Week of August 12, 2019

Virus

Trumps continued attacks on sitting members of Congress are going to end in someone being killed.

When Donald Trump suggested [on Wednesday] that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) once married her own brother in an immigration fraud scheme, he demonstrated the remarkable degree to which even the most far-off corners of the right-wing internet can launch unproven, anonymous claims into the national political discourse.

Tools

Craig Mod on good software.

It feels — intuitively — that software (beyond core functionality) should aim for speed. Speed as a proxy for efficiency. If a piece of software is becoming taurine-esque, unwieldy, then perhaps it shouldn’t be a single piece of software. Ultimately, to be fast is to be light. And to be light is to lessen the burden on someone or some task. This is the ultimate goal: For our pocket supercomputers to lesson burdens, not increase them. For our mega-powered laptops to enable a kind of fluency — not battle, or struggle — of creation.

🐐

A profile of Hope Solo on life after soccer.

During Solo’s 17 years playing with the national team, she became the most dominant female goalkeeper in the game. Her supporters would argue she remains, today, the best goalkeeper in the world, full stop, the one with the most international appearances (202) and shutouts (102). Her detractors would counter that she is known as much for her off-the-field candor and her legal entanglements as for her on-field excellence. The truism is that everyone has an opinion.

Hacker

I actually found this interview with Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Palestinian-Canadian emergency room physician who founded the Glia Project to provide affordable stethoscopes and other medical equipment to Palestinian people, to be rather optimistic.

The problem in Gaza is not a problem of the place being poor or the people being stupid. The problem is that, quite literally, the Israelis stop us from receiving equipment, from getting training, from doing anything. When I looked around, I realized that what we actually needed wasn’t medical devices. It was independence.

Americans are the most hopeless people on the Israel-Palestine conflict. They’re like, “Oh my God, the occupation has been there for seven million years and it’s going to be there for seven million thousand more years.” No. It’s not. It’s collapsing. What’s really difficult to understand until you spend some time there is that it’s obvious that the occupation’s days are numbered. The occupation is collapsing right now, so if we were to run a project that was aimed solely at disaster relief — which is what some people think we should be running — then what would we do after the disaster of occupation is over and we’re left with the other disaster: capitalism?

Inverted

This article and tweetstorm provide the most simple, honest, and levelheaded overview of our current economic state.

I don't think the Fed gets it, frankly. It overtightened in 2018 and has been slow to unwind. Now, markets are in a panic. The only thing that can save the Fed here are the data. If we get improved economic data, it would alleviate fears of recession, loosening financial conditions. But right now, the combination of weakening growth globally and tightening financial conditions is toxic. It has brought us to the brink of no return. Personally, I am looking at the Treasury curve inversion out to seven years as the sign to throw in the towel. Until then, I have some hope the Fed or the data will change enough to avoid recession and crisis. ... We're not there yet. But the Fed's not helping. Let's hope they see the light...and soon. We’ve got several months before things get really ugly. But, legitimately we have much less time for the Fed to act before recession is baked in the cake.

Pair the above with 👇🏼

Heidi N. Moore @moorehn

Okay who wants a plain-language explanation of the inverted yield curve? I will do it if there's demand.

August 14th 2019

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