Links
How’s this for a sentence: “the industry of Henry Kissinger’s interminable twilight was only matched by its tawdriness”
Palantir’s expansion into health care carries more risks than we imagine
In this paper, I explore the risks of Palantir’s expansion into the health sphere using Sharon’s sphere transgressions framework as a conceptual lens and critical tool to understand and judge this move. We should anticipate the risks of no public returns, dominance, and new dependencies. While this might be true for many Big Tech actors, I add that Palantir’s expansion might be particularly pernicious. Palantir’s history reveals the perversion of logics under exclusionary politics in the sphere of security.
Posadists promised us UFOs, these idiots just want us to burn in a planetary furnace.
Even the accelerationists of this age are wretched.
While effective altruists claim to be ultimately motivated by charitable giving, accelerationists unequivocally want every dollar of tech money plowed back into tech companies. “Giving money to charity is a waste as it is not a self-sustaining/growing organism like a corporation.
Meet the Silicon Valley CEOs Who Say Greed Is Good, Even if It Kills Us All - Mother Jones
Collective punishment won’t defeat Hamas - and reveals it for the empty rhetoric it is
In fact, never in history has a bombing campaign caused the targeted population to revolt against its own government. The United States has tried the tactic numerous times, to no avail. During the Korean war, it destroyed 90 per cent of electricity generation in North Korea. In the Vietnam war, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam. And in the Gulf war, US air attacks disrupted 90 per cent of electricity generation in Iraq. In none of these cases did the population rise up.
My best of 2023: Dismantling Sellafield - the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site
I thought I might post some of the best pieces I read this year. From January (actually last December but I read it in January):
Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.
Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site - The Guardian
Parallel vaccine discourses in Guinea: ‘grounding’ social listening for a non-hegemonic global health
An interesting paper that’s critical of relying on online discourse to represent social listening, when the reality is more nuanced, negotiated and less extreme.
“While the online social listening showcased a predominance of individual and collective safety concerns, distrust towards African elites and Western actors, fieldwork revealed that healthcare workers’ vaccine perceptions were more nuanced and largely shaped by complex kinship relations spanning across online and offline social landscapes.”
Legitimising autocracy: re-framing the analysis of corporate relations to undemocratic regimes
…corporations confer legitimacy on autocratic governments through a number of material and symbolic activities, including by praising their economic performance. We trace out the implications of adopting legitimation as a key concept in the analysis of corporate relations to autocratic regimes.
Australia’s ‘deeply unfair’ housing system is in crisis – and our politicians are failing us
A good piece on Australia’s horrendously broken housing system, which is more about capital gains, intergenerational hoarding and tax write-offs than rental income.
It also criticises the utter naïveté of YIMBYs, who play into the hands of plutocrats:
Blaming planners is not new, but it ultimately misses the point. A recent analysis suggested there were over 100,000 approved but unbuilt dwelling units in Australia between 2012 and 2000. The supply system itself is now thoroughly geared to capital flowing from investors. If developers cannot sell to them, or simply cannot make enough profit, the banks won’t lend and developers won’t build.
As Kohler notes, the politics of this is simple:
“housing is a cartel of the majority, with banks and developers helping them maintain high house prices with the political class actively supporting them.”
Sydney's FBi community radio celebrates 20 years as a full time station
The two things that we said right from day one was it has to be 50% Australian music with half of that from Sydney, and that it needs to be accountable to the members. It was built on the basis that it belongs to the people that it’s for, because they’re the ones who show up and volunteer.
FBi Radio celebrates 20 years of Sydney broadcasts: ‘We were just this crew of dorks
"I also saw non-white colleagues who were senior to me get passed up for promotions. I could no longer take DEI efforts seriously and realized that academia didn’t fit my values."
It makes me sad that the academy has been so hostile, racist and sexist to these people, because we need them. It’s good to see that they’re flourishing though, and a reminder that careers can take many directions.
“The job isn’t what it was,” says Kelsky. She says the story used to be, “I can’t get an academic job, so I have to leave academia.” Now, academics — including established ones walking away from tenure — think, “I have a job and have to leave because I can’t stand it.”
The elephant in the room is that universities will be under increasing over the next fifty years and many, if not most, will fold. I worry about the human toll this will have.
How five researchers fared after their ‘great resignation’ from academia - Nature
Protecting Indigenous Designs From the Fashion Machine
“We were not legally allowed to practise our culture,” says Paul, who is an urban Denesuliné woman and a member of English River First Nation. “So, historically, people were making money off our culture that we were not allowed to practise.” Stolen designs may also feature ceremonial images and iconography, she says, which are then taken out of context when presented in isolation by a brand.
The hurt felt by affected communities goes deep—this unrooted representation of Indigenous peoples and Native cultures can lead to harmful stereotypes, which are then used to justify further oppression, mistreatment, and violence.
Protecting Indigenous Designs From the Fashion Machine - Atmos
Rozelle Interchange, another planning failure we're kicking down the road
My colleague Chris Standen on the Rozelle interchange:
Christopher Standen, an urban transport and planning expert with the University of NSW, said the interchange was emblematic of poor infrastructure planning in Australia.
“It was always clear that it would be a disaster for Sydney and that’s played out,” he said.
“There were votes to be had in making it easier for people in outer suburbs to drive into the city, even though that’s not a great thing from an urban planning perspective.
“The last thing we should be doing is building roads that encourage people to drive more and to move further away from work, so encouraging urban sprawl and low-density development.”
Rozelle Interchange design issues will be a problem for Sydney’s future, experts say - ABC
"My campus experience happened off-campus while working in a part-time job"
A useful discussion about how depictions of college have almost no relationship to reality, drawing on Land’s new memoir “Class”:
Stephanie Land didn’t know about office hours. She saw them listed on every syllabus during her undergraduate years at the University of Montana, but she didn’t know they were dedicated blocks of time where students could develop mentorships with their instructors, ask for clarity about curriculum, or inquire about scholarships and recommendation letters. She understood that networking was part of “the college experience,” but she assumed those opportunities were reserved for graduate students or an elite cohort of especially gifted undergrads. “I had no idea that as an Algebra 1 student, I could go to my instructor’s office during this hour and ask them questions about the assignment,” Land said. She considers office hours part of the “hidden curriculum” of academic jargon and social codes that excluded students like herself: a decade older than most of her peers and working multiple jobs to support her daughter.
"If you were to simplify how the globe looks through the eyes of a potato crisp, the whole thing is divided down the middle – and one side is labelled “cheese” and the other “fish”"
The fascinating world of chip flavours:
Crucially, however, the expectations of what lasagne should taste like are not as high for a Thai consumer as an Italian. After all, there’s a reason we don’t eat shepherd’s pie crisps. “An Italian would think: how can a crisp taste of authentic mother’s lasagne?” Wade says. Peggy puts it another way: “They’d just think it was horrendous if you put something like lasagne on a potato chip!”
Bizarrely, it seems as though flavour houses take internal walls more seriously than major consulting firms:
In fact, the seasoning house is strictly siloed to guarantee exclusivity. Reuben’s team work on the Pringles account; the team making flavours for PepsiCo is in an entirely different country. “So the recipe, if you will, of the Pringles salt and vinegar can’t be seen by the other team,” Reuben says.
Apple warned Indian journalists and opposition politicians last month that their phones had likely been hacked by a state-sponsored attacker
journalist Anand Mangnale woke to find a disturbing notification from Apple on his mobile phone: “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone.” He was one of at least a dozen journalists and Indian opposition politicians who said they had received the same message. “These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are and what you do,” the warning read. “While it’s possible this is a false alarm, please take it seriously.”
Universities are struggling to protect staff from stalking and online harassment
But today, a cadre of academics is now aiming to strengthen the much smaller body of research that exists around faculty who experience stalking and abuse. Victoria O’Meara, a post-doctoral research fellow at Royal Roads University, has been interviewing scholars in the US and Canada for a study on online abuse of faculty. She told me there has been “an increasingly organized attack on academia,” and scholars have told her their universities remain ill-equipped to respond to it or support faculty, let alone to protect them.
The contemporary hunt for hidden messages in film
We retreat into private enclaves, indulging our personal preferences without worrying about what the things we enjoy signify for society writ large. This condition has been especially painful for self-conscious critics, who simply can’t bring themselves to take sides in debates about modernism v. mass culture or Barbie v. Oppenheimer.