Democrats should condemn the wrecker's wild and destructive use of tariffs but must refuse to support the demand from business to make international trade completely easy.

Tariffs can be effective for promoting specific industries in a country, but the tariff plans the US has adopted in recent years have been foolishly designed.

I object to the way the author uses the word "liberal", meaning "in favor of letting businesses do whatever they like". That is not what liberals stand for when we had political influence, and it is not what Liberals stand for now. Liberal policies adopted in the 1960s and 70s included Medicare, Medicaid, prohibiting racial discrimination, protecting voting rights, protecting the air and the water, protecting endangered species, and protecting workers from injurious working conditions. You can tell from the way the right-wing Supreme Court has attacked these that they do not bow to business.

Wildflowers growing on contaminated soil can absorb arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead from it, and pass them on to bees. It damages he bees' memory, which can wipe out the hive.

Australia wants some of its oldest rock art to be listed as a World Heritage site.

Advisors say Australia should first end industrial development and damaging air pollution, and then it could be listed. I agree Australia should end those, but I wonder if the committee could issue conditional approval.

People in part of Texas have suffered a disaster that they partly brought on themselves. That includes the flood itself — many years of voting for climate denialists have permitted more global heating and that enabled the flood. And it includes the wrecker's efforts to weaken and abolish FEMA.

How should we express our disgust for those political policies in relation to the resulting non-natural disasters?

A doctor in Texas wished for Republican voters in the flood region to suffer the bad consequences of their votes. That is not the right ethical position.

Many Kerr County voters are getting the consequences most of them voted for — but we should be sad for that, not wish for that. Their votes were foolish because of their bad consequences; we should regret both those foolish votes and their bad consequences.

People get the government their behavior deserves, but people always deserve good government.

We can say that people brought disaster themselves without wishing for disaster to harm them. We can wish that they learn to make wise decisions without wishing for a disaster so "to teach them" that lesson.

Moreover, disasters don't always get people to be compassionate towards each other.

Meanwhile, while she was being fired for wishing that right-wingers suffer the harm they have caused, a group of right-wing fanatics seek to impose that harm on non-right-wing Texans.

Iran is deporting 4 million Afghan refugees in a hurry. Many are single women, who under Afghanistan's repressive laws can't even leave the border post.

With their prospects, death is an escape. Why, I wonder, do they obligingly walk to the border post, when they could instead drop on the ground and say, defiantly, "You can carry me or you can kill me"?

There may be other opportunities to fight their guards, for those who would rather die fast than be driven to death or slavery.

*The corrupter's inaugural fund got $19m from fossil fuel industry, analysis shows.*

The corrupter used the electoral fund as an opportunity to pressure the rich for bribes.

If we ever win back democracy, we should make it illegal for any elected or appointed official to raise funds for anything similar in spirit to an inaugural fund. If its purpose is per glorification, perse must have no direct relationship with its operations, with its fund-raising, or its money.

The US saboteur in chief deleted the web site that published national climate assessments, including the most recent one which is from 2023. A copy of that is available here.

Much worse, he has shut down the preparation of the next edition, due in 2027. This will surely please his sponsors, the fossil fuel companies.

Everyone: write to Palantir's board of directors and call on them to explain what they are doing with personal data from the US government.

In my letter I called on Palentir never to process that data together with any personal data obtained in any other way. That would include, for example, location data.

I used the following Subject field:
You must tell us what Palantir is doing with personal data from the US government and NEVER process it together with any other data you have.

I used the following message body:

Others are demanding that Palantir be transparent about what it does
with personal data from the US government. I join in that demand, but
that does not go far enough.

Palantir must never combine, or process together, any of that
government data with any other data it has or obtains about people.
To do so would establish a China-like system of total repression.

I want to be able to continue to love my country. I want it to remain
"the land of the free and the home of the brave." I hope you don't
want Palantir to be responsible for converting the US into a place
that people must flee for their freedom's sake.

Sincerely,

It is most effective if you write your message in your own words. If you are in a demographic that tends to support the bully, it is good to mention that.

Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for why that issue matters.)

First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.

I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!"

They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.

To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.

Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:

First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.

This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.

*The Private Prison Industry Looks Forward to Soaring Profits Thanks to [the persecutor]'s Budget.

Greg Palast: Tesla stays afloat as a seller of greenhouse gas offsets.

*So, my dear green friends, when you buy a Tesla, you're not reducing your carbon footprint by a quarter inch, because Musk is selling your good intentions to General Motors so they can pollute more.*

James Steinberg has designed an app that allows you to change the background your digital airplane boarding pass to display a now-infamous image of the vice president as a bald, bearded baby-man. [...]

He says there was no issue at security. "The TSA tried not to show emotion but looked mildly amused," Steinberg says. "Maybe I should try in a less liberal airport."

As someone who, regrettably, has a lot of experience with Apple Wallet, I was curious how he's altering the picture, since pkpass files are signed. He's not! He's taking your info and issuing a new pkpass with the same content.

One of the cool features of pkpass is that they receive push updates, so that, for example, if the time of the event / flight changes, your pass can be updated remotely and notify you. Bald Boarding almost certainly breaks that connection.

Previously.

I have a friend who exited his startup a few years ago and is now rich. How rich is unclear. One day, we were discussing ways to expedite the delivery of his superyacht and I suggested paying extra. His response, as to so many of my suggestions, was, “Avery, I’m not that rich.”

Everyone has their limit.

I, too, am not that rich. I have shares in a startup that has not exited, and they seem to be gracefully ticking up in value as the years pass. But I have to come to work each day, and if I make a few wrong medium-quality choices (not even bad ones!), it could all be vaporized in an instant. Meanwhile, I can’t spend it. So what I have is my accumulated savings from a long career of writing software and modest tastes (I like hot dogs).

Those accumulated savings and modest tastes are enough to retire indefinitely. Is that bragging? It was true even before I started my startup. Back in 2018, I calculated my “personal runway” to see how long I could last if I started a company and we didn’t get funded, before I had to go back to work. My conclusion was I should move from New York City back to Montreal and then stop worrying about it forever.

Of course, being in that position means I’m lucky and special. But I’m not that lucky and special. My numbers aren’t that different from the average Canadian or (especially) American software developer nowadays. We all talk a lot about how the “top 1%” are screwing up society, but software developers nowadays fall mostly in the top 1-2%[1] of income earners in the US or Canada. It doesn’t feel like we’re that rich, because we’re surrounded by people who are about equally rich. And we occasionally bump into a few who are much more rich, who in turn surround themselves with people who are about equally rich, so they don’t feel that rich either.

But, we’re rich.

Based on my readership demographics, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a software developer. Do you feel rich?

It’s all your fault

So let’s trace this through. By the numbers, you’re probably a software developer. So you’re probably in the top 1-2% of wage earners in your country, and even better globally. So you’re one of those 1%ers ruining society.

I’m not the first person to notice this. When I read other posts about it, they usually stop at this point and say, ha ha. Okay, obviously that’s not what we meant. Most 1%ers are nice people who pay their taxes. Actually it’s the top 0.1% screwing up society!

No.

I’m not letting us off that easily. Okay, the 0.1%ers are probably worse (with apologies to my friend and his chronically delayed superyacht). But, there aren’t that many of them[2] which means they aren’t as powerful as they think. No one person has very much capacity to do bad things. They only have the capacity to pay other people to do bad things.

Some people have no choice but to take that money and do some bad things so they can feed their families or whatever. But that’s not you. That’s not us. We’re rich. If we do bad things, that’s entirely on us, no matter who’s paying our bills.

What does the top 1% spend their money on?

Mostly real estate, food, and junk. If they have kids, maybe they spend a few hundred $k on overpriced university education (which in sensible countries is free or cheap).

What they don’t spend their money on is making the world a better place. Because they are convinced they are not that rich and the world’s problems are caused by somebody else.

When I worked at a megacorp, I spoke to highly paid software engineers who were torn up about their declined promotion to L4 or L5 or L6, because they needed to earn more money, because without more money they wouldn’t be able to afford the mortgage payments on an overpriced $1M+ run-down Bay Area townhome which is a prerequisite to starting a family and thus living a meaningful life. This treadmill started the day after graduation.[3]

I tried to tell some of these L3 and L4 engineers that they were already in the top 5%, probably top 2% of wage earners, and their earning potential was only going up. They didn’t believe me until I showed them the arithmetic and the economic stats. And even then, facts didn’t help, because it didn’t make their fears about money go away. They needed more money before they could feel safe, and in the meantime, they had no disposable income. Sort of. Well, for the sort of definition of disposable income that rich people use.[4]

Anyway there are psychology studies about this phenomenon. “What people consider rich is about three times what they currently make.” No matter what they make. So, I’ll forgive you for falling into this trap. I’ll even forgive me for falling into this trap.

But it’s time to fall out of it.

The meaning of life

My rich friend is a fountain of wisdom. Part of this wisdom came from the shock effect of going from normal-software-developer rich to founder-successful-exit rich, all at once. He described his existential crisis: “Maybe you do find something you want to spend your money on. But, I'd bet you never will. It’s a rare problem. Money, which is the driver for everyone, is no longer a thing in my life.”

Growing up, I really liked the saying, “Money is just a way of keeping score.” I think that metaphor goes deeper than most people give it credit for. Remember old Super Mario Brothers, which had a vestigial score counter? Do you know anybody who rated their Super Mario Brothers performance based on the score? I don’t. I’m sure those people exist. They probably have Twitch channels and are probably competitive to the point of being annoying. Most normal people get some other enjoyment out of Mario that is not from the score. Eventually, Nintendo stopped including a score system in Mario games altogether. Most people have never noticed. The games are still fun.

Back in the world of capitalism, we’re still keeping score, and we’re still weirdly competitive about it. We programmers, we 1%ers, are in the top percentile of capitalism high scores in the entire world - that’s the literal definition - but we keep fighting with each other to get closer to top place. Why?

Because we forgot there’s anything else. Because someone convinced us that the score even matters.

The saying isn’t, “Money is the way of keeping score.” Money is just one way of keeping score.

It’s mostly a pretty good way. Capitalism, for all its flaws, mostly aligns incentives so we’re motivated to work together and produce more stuff, and more valuable stuff, than otherwise. Then it automatically gives more power to people who empirically[5] seem to be good at organizing others to make money. Rinse and repeat. Number goes up.

But there are limits. And in the ever-accelerating feedback loop of modern capitalism, more people reach those limits faster than ever. They might realize, like my friend, that money is no longer a thing in their life. You might realize that. We might.

There’s nothing more dangerous than a powerful person with nothing to prove

Billionaires run into this existential crisis, that they obviously have to have something to live for, and money just isn’t it. Once you can buy anything you want, you quickly realize that what you want was not very expensive all along. And then what?

Some people, the less dangerous ones, retire to their superyacht (if it ever finally gets delivered, come on already). The dangerous ones pick ever loftier goals (colonize Mars) and then bet everything on it. Everything. Their time, their reputation, their relationships, their fortune, their companies, their morals, everything they’ve ever built. Because if there’s nothing on the line, there’s no reason to wake up in the morning. And they really need to want to wake up in the morning. Even if the reason to wake up is to deal with today’s unnecessary emergency. As long as, you know, the emergency requires them to do something.

Dear reader, statistically speaking, you are not a billionaire. But you have this problem.

So what then

Good question. We live at a moment in history when society is richer and more productive than it has ever been, with opportunities for even more of us to become even more rich and productive even more quickly than ever. And yet, we live in existential fear: the fear that nothing we do matters.[6][7]

I have bad news for you. This blog post is not going to solve that.

I have worse news. 98% of society gets to wake up each day and go to work because they have no choice, so at worst, for them this is a background philosophical question, like the trolley problem.

Not you.

For you this unsolved philosophy problem is urgent right now. There are people tied to the tracks. You’re driving the metaphorical trolley. Maybe nobody told you you’re driving the trolley. Maybe they lied to you and said someone else is driving. Maybe you have no idea there are people on the tracks. Maybe you do know, but you’ll get promoted to L6 if you pull the right lever. Maybe you’re blind. Maybe you’re asleep. Maybe there are no people on the tracks after all and you’re just destined to go around and around in circles, forever.

But whatever happens next: you chose it.

We chose it.

Footnotes

[1] Beware of estimates of the “average income of the top 1%.” That average includes all the richest people in the world. You only need to earn the very bottom of the 1% bucket in order to be in the top 1%.

[2] If the population of the US is 340 million, there are actually 340,000 people in the top 0.1%.

[3] I’m Canadian so I’m disconnected from this phenomenon, but if TV and movies are to be believed, in America the treadmill starts all the way back in high school where you stress over getting into an elite university so that you can land the megacorp job after graduation so that you can stress about getting promoted. If that’s so, I send my sympathies. That’s not how it was where I grew up.

[4] Rich people like us methodically put money into savings accounts, investments, life insurance, home equity, and so on, and only what’s left counts as “disposable income.” This is not the definition normal people use.

[5] Such an interesting double entendre.

[6] This is what AI doomerism is about. A few people have worked themselves into a terror that if AI becomes too smart, it will realize that humans are not actually that useful, and eliminate us in the name of efficiency. That’s not a story about AI. It’s a story about what we already worry is true.

[7] I’m in favour of Universal Basic Income (UBI), but it has a big problem: it reduces your need to wake up in the morning. If the alternative is bullshit jobs or suffering then yeah, UBI is obviously better. And the people who think that if you don’t work hard, you don’t deserve to live, are nuts. But it’s horribly dystopian to imagine a society where lots of people wake up and have nothing that motivates them. The utopian version is to wake up and be able to spend all your time doing what gives your life meaning. Alas, so far science has produced no evidence that anything gives your life meaning.

Blaming intense media coverage and backlash to the US military deployment in Los Angeles, DHS expects the demonstrations to "continue and grow across the nation" as protesters focused on other issues shift to immigration, following a broad "embracement of anti-ICE messaging."

Don't threaten me with a good time.

The guidance urges officers to consider a range of nonviolent behavior and common protest gear -- like masks, flashlights, and cameras -- as potential precursors to violence [...] Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even "on foot" are framed as potential "scouts" conducting reconnaissance or searching for "items to be used as weapons." Livestreaming is listed alongside "doxxing" as a "tactic" for "threatening" police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters -- or as participants in "surveillance sharing."

One list of "violent tactics" shared by the Los Angeles -- based Joint Regional Intelligence Center -- part of a post-9/11 fusion network -- includes both protesters' attempts to avoid identification and efforts to identify police.

That can't be correct. Skateboarding, I have been reliably informed, is not a crime.

In advance of protests, agencies increasingly rely on intelligence forecasting to identify groups seen as ideologically subversive or tactically unpredictable. Demonstrators labeled "transgressive" may be monitored, detained without charges, or met with force.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

GLib: g_ptr_array_unref: assertion 'array' failed

This assertion fires late, with none of my code on the stack, so I have no idea what it is complaining about; and valgrind provides no clues. It started happening recently, but happens against releases as far back as XScreenSaver 6.05, so something about GTK changed, not my code. Commenting out every call to g*_free does not make it go away. Happens under X11 or Wayland.

I have no patience for dealing with GTK, so I would be very appreciative if someone else would figure this out...

Previously.

Security researcher Alex Radocea found that it's possible to impersonate someone else and trick a person's contacts into thinking they are talking to the legitimate contact. [...]

"Security is a great feature to have for going viral. But a basic sanity check, like, do the identity keys actually do any cryptography, would be a very obvious thing to test when building something like this." [...]

Referring to his and other people's findings, Radocea criticized Dorsey's warning that Bitchat has not been tested for security.

"I'd argue it has received external security review, and it's not looking good," he said.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

The man also damaged CCTV cameras monitoring the site, but cameras captured a clear image of his face before they were destroyed. [...]

"Anyone that's going out to eliminate a Nexrad, if they haven't harmed life, and they're doing it according to the videos that we're providing, they are part of our group," Meyer tells WIRED. "We're going to have to take out every single media's capabilities of lying to the American people. Mainstream media is the biggest threat right now."

Nexrads refer to Next Generation Weather Radar systems used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to detect precipitation, wind, tornadoes, and thunderstorms. Meyer says that his group wants to disable these as well as satellite systems used by media outlets to broadcast weather updates.

The attack on the News 9 weather radar system comes amid a sustained disinformation campaign on social media platforms including everyone from extremist figures like Meyer to elected GOP lawmakers. What united these disparate figures is that they were all promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that the devastating flooding in Texas last weekend was caused not by a month's worth of rain falling in the space of just a few hours -- the intensity of which, meteorologists say, was difficult to predict ahead of time -- but by a targeted attack on American citizens using directed energy weapons or cloud seeding technology to manipulate the weather. The result has not only been possible damage to a radar system but death threats against those who are being wrongly blamed for causing the floods. [...]

Within hours of the tragedy happening, conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers, and lawmakers were pushing wild claims on social media that the floods were somehow geoengineered.

"Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding. Fake. Fake. Fake," Kandiss Taylor, who intends to run as a GOP candidate to represent Georgia's 1st congressional district in the House of Representatives, wrote in a post viewed 2.4 million times. "That doesn't even seem natural," Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America First, wrote on X, in a post that has been viewed 9 million times.

As the emergency response to the floods was still taking place on Saturday, US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, tweeted that she would be introducing a bill to "end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering." Greene, who once blamed California wildfires on laser beams or light beams connected to an electric company with purported ties to an organization affiliated with a powerful Jewish family, said that the bill will be similar to Florida's Senate Bill 56, which Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law in June. That bill makes weather modification a third-degree felony, punishable by up to $100,000.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

The clash started at 11:18 a.m. on Tuesday when around 10 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, almost all with faces covered, tried to enter the courthouse at 100 Montgomery St. to escort other agents already inside who had a young immigrant man in custody.

ICE has been routinely arresting asylum-seekers following their immigration hearings, and anti-ICE protesters had gathered at the courthouse that morning, as they said they've been doing every Tuesday. [...]

Protesters tried to grab the man in handcuffs and pull him away from officers, but were tossed back by the ICE agents. As police pulled the man back into a waiting black SUV and began driving away, protesters jumped onto the van's front hood.

A half-dozen protesters blocked the van by amassing in front of it. The van inched forward, indifferent, before gaining speed and driving off quickly. One protester, still lying on the hood of the car, fell off the car's hood half a block away and was almost run over.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

According to the indictment, Orellana and at least two others drove around downtown L.A. in a pickup truck distributing Uvex Bionic face shields and other items to a crowd engaged in a protest near the federal building on Los Angeles Street on June 9.

Prosecutors allege Orellana was helping protesters withstand less-lethal munitions being deployed by Los Angeles police officers and Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies. [...]

Asked how handing out defensive equipment was a crime during a news conference last month, U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli [said] "He wasn't handing masks out at the beach. ... They're covering their faces. They're wearing backpacks. These weren't peaceful protesters." [...] Essayli described anyone who remained at a protest scene after an unlawful assembly was declared as a "rioter" and said peaceful protesters "don't need a face shield." [...]

"It's ridiculous charges. We're demanding they drop the charges now. They're insignificant, ridiculous," Montes said. "The most it amounts to is that he was passing out personal protective equipment, which includes boxes of water, hand sanitizer and snacks."

If you want a picture of the future, it's a rubber bullet screaming "STOP RESISTING". When people wear protective equipment, "the ability of that officer to gain compliance is restricted."

Remember, kids: all protests are peaceful until the cops declare that they are not!

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.