3.5 million Argentinians pushed into poverty this year https://benhr.xyz/2024/09/27/million-argentinians-pushed.html
Live Free or DEI - Gaby Del Valle at The Baffler
Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war
It’s awful that Israel’s “escape forward” strategy, at the cost of thousands of lives, faces no meaningful international censure.
🇱🇧🇵🇸
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/23/israel-lebanon-strikes-evacuation-hezbollah
Sticking an AirTag on my Kindle just saved me again. If it wasn’t for this I’d have lost it many times by now.
Catholicism, another flank in America's pernicious global influence? https://benhr.xyz/2024/09/20/catholicism-another-flank.html
Interesting piece on Vance and his antecedents.
"Who Owns America? was the Agrarian-Distributists’ last hurrah. The American public — including, ironically, the very farmers and working men that the movement sought to “save” — was simply not attracted to the philosophy."
The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right - Olivia Paschal in HNN
https://www.hnn.us/article/the-forebears-of-jd-vance-and-the-new-right
As above
‘The most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’: BBC nuclear apocalypse film Threads 40 years on - The Guardian
Worth a watch if you’ve never seen it.
A genuinely shocking number of students on campus. I wish things were more like this at home.
>The primary risk here, however, is the replacement of actual policymaking by a distorted form of technical action. Despite its claim to assist or even automate the production of policy solutions, AI is incapable of addressing the tricky structural issues that impede actual change.
https://www.jrf.org.uk/ai-for-public-good/public-policymaking-from-ai-to-decomputing
"We crave assurance that intimacy can survive independent of convenience. We dream of friendship that is interminable, impervious to the passage of time or changes in geography or individual growth."
On group chats - LARB
Scholarly communication infrastructure has been beyond its breaking point for a while. Generative pre-trained transformers look increasingly like an epistemological omnicidal weapon that we've failed to contain. https://benhr.xyz/2024/09/08/scholarly-communication-infrastructure.html
A wistful piece of writing about a We’re wealthier than kings of the past but we remain a kind of peasantry in the thrall of distance plutocrats now. Unmoored without a sense of place. Indentured to the precarity machine of credit and capitalism.
Vanishing World: On Europe’s Disappearing Peasantry
https://lithub.com/a-vanishing-world-on-europes-disappearing-peasantry
NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose https://benhr.xyz/2024/09/07/nanowrimo-organizers-said.html
On early 2023… Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero—the enlisted shipboard leader—led a scheme to buy a Starlink for $2,800 and to install it inconspicuously on the ship’s deck. The system was only for use by chiefs… and a Navy investigation later revealed that at least 15 chiefs were in on the plan.
Google Scholar is more busted than I thought. Pay for citations schemes exist and may be more widespread than we realise.
Google Scholar is manipulatable - arXiv
A fascinating long read about the origins of Gaia theory, the early influence of systems theory, and NASA and JPL’s sexist culture in the ’60s.
A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair
"“the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet Archive’s book digitization projects violated copyright law.”"
"The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case wired.com
WIRED - The Latest in Technology, Science, Culture and Business https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-books-case-appeal/
https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-books-case-appeal/ https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-books-case-appeal/
Rosella outside the window
I tried to explain this t-shirt to my ten year old niece and she looked at me so pityingly, as if she thought i was suffering a major mental impairment.
