Dear Readers, once again a selection of links to long-form pieces which I, as a semi-retired person, have time for, but people with normal lives probably don’t. The hope is that one or two will enrich your life. Housekeeping note: I have said “Yes” too often recently and Long-Linking opportunities will probably shrink. Featured this time out: American roots music, BC beer, how wealth vanishes, and the Apple M2.

Let’s start with the music. My streamer has noticed that I really like Sierra Ferrell and has been feeding me increasing doses of acoustic American flavors. While I’m not giving giving up on Bach or alt-metal, I’ve enjoyed it. I particularly recommend Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle roaring through Little Maggie, and AJ Lee and the Brothers Comatose gracefully covering Neil Young’s Harvest Moon.

This one is specific to my part of the world, but hey, we’re a tourist destination and if you’re going to visit us, I think a close study would reward your vacation planning. Local CBC reportor Justin McElroy, who has found a lovely niche in ranking things (neighborhoods, parks, welcome signs) has ranked all the breweries in the bottom left corner of Canada. Many of these were already among my faves and I surely plan to visit more, particularly those within bicycle range.

For your enjoyment, a piece of excellent propaganda. Recently I accidentally studied the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (even wrote about it. This is a big link in the chain of events and activities that eventually led to the British abolition of slavery. One of the activists’ tools were the 19th-century equivalent of blogs, namely leaflets. Courtesy of the Internet Archive, here is Cushoo: A Dialogue.

It’s short and snappy (and racist of course, in the manner of its time) but well-done. We know this was effective because the colonial plantation-owners lobbied ferociously to get it banned and, above all, to keep it from circulating among their own slaves. They failed.

There’s no geek-out like a linguistics geek-out. The Economist covers the strange reverse-transatlantic journey of the subjunctive case in modern English. Fun!

Way back when the Net was young, Kevin Kelly suggested that you could make a living with one thousand true fans. Which turned out to mostly not work. But, maybe it’s starting to?

Humans rely on tools. Here’s a convincing curation of nice ones.

OK, this has been a pretty cheery long-link curation so far. But it’s 2022 and There Are Politics and They Are Not Good. Elephant in the Room addresses something that’s going on but is really hard to talk about: The fact that many progressive organizations have been ineffective in recent years because they’ve been tearing themselves apart in an effort to live the progressive ideas they exist to promote. Empirically, we are really both at avoiding institutionalized racist/sexist/homophobic culture and at constructively working to get out from under that shadow. This piece is long and (I think) balanced and (I think) important. I have experienced, indirectly, some of the heat and churn being discussed here. We really need to get better at this stuff.

It is no secret that Big Tech employers actively try to “manage out” their least effective employees. It’s easy to splash a broad brush of condemnation on this but on the other hand, when an organization is growing by 25%+/year, you’re going to screw up some of that hiring; what to do about it? I sure don’t know. Anyhow, the conversation continues, and I thought “Standing Up For Us Plebs.” Amazon Leaders Reject Policy To Push Employees Out, about an Amazon division going rogue on this issue, sheds illuminating light.

Eric Alterman is a really good writer on politics and popular music. There are a lot of terrible things in the world, and the continuing bloodshed and brutality in Israel/Palestine has been one of them for pretty well my entire life. Alterman surveys the (terrible) state of affairs in 2022 in Israel and Palestine and the Absence of a Solution.

There’s a lot of financial doom-and-gloom going on, you hear stories about how a trillion dollars worth of cryptocurrency value vanished, or how Bezos or Musk or whoever “lost billions”. It’s reasonable to ask “Well, where did that money go?” Noah Smith explains: Where does the wealth go when asset prices go down? It vanishes into nothingness. While I’m as anti-billionaire as the next progressive, I was sort of annoyed, in the recent stock-market run-up, at the feverish headlines about how Bezos was making a million dollars a minute. In fact, wealth due to ownership of financial instruments was being created out of thin air by equity-market machinations; and now it’s being un-created. Poor Jeff has probably lost more money in 2022 than any individual human in history has ever lost before. Not feeling sorry for him. And anyhow it’ll probably all come back. Or maybe not. Whatever. Oh, and the basic politico-financial infrastructure that lets this happen is broken, obviously.

This wouldn’t be a Long Links without an anti-cryptocurrency screed. These days, the stinkiness has become so obvious that it’s kind of hard to find anything new to say. Kyle E. Mitchell, whose blog is called /dev/lawyer, has a new angle in The Work, the Tech, and the Crime. As you’d expect, the viewpoint is that of a working lawyer. Let me pull a paragraph for flavor: “I don’t support cracking down on blockchain people just for being blockchain people. A scene being riven with datajackers, confidence men, and self-taught, emoji-adept bucket shop jockeys does not condemn others not so involved by abstract association, be they merely fools or holdout true believers. But neither do I support special accommodations for those in denial or indifference to the unwelcome company they keep.” Good stuff.

Let’s finish up with a hard-core tech geek-out. (Civilians can close the tab now, my feelings won’t be hurt.) Those who actually about the nuts and bolts of CPUs and how they fit into the computers in your pocket and on your desk will enjoy Apple M2 Die Shot and Architecture Analysis – Big Cost Increase And A15 Based IP. I’m particularly impressed by the M2 design’s apparent focus on RAM bandwidth and latency; all CPUs wait for memory at the same speed.

Until next time, whenever that is.