Mitch's Blog

The Guardian, quoting Yale historian and author Timothy Snyder:

“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.

“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”

As Trump tries to control Congressional Republicans, he threatens lawsuits and primary challenges, and Musk will fund all that, making Trump increasingly dependent on Musk, Snyder says.

ht @nitpicking@mstdn.party

The problem is that this is, at the fundamental level, a terrible idea.

There’s a reason that mathematics doesn’t use English. There’s a reason that every professional field comes with its own flavour of jargon. There’s a reason that contracts are written in legalese, not plain natural language. Natural language is really bad at being unambiguous.

— David Chisnall

Scott Lewis at Voice of San Diego:

A few weeks ago, a man in the alley behind our house began screaming. Screaming is not unusual around us, unfortunately. But usually it comes and goes – less frequent than the airplanes, more frequent than the helicopters.

One man walks around screaming all the time. Long beard, bike. Sometimes he begs on the corner. Sometimes he disappears for weeks. But he’s always back and almost always screaming.

This wasn’t him. We know him. This was deeper, closer and more disturbed. And it wasn’t going away. It scared my daughter. I went back there with the flashlight and found the man. He was ensconced in a combination of blankets and garbage. He was ranting incoherently, unaware of me even as I tried to get his attention.

I finally yelled “Hey!” He turned and looked right at me. “You’re freaking people out.”

He snapped out of it. “I’m so sorry. I know, I know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go.”

The way he snapped out of it turned my anger and fear immediately into pity and wonder. It was like he was two people. The one made mad, screaming at the cold, fueled by the drugs, the trauma. And the one below the surface almost watching himself.

It was cold. San Diego is more comfortable than most places to be homeless but try sleeping in 45 degrees. It is bone-chilling cold. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t last more than a night or two before … well, before I did things that would probably lead to screaming.

We are now entering the eighth year of the homeless crisis…. We are numb to so much of it. The suffering and poverty. The disorder and chaos.

…

San Diego is facing a catastrophe. The city is teeming with suffering. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its cost of living is extreme and escalating rapidly. People are leaving. The region’s growth projections, for the first time in decades, show a peak and downturn not because people don’t want to be here but because they can’t afford to be. Public school enrollment is down.

San Diego’s history, however, is full of moments when it seemed irredeemable. Every city has a similar story – moments of prosperity followed by recessions, public health crises, disasters, despair but then great leaps in design, construction and innovation followed by growth and prosperity.

We can, once again, meet the moment. But in 2025, it will take something we did not see in 2024: creativity and leadership.

Welsh continues to be a lone voice saying the war in Ukraine is going very badly for Ukraine, and he predicts victory for Russia in 2025. The major news media are pointing the other way — that Russia is getting clobbered.

That doesn’t make Welsh wrong. In 2003 everybody knew the US invasion of Iraq was a great idea, the Iraqis would welcome us with flowers and we’d be out in a jiffy.

Well That Was Hell: 2024 In Review.

He looks back on the book here and mentions that parts of it are now dated.

The ony part that stands out in my memory as dated is that the soldiers' communications-compute devices are called “PDAs.” Now they’d be called “phones.”

The novel is a lesson in marketing. It’s got a good gimmick. The gimmick is that in the far future of the novel, medical science has advanced so that it’s inexpensive to rejuvenate old people and send them out as soldiers.

That kind of gimmick will cause people to pick it up in a bookstore and take a closer look. But a gimmick isn’t enough; the book also has to be good to generate the kinds of reviews and word-of-mouth that really push sales. And Old Man’s War is, indeed, a good book.

Ian Welsh does a better job than I did articulating what I was trying to say in my earlier post on this:

H1-B visas obviously take jobs from Americans. Yes, companies must say they doesn’t, but they do. H1B workers can’t leave their employers unless they have another lined up immediately, so they do what they’re told or go home. As such, they obviously have reduced bargaining power compared to natives or landed immigrants. This drives down wages for natives, “if you won’t do it, we’ll get an immigrant to, and they’ll take the wage we’re offering.”

The left-wing argument against guest workers, and H1B visas are just tech guest workers, is that if we genuinely need workers, then they should be over here either as landed immigrants or on a visa which allows them to quit and have some reasonable time to find another employer. A class of workers with reduced rights will obviously be preferred by management and will reduce the bargaining power of native workers.

Also, Vivek Ramaswami is spouting nonsense when he claims that America’s problem is cultural, because we venerate prom queens and jocks more than nerds. Nerds were no more popular in the 1950s through the 70s then they are today and yet America led the engineering world in those decades. The reason we’re lagging is because we’ve outsourced that work to China.

@pratik

I read about 13 books this year. Here are my favorites:

“Nobody’s Fool,” “Somebody’s Fool,” and “Everybody’s Fool," a trilogy by Richard Russo, set in the small town of North Bath in upstate New York, following the lives of a dozen or more characters over 20 years. There are two murder investigations in the series, but the novels aren’t plot-driven; they are a series of episodes. The action covers most of a century, including generous flashbacks,

I first read “Nobody’s Fool” when it was published in 1993, and the characters have inhabited my brain for most of my life. The main character of “Nobody’s Fool,” Donald “Sully” Sullivan, is 60. I was young enough to be his son when I first read the book; indeed, he has a son in that novel who is older than I was then. Now I’m a little older than Sully himself, though my knees are in much better shape than his.

The second book in the series came out in 2016, and the third in 2023, and I read them both as they came out and loved them so much that I listened to the whole series on audiobooks in 2024.

I love living in North Bath with these people, which is weird because North Bath is dying, and the people are kind of broken.

“Nobody’s Fool” was made into a movie starring Paul Newman as Sully, Jessica Tandy as his friend, landlady and former schoolteacher, Mrs. Peoples; Bruce Willis in a rare non-action role; and Melanie Griffith. The movie features talented character actors, including Pruitt Taylor Vince and Margo Martindale and, in a very early role, the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the idiotic and headstrong policeman, Doug Raymer. Hoffman’s casting was a stroke of luck; he’s fine, but it’s a small, one-dimensional role, and it didn’t tap Hoffman’s enormous talent. However, Raymer is the main character of the two sequel novels, where we learn he’s a much more sympathetic and intelligent character than he appears to be in the first book. There was some discussion of making the second book into a movie starring Hoffman, which would have been fantastic. But I haven’t heard anything about the movies since Hoffman’s death.

I love the movie “Nobody’s Fool,” although the writers tacked a shmaltzy, wholesome ending on it. The novel’s ending is hopeful and upbeat but darker; the characters' victories are smaller than in the movie and achieved with greater difficulty. I like the novel’s ending better.

“Elsewhere: A Memoir,” by Russo (again). Most of Russo’s novels are autobiographical; he grew up in Gloversville, a small town in upstate New York, which had once had a factory manufacturing women’s leather gloves. If you watch many old movies, you’ll know that women used to wear gloves routinely every day, and if you live in the world, you know they don’t anymore unless it’s cold. And gloves aren’t made in the USA anymore. Like North Bath and other towns in Russo’s work, Gloversville struggles to stay alive. In “Elsewhere,” we learn that Russo’s father was a charming small-town rogue, much like Sully and characters in Russo’s other work; his mother raised him, and Russo left Gloversville to go to college and rarely returned in later life. But Russo has returned to Gloversville again and again in his writing.

Spoiler (sorry): We learn in this book that Sully’s mother was a formidable woman who succeeded professionally working for an engineering company, very much a man’s world in the 1960s. However, she struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which eventually poisoned her life. Russo’s father was a compulsive gambler. Russo tells us that he himself has the same disorders — as a young man, he was a compulsive pinball player (!) and gambler, but he eventually turned his compulsiveness to writing stories. Russo reflects that if his compulsiveness had taken a less socially acceptable turn, his life would have been very different, perhaps much like his father’s. But instead the world lavishly rewarded Russo, who has won a Pulitzer Prize.

Russo won the prize for “Empire Falls,” but the North Bath trilogy are my favorite of his books.

I have known two people with connections to Gloversville — surprising because Gloversville is such a small, remote town. One, a woman, grew up there. I was excited when I found out and questioned her about the town, but she seemed to find my questions creepy, so I dropped it. I got the impression that, like Russo, this woman put Gloversville in her rearview mirror as soon as she was old enough to get out of town and, unlike Russo, she never looked back afterward.

“Mohawk,” by Russo (again). Another story of feckless, charming fathers and a sprawling cast in a struggling small town in upstate New York. Russo’s first novel. I listened to the audiobook.

“Alas, Babylon,” by Pat Frank, about an American small town struggling to survive after a nuclear war. Another struggling small town — this one in Florida — another feckless, charming hero coming of age and taking responsibility for the people around him. I loved this book and read it many times as a boy, read it again during the pandemic and thought it was still great, and listened to the audiobook in 2024 to prepare to discuss the book on the “Hugos There” podcast. I loved doing that podcast; I did it once before, several years ago, to discuss “A Canticle for Lebowitz,” by Walter M. Miller. Both novels are post-apocalyptic. I have no special love for that genre; it just worked out that I love those two books, and those are the ones I discussed.

“Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Nonfiction about learning to live a creative life in the real world. Gilbert is the author of the wildly bestselling “Eat, Pray, Love,” and for years I dismissed her books as New Age women’s self-help nonsense with a lot of crystals and scented candles (yes, I know that’s awful of me). But I have heard Gilbert interviewed on a couple of podcasts (including Design Matters, hosted by my childhood friend Debbie Millman — thanks Debbie!) and I learned from those interviews that Gilbert is tough, smart, hard-headed and pragmatic. Yes, she dips deeply into occult waters, but I think of that as metaphor and go with it. I highly recommend Gilbert’s novel “City of Girls.” And I guess I need to read “Eat, Pray, Love.”

“A Son of the Circus,” by John Irving. A successful Indian doctor splits his time between Toronto and India and doesn’t feel at home in either world. This is a very long, sprawling novel and, like the North Bath trilogy, it doesn’t have much of a plot — though it does have murders to solve — and focuses on the rich cast of characters and Indian locations.

“The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet,” and “A Closed and Common Orbit,” by Becky Chambers. These are hugely popular books of a genre known as cozypunk, which means they’re about the characters and their interactions rather than the plot. This story is set in the distant future on a small merchant starship.

I grew up reading science fiction and branched out into crime fiction in my 20s. I read fiction for plot — the characters have a problem and solve it with their wits and violence. I often struggle with more episodic novels, where a part of me thinks nothing happens. I struggled with the Chambers novel and “Son of the Circus.”

“Joyland,” by Stephen King. A young man leaves college to take a summer job in a carny. Does he encounter horrors? Of course he does — a serial killer, which is pretty tame as King horrors go. But “Joyland” is mainly about a character who finds community and connection in a small town. I sense a trend in my reading.

“The Closers,” “The Narrows” and “Lost Light,” by Michael Connelly, who has devoted his career to about 35 crime novels, mostly focused on present-day Los Angeles. Connelly’s novels have different main characters — Detective Harry Bosch, defense attorney Mickey Haller (the Lincoln Laywer), a retired FBI agent, a crime journalist — but, interestingly, they all inhabit the same universe. Minor characters in one series turn up in another, and sometimes, two of the main characters cross over. I’m reading the books in order — 11 down and much more to go! Connelly is a master of writing a sentence that compels you to read the next and doing it again and again and again.

Currently Reading

“Storm Front,” by Jim Butcher. Book 1 of the Dresden Files.

“The Infernal Machine,” by Steven Johnson. A history of dynamite, anarchist terrorism, and the rise of professional policing at the turn of the 20th Century.

The Hill:

The Constitution provides that an oath-breaking insurrectionist is ineligible to be president. This is the plain wording of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” This disability can be removed by a two-thirds vote in each House.

Disqualification is based on insurrection against the Constitution and not the government. The evidence of Donald Trump’s engaging in such insurrection is overwhelming. The matter has been decided in three separate forums, two of which were fully contested with the active participation of Trump’s counsel.

Never going to happen, of course. The US is sliding into autocracy and the Republican majority is pushing it downhill.

ht @davew

Like many people, I canceled my Washington Post subscription when the Post declined to endorse a Presidential candidate this year. At the time, I thought I might come back if I missed it. But I didn’t miss it. The Post is not what it was during Trump’s first term; it’s replaceable.

That leaves the US with one good national newspaper, the New York Times. And that’s not healthy. Local journalism is dead in the US, too — also unhealthy.

@manton says he will never resubscribe to the WaPo. I’m not so rigid; I’ll come back if the Post starts doing work worth paying for again.

Meta wants to fill your social media feeds with AI-generated characters. They’ll have bios and profile photos and generate content, but they’ll be bots.

Nick Heer:

A big problem for Meta is that it is institutionally very dumb. … There are lots of smart people working there and its leadership clearly understands something about how people use social media.

But there is a vast sense of dumb in its attempts to deliver the next generation of its products.

I’m still very active on Facebook, but getting less so as Meta overthinks its products and my real-life friends and family wander away. I just want Facebook to just get the hell out of my way and let me see posts from the people, groups and pages I follow. That’s it. I’m fine with them throwing me the occasional ad to make money; Facebook ads are entertaining.

I don’t post these links to Facebook anymore because nobody sees them.

h/t @manton