How doth our Hollyhocks grow?
Of all the plants in our garden the Hollyhocks are the most striking. This one is still flowering in late November. And it withstood Storm Bert!
Quote of the Day
”Dystopias may sometimes be grimly funny—but rarely from the inside.“
- Henry Farrell
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart | Laudate Dominum, KV 339 | Patricia Janečková
Long Read of the Day
The far right grows through “disaster fantasies”
Terrific blast from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve):
Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It’s an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism’s mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual (“There is no such thing as society” – M. Thatcher). If we have a workplace problem, we must bargain with our bosses, and if we lose, our choices are to quit or eat shit. Under no circumstances should we solve labor disputes through a union, especially not one that wins strong legal protections for workers and then holds the government’s feet to the fire.
Same with bad corporate conduct: getting ripped off? Caveat emptor! Vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Elections are slow and politics are boring. But “vote with your wallet” turns retail therapy into a form of civics.
This individualistic approach to problem solving does useful work for powerful people, because it keeps the rest of us thoroughly powerless. Voting with your wallet is casting a ballot in a rigged election that’s always won by the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that’s never you. That’s why the right is so obsessed with removing barriers to election spending: the wealthy can’t win a one-person/one-vote election (to be in the 1% is to be outnumbered 99:1), but unlimited campaign spending lets the wealthy vote in real elections using their wallets, not just just ballots…
Thomas Kurtz RIP
A great computer scientist and mathematician has died at the age of 96. Together with a Dartmouth colleague, John Kemeny. He created BASIC, the first human-friendly programming language, and the first general-purpose time-sharing system. He and Kemeny had an idea that was then (1963) pretty radical: “The target (in computing) was research, whereas here at Dartmouth we had the crazy idea that our undergraduate students who are not going to be technically employed later on should learn how to use the computer. Completely nutty idea.” But to make that idea work, they had to design a programming language that was much less austere and arcane than FORTRAN and ALGOL.So they created BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Critical features of the language were that it was small (and could run on early microcomputers like the TRS-80 Model 100 laptop) and that it was interactive by design.
In 1978 Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their first version of BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800. Later, in 1983, Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter (in machine code) for the TRS-80 which I think took up only 20Kb of RAM.
There’s an affectionate obituary of Kurtz on the Dartmouth site.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
From the Borowitz Report:
Jeff Bezos has desperately tried to return the Washington Post for a full refund without success, sources close to the Amazon chief confirmed on Monday.
Bezos, who purchased the Post for $250 million in 2013, was reportedly kept on hold with customer service for 45 minutes before a human was finally available to speak to him.
Unfortunately for Bezos, the customer service rep informed him that he had failed to check the newspaper’s return policy when he purchased it.
According to the rep, Bezos cannot return the Post because he bought it more than a hundred days ago and it is now in damaged condition.
Feedback
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Many readers were horrified by the evidence of my illiteracy provided in Monday’s edition that I was unable to distinguish between the Austens and the Brontes. But although I was of course mortified, the first email that arrived — from Bill Janeway — rendered me speechless with laughter. “When,” he inquired, “did Jane Austen move in with the Brontes?” Touché as we say in Ireland.
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On the idea (in Monday’s Long Read) that liberal echo-chambers might have their uses, Joe Dunne reminded me of the old adage: Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it.
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