann: A Call for Sustainable Open Source Infrastructure.

• Hackernoon: How Can Governments Pay Open Source Maintainers?

• The New Stack: FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs.

Things obviously can’t go on as they are. The best path forward isn’t obvious to me, but we need to start finding it.

Economics and life · Paul Krugman and Martin Wolf, two really smart guys who aren’t technologists, talk about the impact of AI. Technofeudalism is considered carefully. My favorite out-take is from Krugman: “[I] have come to the conclusion that anything that I want to believe about the prospects of AI and its economic effects, all I need to do is do a little searching, and I can find some expert who will tell me whatever it is I want to believe.” Even with that well-justified cynicism, there is deep stuff here.

I read Matt Levine’s newsletter almost every day; not only does it teach you things about how money makes the world go round, it entertains; his glee at some particularly juicy financial swindle or clever arbitrage maneuver will bring a smile to your face. In Money Stuff: Quantum Bond Trading he addresses a deeper question: Does the Finance business actually benefit society? Obviously a subject worthy of attention, and he makes it amusing.

Wonderful things · The dude who wrote Paddling the Darien is clearly crazy, I guess it’d be more polite to say “insanely brave”. Anyhow, I think there are very few people who won’t be astonished at these pictures and stories

I’m not at all sure what A. Inventions, by Jonathan Hoefler, is, actually. The link that I followed said that GenAI image generators were involved. I don’t care.

Alignment Calendars 1584–1811,
from Jonathan Hoefler’s Inventions.

Let’s end with music. Here are two absolutely exquisite song performances, courtesy of YouTube. First, Old Enough by the Raconteurs, Ricky Skaggs, and Ashley Monroe. The interplay of voices and strings is magical. Then Billy Strings wiith his band and string players, doing Gild the Lily. Just a lovely performance of a fine new song.

That’s all, folks, see you next time.