willy nilly

i think i huave a kidney stone

even though i know that might not have actually been why they were fighting the fact that thomas jefferson and frederick douglass and abraham lincoln and fdr and martin luther king were able to make it seem that way feels important

like if i think for too long about how generations of americans fought and died so that I Might Be Free and now it’s my responsibility to make sure that wasn’t all in vain i can’t help but get a little weepy

i’m not religious or communist or passionate about my college’s football team so the american liberal tradition is the only thing that’s Bigger Than Me that i really feel like i’m A Part Of and it can get a little overwhelming

crying ugly tears at the last 5 mins of ken burns’ american revolution when he has a voiceover reading letters about the unfinished promise of the revolution over a series of photographs from us history

it’s still wild to me that when the woman who founded an outfit called “the free press” says she has the responsibility to “redraw the lines of what falls in acceptable debate in american culture”, what she means is that she wants to narrow those lines. it’s not 1984 but definitely a touch orwellian

anyways, tpusa delenda est

idk if people who haven’t been in college recently know how low of a bar there is on this kind of assignment. ime some people write well reasoned, thoughtful responses but half or more are on this level of “reading x made me feel y/think of tangentially related z” and all those people end up passing

last nights fight revolved around the world-historically important question of “is it always appropriate to call a history book that has pictures of art from the period in it an ‘art history book’”?

getting into the stupidest arguments in the world with my sister and decades of habit mean neither of us are capable of backing down when we think the other is wrong

"the entire ai industry is an evil conspiracy and is going to be gone soon anyways" is a very comforting thing to believe if you're already predisposed to hate ai/big tech

zitronism is the opiate of the masses

guy who writes a whole book about the global diffusion of chip-making technology: “technology hadn’t diffused” (he says it was monopolized but that’s not the old tech, which inarguably has, it’s just the cutting edge stuff which are monopolized cause they were only invented in the last 10 years)

“taiwanization” is when a company in taiwan uses dutch made tools with world spanning supply chains to manufacture chips designed in america for use in products assembled in china and sold across the world 🙄

me when i’m just a neutral historian: describe various claims as people “drinking their own kool aid”, argue they aren’t backed by evidence, then immediately assert they’re “easily seen to be false” (without evidence, of course)

in summary: everything is fine, we (probably) won’t fight a war with china, and if we do it’ll 1. make both us, them, and every other country in the world worse off, and 2. be at least partly the fault of the people screaming about how we need to be prepared to fight a war with china

then we act surprised when the country which we have made it our official government policy to harm doesn't want to play nice with us in other venues, accelerates its efforts to reduce its dependence on us, makes friends with countries we actually have a reason to wage economic warfare against, etc

but instead of talking about those specific things they do that we don't like we roll them all up into a single ccp-evil-bundle that justifies us using any and all leverage we have to hurt them with the fully generalizable purpose of 'preventing china's rise,'

and like sure, china is bigger than all those countries combined and is making more of an effort to fully indigenize their supply chains (though seemingly entirely justified given the us response), and they have state backing making it not an entirely fair fight (though our asian allies do the same)

the middle third of the book is about how the rise of japan almost destroyed the us's domestic semiconductor industry but then we made some innovations and did some division of labor and everything was fine again, just with supply chains now including sk/japan/taiwan etc

like sure its fine for the defense people to think about that ahead of time but should we really be designing our whole govt/economy policy around planning for world war 3? can we at least acknowledge that that is the Very Bad Outcome we are trying to avoid, not the base case we plan for?

reading Chip Wars rn and just getting frustrated at how often phrases like "national security concerns" are used as a euphemism for "potential pressure points in an all out war with china"

the entire logic of us china policy seems backwards. we take for granted that we're on a collision course with them and so implement policies to better position ourselves for that conflict, which themselves create the zero-sum conflict they were supposed to help us win

not sure why yimbys would place a particularly high priority on planning to mitigate the second order effects of what seems like should be a massive first-order win for them

heartbreaking: your favorite podcaster has announced a new podcast built entirely out of the most boring bits of their last podcast

average skill level very low but the winner so far is definitely the guy doing (to the untrained ear) an impeccable bob dylan impression

unbeknownst to us the local beers-and-burgers dive does karaoke on Sunday nights so the soundtrack for dinner was a succession of moderately drunk 60+ year old men doing their best to sing along to the biggest hits of the 60’s and (early) 70’s

have they made an ai that can produce good jazz yet?

all the podcasters i listen to keep talking about how we’re returning to an oral culture