Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
@bruces 260:

"I could probably rustle up a Covid vaccination somewhere outside
the European Union, but it wouldn't help me much in my bureaucratic
daily life in Europe; if a European health system didn't give it to
me, they wouldn't be able to count it.  Although coronavirus drifts
aross borders with great speed and ease, health data doesn't, and
won't.  Global medical cooperation is vastly *worse* than it was
when the global pandemic started."

It's actually better, but weirder, than that. In France, you can get
your California covid QR converted into an EU QR for 50 euros at a
pharmacy. Same in Germany, but I think it's 30 EUR. If you have a QR
from Washington state or a few other US states that embraced an
international standard, you can just use your QR in the EU. UK
passes work in the EU, too.

Some EU countries, like .pl and .nl, won't recognize US proof of vax
- either the card or the QR - but they WILL recognize a US-to-EU
proof of vax that you get in Germany or France.

In Poland, the restaurateurs I encountered looked at my paper CDC
covid card and shrugged and admitted me (but I was in Katowice for a
UN conference, so there were a lot of foreign proof-of-vax
credentials being presented). In the Netherlands, I had to book and
take a free LFT/antigen test every day, results from which included
a GUID that I could enter into the Dutch covid pass app and get a
24h QR code.
  

    
@bruces 261

"If I lack this QR code validation -- my phone got wet, for
instance -- then I'm in trouble; I become unvaccinated underclass
and a visible health risk."

Again, not quite right. Your Green Pass is delivered as a paper QR
code that you scan into your national QR pass app, which then
generates a(nother?) QR code you can present by showing your phone
instead of the paper. 

But you can present the paper one, or a photo of it. When my fam was
in France, we each took pictures of the others' paper QRs and kept
them on our phones in case someone had a tech problem, we could
present their credential for them. 
  

    
Via email from Jamais Cascio:

Hi folks

Good to see so many old friends and colleagues here. I’m glad we’re
all still fighting to understand what’s going on, and fighting to
hold on to what’s worth saving. It’s hard to keep that fighting
spirit going, sometimes.

I spoke in Kazakhstan about a decade ago. At the time, Nazarbayev
was still President, and the cult of personality was overpowering: a
bronze pillar with his handprint at the peak of the “Baytarek” tower
in the center of Astana; paintings of him everywhere, looking
lovingly at his people; young translators/guides/watchers gushing
about how “the President is such a genius” and “he even wrote our
national anthem!”

That, and the underside of the cars we were shuttled around in being
checked for bombs every time we entered or exited a parking lot.

It’s not all that surprising to me that there’s growing unrest
there. An impoverished population, living with infrastructure
(outside the big city) looking like it was stuck in the aftermath of
a regional war, while the leadership had increasingly gaudy
structures — buildings and monuments — filling the capital. An
economy based on extraction of raw materials that were already
rapidly losing value. Atop all of this was an environment that was
little-cared-for: at the largest scale, the disappearance of the
Aral Sea; at the smallest, the casual way the translators/guides
would toss garbage out the car window as we toured the countryside.
The only surprise to me was that the unrest took this long to
emerge.

I haven’t been following the discussion this year as closely in
years past. Not because of the content or participants — I have
enormous respect and admiration of so many of you here — but because
the state of the world is so deeply depressing. The work that I do
is drowning in the reality of collapsing systems. Still, as noted
above, we keep fighting to hold on to what’s worth saving. Thank you
for that.

-Jamais
  

    
Via email from fruitbatpangolin:

The viewing of Sneakers following the recent death of Sydney Poitier
after the deep state finally hunted him down at the young age of 94,
has taken longer than I anticipated. Largely due to a massive
landlady incursion within the venue chosen, powered demonically by
her exuberant consumption of some 21st century street modern
nightmare fuel consisting, apparently, of hard spirits, valium,
cheap wine, and weak ketamine.

That situation is now largely quelled. Primarily due to the efforts
of a friend, an expert in the role of idiot-whisperer. And the
rescreening of Sneakers went well. Now what have I missed here?

*scans thread*

*slips into NBC suit, carefully checking every seal*

Soooo.

Nuclear: I heartily agree with both Michael Bravo, and Vinay Gupta.

Vinay reminded me, with his 'worst idea I have ever had', of a
conversation I had years ago with someone from the US Navy.
Basically, the US Navy are the only organisation I have ever heard
of that deals with its own nuclear power reactors in a way that is
anything close to that which you would like to expect from a
civilian municipal nuclear power generation supplier. Possibly
because they have a habit of living on them, whilst out at sea. I
suggested that, because of this, it might be a good thing if the US
Navy militarily seceded itself, from the United States, and then set
itself up as an international NGO, finally free from all that
troublesome Washington interference, free to go sail the high seas,
provide nuclear power generation to all, and shoot at anyone who
comes near it.

I was expecting some pushback on this, but given the suprisingly
enthusiastic response I got to the suggestion, I'm not sure it would
be that difficult to pull off. The other branches might get a bit
annoyed.

The essential problem is that whatever the real risks may or may not
be, politics is not engineering. You cannot utilise something as
baseload power for a global energy technology problem, that you are
not also publicly willing to allow any geopolitical adversaries to
use. Lithium and silicon are hyperabundant and simply do not carry
the same political risk. Though I'd like to see mini self-regulating
molten salt reactors built into floating arcology skyscraper
basements. From experience, the problem with nuclear power is not
the technology, it is the current culture of the industry, combined
with the weapons politics. Wanna use nulcear? solve those.

Biological: Lets all sing the doom song (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw_cdqQHGA8 )

The anthropocene is still accelerating
<https://www.bimco.org/news/market_analysis/2021/20210601_dry_bulk_shipping>, and if you ignore the PR and concentrate on the numbers, quite frankly my dear, we're fucked. The climate curve is consistently topping the worst of the IPCC expectations, which means, at least quite likely, that we are on a very different, and sharper curve, to the worst of the IPCC projections. Things that my dad thinks are worrying, but still thinks will take centuries, may take decades. And if that happens, without some kind of explosion in personal fremen-tech, billions are going to have to move rather quickly. From that perspective, the current destabilising fall of the US and the UK may actually help in this regard.

Chemical: Chemistry is our best bet at a technical out, from a
current engineering and politics standpoint. Our batteries and solar
panels might not be perfect, but nothing is, and if you run out of
lithium and silicon, you get a special award from the Galactic High
Council for ingenious stupidity.

Also, if lines of communication and geography can be suitably
organised, up for that drink with <loris>.
  

    
ah, thanks <fruitbatpangolin>. i live rural santa cruz county, USA
(nothing really matters but the view of monterey bay is great).

what is 'frementech'?
  

    
I would guess "frementech" is a reference to the technology, such as
still-suits and crysknives, used by the Fremen people in the Dune
universe.
  

    
ah, not a dune fellow traveler.

i thought this protocol article on crypto communists was useful:

https://www.protocol.com/fintech/crypto-communists
  

    
Tiffany suggested that we post a link to this article by my pal
Ethan Zuckerman, in the Atlantic:
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/10/facebook-metaverse-was-
always-terrible/620546/>

It's about creating a text-based metaverse back in the day, using a
technology called MOO, for "multiuser object-oriented" virtual
reality. We did something similar here in Austin, creating a MOO for
a LAN demonstration set up by EFF-Austin for Robofest Austin back in
the 90s, instigated by Doug Barnes. Doug was a systems administrator
back then; since then, he became a tech-focused attorney based in
New York.

The LAN was set up with computers and much help from Steve Jackson
Games. Steve was so excited about the gaming potential of the MOO
that he made it a subscription service, and attached it to
Illuminati Online or io.com, which was one of the earliest
commercial ISPs. The MOO was a cool environment - we built a
FringeWare building in it. I recall that there was a text-based
marker you could sniff, and it would make you virtually high.

Probably more interesting than anything Facebook will come up with -
but it didn't survive, though io.com succeeded for a long time as an
ISP.

From Ethan's piece:

"The MOO was really cool, in theory. Most people weren’t building
HTML-enabled multiplayer spaces in 1995. It got us our first round
of venture-capital funding, demonstrating to our investors that we
weren’t just kids translating mutual-fund propaganda into HTML. We
were technology innovators. We were building things no one had ever
seen before.

"But here’s the thing: The MOO was garbage. On a good day, I could
give a demo that made it look smooth, slick, and fun to use. But our
CEO couldn’t. And that was a problem. It wasn’t his fault. The MOO
was buggy and quirky and demanded that you think of the world as a
set of six-sided cubes made up of webpages. Our boss pulled the plug
on the project, telling us, 'I know it’s the future, but if I can’t
use it, I can’t sell it to investors.'"
  

    
If you're interested text game nostalgia you might take a look at
the "Fifty Years of Text Games" substack. The author's gimmick is
that he reviewed one text game for each year between 1971 and 2020:

<https://if50.substack.com/archive?sort=new>

He's writing a book, but made the archives free for a week. (It's
been more than a week, but it seems he hasn't turned the paywall
back on yet.)
  

    
Banning video game *companies* isn't quite the same as banning
games. I don't know anything about the scene in China, but there are
plenty of open source game projects out there, built as labors of
love. They are overshadowed by commercial games, but if the
commercial games went away, they'd probably get a lot more interest.

I wonder if we'll see more of those sort of games from China? Maybe
some "lying flat" people might decide to get into programming in
their copious spare time? The laid off game developers could help
them get them started.
  

    
China also cracked down on tutoring companies this year:

<https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008838/chinas-tutoring-ban-leaves-a-trail-of-d
ebt%2C-anger%2C-and-broken-dreams>

> The Chinese government launched a severe clampdown on private
tutoring, blaming the industry for fueling an unhealthy educational
rat race. Academic classes on weekends and holidays were banned.
Education firms were prevented from opening new centers or raising
capital. From January 2022, all for-profit academic tutoring would
be outlawed.

This is terrible for the teachers, but I expect that studying for
exams will continue?
  

    
From a social science point of view, the heavy-handed ban on
for-profit tutoring seems like an unusual natural experiment. Should
we expect that the Chinese public will be less educated without the
for-profit tutoring companies, and how could anyone tell?
  

    
Meanwhile, it's another good year for California state budgets:

<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-12/with-gusher-of-tax-revenue
s-gavin-newsom-politics-of-plenty-california-budget?_amp=true>

> Newsom’s more than $286-billion budget proposal for 2022-23,
unveiled Monday, follows the unconventional model that has become a
hallmark of his governing style and drawn some criticism — bucking
the approach of his predecessors, who narrowed their focus to a few
signature policies. Instead, the 54-year-old Democrat has become a
governor who “swings at every pitch,” as he often describes the
critique of his wide-ranging agenda.

> His plan includes a mix of high-profile proposals sure to grab
attention, such as the expansion of Medi-Cal eligibility to all
immigrants and a call for the state to manufacture insulin, and
others to more quietly bolster the safety net and chip away at
California’s problems.

> The governor is proposing $1.2 billion over two years for forest
health and fire prevention and suggests offering incentives for
developers to build housing in downtown areas, in hopes of
discouraging the kind of suburban sprawl into forests that has put
new homes in the path of wildfires.

You'd think we'd be happier in California, with a mostly-unified
government and plenty of money? Instead we worry about the federal
level.
  

    
<292> seriously misrepresents US socio/political/economic history
since World War II. US workers lost much of what they'd gained since
the establishment of the New Deal because purveyors of the
neoliberal consensus gained power and cut taxes. This created a
powerful oligarchy that now can use huge campaign donations to
protect their wealth at the expense of the rest of the populace.
  

    
I'm spending most of the day managing my biopolitical QR codes so as
to fly from Italy to Spain.  Normally I tote around four different
speckled squares just to clear through through airports, but for
this trip I've got two duplicates of one, and I don't need to seem
one of the other.

If I were as clever as Cory Doctorow, I'd master all the thorny
details and hack my travel situations much better, but, alas, I'm
indolent.  Also, if you excel at swift compliance, it just
encourages them.  Before the pandemic a trip from Turin to Ibiza was
a spontaneous weekend jaunt.  Before 9/11 you could haul a toolbox.

Here's a cynical guide to making  money in the NFT racket without
having to swallow any of the koolaid.  It's written entirely in NFT
jargon, and in a handy listicle form.

https://mirror.xyz/nnimrodd.eth/s4gU0NnIEFBnM0wKcCXyWAcyNHl94ooLCs5RHWdnBiY

"Never get attached to a pfp—they’re just a bunch of traits.

"Ignore a pfp project if all animals look the same.

"List everything at 2 ETH above floor. Sell and buy the floor again,
in perpetuity.

"Never de-list, unless it’s to re-list at a higher price. Listed
items are less likely to get stolen...."
  

    
*In surveillance capitalism, "you are the product"; in Web3, you're
the "exit liquidity." 
  

    
Hello, Jamais. Thanks for that note. Honestly, when jonl asked me if
I wanted to be a SOTW guest this year, I told him I was on as much
of a news hiatus as possible for a working journalist. The gears
haven't completely stopped turning though, it seems.

Vinay, I know this is primarily a thought experiment. Black humor
and irony are perfectly reasonable responses to the current state of
the world – not that anyone needs my approval. 

For myself, I don't have it in me lately to be glib about how much
mortality needs to happen before it's worth getting my mind out of
bed. Frankly it's a sad regression to my mindset in my 20s, when I
was working for PIRG and Greenpeace and everything was So Very
Serious. Maybe I'll snap out of it (again) someday.

"Once you put civil war on the table as the possible outcome of
*not*
letting the Red States have a lot more control of their destinies,
the minor aggravations of relocating a lot of people become a lot
more acceptable."

Maybe it'd be cheaper than war, but that's never stopped the U.S.
from going to war before.

White supremacy is a fundamentally unreasonable belief system. White
panic is based on such extreme bigotry that it leads people to deny
themselves economic and social well being just to avoid sharing it
with non-whites. 

If these millions of racists were still paying taxes to the federal
government, and that money could end up benefiting Black, Hispanic,
Latino, Indigenous, Jewish or Muslim or LGBTQ or etc. objectionable
people, most still wouldn't be appeased by moving "those people" a
few states away.

There's no reason to assume that "blue state" Republicans are
benign, either: Chris Christie may have seemed pretty good, but
that's only by comparison to the Greg Abbots and Ron DeSantises.
Maine's recent former governor, climate denier and bigot Paul
LePage, now calls himself "Trump before Trump."

In a scenario like Maine's, where Democrat Janet Miller is now the
governor, would we move all the relocated Mainers back to Maine?
Would the Republicans then be discharged from the state? 
  

    
Instead of assuming civil war we could talk about an increase in
violence and what forms it could take.

It's not clear that angry Americans  are ready to be or to support
guerillas? Gangs are sometimes a thing. There was the ritual
violence of protesters versus the police in Portland. January 6 was
among other things a sort of imitation of a protest. Many people on
both sides seemed to be expecting things to go the way protests
usually go, and were surprised when it didn't.

Meanwhile there is the stochastic violence of loners that we see in
school shootings and the like.

There seems to be precedent for American acceptance and tolerance of
higher levels of violence without society breaking down? Consider
bombings in the 1970's and the drug war.
  

    
The 2022 and 2024 elections in the USA could be breaking points, or
at least points where protest and violence accelerate. Regardless
who wins those elections, there'll be trouble. Currently, it appears
that the Republicans are seizing the elections apparatus so that
they can direct the results of the election, and if they appear to
be deciding the elections regardless of the actual vote counts, I
expect an explosive reaction.

Though if Republicans have partisans running the elections, in the
unlikely event that Democrats appear to win, I'm not clear how they
can protest, other than in states where the elections continue to be
run by bipartisans.  
  

    
*So, you're Chinese Big Tech, and you like cool surveillance
algorithms that transform your users into the product? Too bad!  The
Party won't allow those for ethical reasons: they cause users to
“become addicted or spend too much.”

*Xi Jinping has got the only computer-ethics scheme that has teeth. 
It's Xi Jinping Thought ethics with vaguely Confucian
"Market-Leninist" characteristics, but he doesn't kid around about
it when it comes to making the subjects bend the knee.

https://mailchi.mp/a2255ec01dff/un-effort-to-ban-killer-robots-falls-short-chi
na-to-impose-restrictions-on-algorithms-and-intel-lands-in-hot-water-over-xinj
iang-reference?e=c54d18d20f



China Rolls Out New Algorithm Rules: Last week, Chinese regulators
finalized new rules on the use of algorithmic recommendation
systems. The regulations (translation available here), which were
proposed last August, place significant limits on the tech
companies’ content recommendation algorithms and give users the
ability to opt out or limit their use of the systems. 

The new law, set to go into effect on March 1, will:

Require companies to display information about how the algorithms
work and their intended purpose.

Give users the ability to opt out of using algorithmic
recommendation systems entirely, opt out of personalized
recommendation systems specifically, or delete personalized tags
used by algorithms to make individual recommendations.  

Place limits on models that cause users to “become addicted or spend
too much.”

Bar algorithms that “generate or synthesize fake news information,”
(a new addition since the draft regulations).
  

    
Emily: "I don't get out of bed for less than 1% mortality" was
literally *printed on my business cards* for years when I was doing
worst case scenarios work. Mordant sense of humor, yes, but it was
also literally true - I did not work on scenarios which weren't
going to kill at least 80 million people, or 1% of the country they
happened in, generally. 

That's given me a certain perspective. Working directly with
mortality at scale - "if you want to know the truth, count the
bodies in the morgues - and in the streets" - is a brutal practice.
But it grounds us in reality, the certainty of death (and taxes)
more than almost any other way of knowing the truth: can be
depressing as hell, or can be liberating. To fight death is futile,
at least for a while longer, but to *know* death is bountiful and
creative. Life-death chiaroscuro.

As a failed state guy, a former planner, I am *grimly afraid* about
what I see in America. I'm trying to sensitize people to a
"Yugoslavia scenario" possibility: Capitalism starts to collapse as
Communism once did and a civil war follows.

I am afraid. And when I am afraid, everybody should be afraid. I
startle easily - I'm very risk-aware, risk-alert - but very little
genuinely frightens me.

American civil war genuinely frightens me.

https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2018/3/29/christian-takeover-us-military
  

    
So what I'm proposing, if it happened in another country, a place
which was not America - we would be talking about ideas like
"autonomous regions".

Texas Autonomous Region?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_areas_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_administrative_division

There has to be something between full federalization - only 100
years old (1913) and civil war. There HAS TO BE.
  

    
Via email from George Mokray:

bruces:  Kazakhstan's Chamber of Entrepreneurs

Sounds a lot like Jack London's Board of Industrial Magnates from
both The Iron Heel and, in passing, The Scarlet Plague where “the
census of 2010 gave eight billions for the whole world…” and “it was
in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came….  From the moment of the
first signs of it, a man would be dead in an hour.  Some lasted for
several hours.  Many died within ten or fifteen minutes or the
appearance of the first signs…”  All this In the midst of a
civilization, ruled by said Board of Industrial Magnates, in which
"down in our slums and labor-ghettos, we had bred a race of
barbarians, of savages;  and now, in the time of our calamity, they
turned upon us like the wild beasts they were and destroyed us.  And
they destroyed themselves as well…...."

fruitbatpangolin: some kind of explosion in personal fremen-tech

Screw the jetpack.  With wet bulb heat death and polar vortex
freezing death, I want my stilsuit STAT!

The Chinese crackdown on gaming and independent tutoring is probably
less about dumbing down and "idleness" than it is about fencing off
what is acceptable and what is not.  What will they use to replace
these activities and how are they expecting to shape the minds that
use those substitutes?  Perhaps they’ve actually learned from our
experiments in meritocracy, planning a “softer” cultural revolution,
or maybe it's just plastering over another oligarchy.
  

    
>jonl: Republicans are seizing the elections apparatus so that
they can direct the results of the election, and if they appear to
be deciding the elections regardless of the actual vote counts, I
expect an explosive reaction

I agree. I also think it highly likely that Dems will prevail by
such margins that the fixes the Pugs have put in place will be
insufficient to deny them. The Blutocrats will again stage a nutty,
but this time we'll be waiting for them. 

I read today that there may be a procedural circumnavigation of the
filibuster perplex to get voting protections passed with a simple
majority, or at least bring it to the floor and force the Pugs to
argue against it in CSPAN soundbites for the midterm campaign. I
remain confident that the Republic is secure and that the
Republicans are delaminating.

I still think crediting this "movement" with the status of
existential threat is a media confection we will all be studiously
ignoring that we once took seriously a few years hence. 
  

    
I suspect we're equally afraid, Vinay. 

I've been astonished for decades at the lack of attention to the
radical right, whether out of ignorance (mainstream news media for
the longest time) or political cynicism (see the Bush II-era FBI
deeming "ecoterrorists" the greatest domestic terrorism threat in
the nation). 

I mean, what did it signify if a few women got screamed at outside
abortion clinics, or a few clinics got bombed, or an occasional
doctor assassinated? The Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing was
terrible – but that was just one guy, right? Ruby Ridge – well, that
guy was NUTS and a woman was the AG at the time amirite?

I don't claim to be special, I don't know why this stuff mattered to
me even though I lived in East Coast liberal bastions until I was
27, working at bookstores and Big Green groups. 

Then I moved to Oregon's liberal bastions for nine years. However,
one didn't need to travel too far out of the Portland or Eugene
metro core areas to start running into a lot of people who thought
Tim McVeigh was a hero, and think now that the Bundys are Paul
Reveres reborn. 

They're the mainstream in eastern Oregon, where most people want to
secede and become part of Idaho. I don't know where most of the
southern Oregonians want to secede to, being surrounded by crazy
California to the south and wacky central-western Oregon to the
north.  But there are comic book "militas" there waiting for the war
to start. They kinda hoped it would start when they started
"patrolling" little towns in summer 2020 against the approaching
Antifa hordes.

This type of faction, being naturally distrustful (although also
pro-conformity), was easier to ignore before the advent of the
popular Internet and addictive social media. Now they've been
mass-weaponized.