Laughable status seeking

I am aware that there is an accessory known as the ‘Birkin bag‘, created by the fashion house Hermès in response to a need expressed by the late actor Jane Birkin. It has become a much-sought-after status symbol that the manufacturer exploits by imposing scarcity that results in prices ranging from $10,000 to $500,000. It has a waiting list for up to six years and is often resold at higher prices. It is an example of a Veblen good, named after the economist Thorstein Veblen who described “a type of luxury good for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve”, making them visible examples of conspicuous consumption and thus status-seeking symbols.

But just having a lot of money is not enough to get this bag and some people go to extraordinary lengths to try and obtain one, as this article attests.
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The Fetterman problem

There has been a long-standing feature in the Democratic party of people being elected as Democrats, even on somewhat progressive platforms, and then abandoning their constituents and cozying up to Republicans. While they often vote against their own party on crucial issues, the party leadership hesitates to call them out, partly because they need their vote on other issues and partly because their potential defection gives the party leadership an excuse to water down their policies in the service of their neoliberal ideology. In the House of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard is an example. In the US Senate, examples are Joe Lieberman, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sinema, all of whom thankfully have died or left office. But now we have John Fetterman.

This article says that former Fetterman staffer are revealing that he does not seem to be interested in doing the work of being a senator.
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Is Mitch McConnell alive?

There is nothing that illustrates how privileged members of the US legislature are than the situation with Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell who is 84 years old and has been in obvious serious physical and cognitive decline for quite some time. He was last seen taken by ambulance to a hospital.

Public emergency services records indicate that paramedics were called to his Washington address on 14 June, where they administered CPR on an unconscious person who was allegedly suffering a cardiac arrest – one whose identity has been withheld. McConnell had been in a Washington DC area hospital ever since.

Since then he has not been seen or heard from in public. The long silence resulted in demands for proof that he was still alive. Although some congressional Republicans say that they have spoken to him, Republicans now routinely lie about pretty much anything as long as it serves their interests so this was greeted with some skepticism. You can see why they would lie. If McConnell is dead, then the governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear would be able to appoint an interim until a special election were held and Republicans would not want to have a Democratic senator replace a Republican one, given how small their current majority is.
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The value of public libraries

I am a big believer in public libraries, seeing them as one of the great egalitarian institutions, enabling anyone to gain access to the world of information and entertainment even if they have no money. But for precisely that reason, the rapacious capitalists in the US dislike them, since in their view the idea that something should be offered free to everyone is anathema. It is part of their effort to undermine access to what are clearly social goods, such as universal free health care and free public education.

So defenders of libraries need to have all the arguments to combat the capitalists who use social conservatives to attack libraries because they have offerings that do not conform to their personal prejudices.

Ashlie D. Stevens writes that the Chicago Public Library system has introduced a novel idea. At the bottom of each check out receipt, it tells the user how much money they saved by using the library and not buying the items.

One afternoon I came home with “Magic Is Dead: My Journey Into the World’s Most Secretive Society of Magicians,” “Village School” and “Cold Comfort Farm,” a stack suggesting either eclectic tastes or a person throwing darts at a bookshelf. Shortly afterward, I received the standard email from the library listing my new acquisitions and their due dates.

Then, underneath the administrative business, came a little piece of information I had somehow never noticed before: You just saved $58.94 by using your library. You have saved $231.79 this past year and $1,107.24 since you began using the library!

I stared at this. My first thought was not, “What a compelling demonstration of the economic value of municipal services.”

My first thought was: I want that number higher.

I took a screenshot and sent it to my sister, who lives in another state.

“Oh, that’s satisfying,” she replied. “I wish my library did that.”

She was right. Somewhere inside me, a tiny rewards-program customer had been activated.

After that, I started browsing the library website differently: less like a catalog, more like a streaming service with unusually eccentric licensing agreements. Did I need the complete box set of “Nip/Tuck”? Maybe. A Blu-ray collection of British noir? Quite possibly. What about both movies called “The Illusionist” — the bittersweet French animated one about an aging magician and the Edward Norton one in which he is also, confusingly, a magician?

If the library adds up all the savings of all its users, the number it arrives at would be a powerful and tangible demonstration of how important libraries are to people and communities. I am going to suggest this idea to the two local libraries that I frequent.

I own a lot of books. But many of them, including the one I am currently reading, were first borrowed from the library and then, while reading them, I decided that I wanted to own them for future reference or other reasons.

Maybe he has a large family?

The article I linked to yesterday about the potential AI bubble focused on Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, who has invested much of his personal fortune and borrowed heavily in order to compete in the AI race. The opening sentence had a parenthetical remark that got my attention, which was was “Larry Ellison woke up in his 33-bedroom, 34-bathroom oceanfront mansion in Florida.” This is part of what has become known as real estate porn, where we are invited to vicariously experience how the rich and famous live. It is of course no secret that these people compete with each other for status symbols that display their wealth in the form of such mansions, luxury yachts, private jets, and even private islands.

But I began to wonder as to whether anyone would ever need so many bedrooms and bathrooms, other than to boast about them. The answer probably is that no one needs them, they just serve as wealth markers. But who stays in them on a regular basis? Are they mostly empty?

This got me thinking about the massive castles of Europe that likely serve as the inspiration for these modern day monstrosities, one of the most iconic being Buckingham Palace in London. It has 19 State Rooms, 52 Royal and guest bedrooms, 188 Staff bedrooms, 92 Offices, and 78 Bathrooms.
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The shaky business model behind AI

The New York Times Magazine has a very long article that asks the question, being posed in many quarters, as to whether we are in an AI bubble. The argument that we are hinges on the massive amounts of money that is being spent on data centers and computers estimated by Cory Doctorow to be currently running at about $1.4 trillion while the AI companies are getting revenues of only about $50 billion from subscriptions to their services. So where is the rest of the money coming from? From borrowing, as rich investors pour money into these AI companies in the belief that they will grow rapidly and be profitable at some point. This belief drives up the stock prices. As Doctorow says:

I’m pretty baffled that there’s people who say it’s not a bubble. Let’s just run the numbers again. Trillion dollars in expenditure this year, over $1.4 trillion total, $50 billion revenue. Seven companies, the magnificent seven that are 35% of the S&P 500. Six of them lose money on AI, and the seventh one makes money from the other six. [The ‘other six’ are Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Anthropic and the seventh is the chip maker Nvidia – MS]
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That’s Nvidia, yes. They’re all passing around the same hundred-billion-dollar IOU really fast and pretending it’s in all of their bank accounts at once. The assets depreciate really quickly. They amortize those data centers and the GPUs in them over five years. They actually replace them every two to three years. The replacements, pretty intense.
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GPUs, data centers, and the AI that runs on them, right? They’re saying that these things are going to last them about five years. The reason that matters is if you spend $1 trillion on stuff that’s only going to last five years, then in five years, you’re going to need another $1 trillion if you want to stay in business at least. Nvidia is actually doing some pretty amazing things with new generations of chips every year.

One of the ways they’re getting such performance out of these chips every year is they’re throwing away one of the principles that normally constrains new technology manufacturers, which is backwards compatibility. These new chips, they have really different heat dissipation, networking, power consumption, and often you can’t put them in the same building. You need to basically tear the data center down to the foundation’s lab and build another one for the next generation of chips.
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These are not durable assets in this model. A third of the stock market, their assets depreciating every three years. They’re spending $1 trillion a year. They’re making $50 billion a year.

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A fight that both people should lose

I cannot see how any event that calls upon participants to beat each other to a pulp can be called a sport and so am baffled that anyone would want to watch such things as boxing or kickboxing, or other mixed martial arts (MMA), which seem to have even fewer protections against injury than boxing. In the past we did have other dangerous contests such as duels but were able to ban them presumably because they had no redeeming value. But boxing and MMA do require some level of athletic prowess and thus seem to escape opprobrium. As long as the people in involved in MMA are consenting adults with full knowledge of the possible dangers involved, there seems to be little to be done other than look away

These things are bad enough when the combatants are ordinary people but what is one to make of a recent kickboxing event between two people like these?
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The real cost of the Iran war

We are now back to the US randomly bombing Iran again, even hitting a wedding, and Iran retaliating.

Iranian media said that the wedding ceremony was being held in a home in the city of Kuhestak, Hormozgan province, late on Tuesday when a US missile struck, with shrapnel and debris from the strike killing and injuring people.

Among the dead was a four-year-old child, Amir-Ali Karimi, and a 16-year-old, Mohammad Mollahi.
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A video of the aftermath shows colourful wedding streamers and decorations strewn across the ground, and shoes abandoned in the rush to escape the attack.

“You wicked people have attacked people’s homes and turned their wedding ceremony into a funeral,” said a man filming the aftermath of the strike, shared by Fars news agency.
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Iran responded by launching drones and missiles on US bases across the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE. Iran’s military spokesperson, Lt Col Ebrahim Zolfaghari, vowed “heavier, broader, and more crushing and devestating” retaliation.
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In February, a strike on an elementary school killed at least 156 people, including more than 120 schoolchildren. Independent investigations concluded that the US likely carried out the strike with the assistance of AI, though the US government said the incident remained under investigation.

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The Facebook/Meta settlement

In a recent post, I discussed the book An Ugly Truth that looked at how Facebook/Meta valued engagement on the site as the most important goal because its profits depended upon having more and more users and having them spend more more and more time on the site. Racist, misogynistic, homophobic and other hateful posts had the effect of creating more engagement and so the company was reluctant to crack down on on them, doing so only when their was a massive public outcry.

Now Facebook/Meta has settled a lawsuit brought by various states alleging that, among other things, the company was cavalier with the harm done to young children.

Last Wednesday, Meta reached a settlement with the attorneys general of forty-seven states, who had sued it for illegally manipulating the attention of children. The settlement will cost the company, which didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing, up to seventeen billion dollars, a striking figure. Even more striking is a detail reported by the Wall Street Journal: during the second quarter of 2026 alone, Meta spent more than two billion dollars on its legal defense.

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Using the mantle of science to advance reactionary views

At the dawn of what is now called the New Atheist movement, I proudly called myself one, seeing myself as an ally in the fight against religious obscurantism. I now feel embarrassed by being identified with that label and distance myself from it. This is not because of what the label itself might signify. Labels (and language) are malleable and transitory and the meaning that I ascribed to it, that it meant that I believed that at a fundamental level, science was incompatible with anything at all supernatural which, inter alia, means that there are no gods of any kind, is something I still believe.

The problem is that New Atheists are now identified not by any definition but by a group of people who wrapped themselves with that label in the early days and thus is now associated with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, along with those who later chose to be aligned with them. Three of them (Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) have been revealed to have deplorable political and social views unconnected to the ones that attracted me. I now feel that the New Atheist label cannot be reclaimed from those associations and so feel compelled to abandon it in order to avoid being grouped in with them and their views.

Dennett and Hitchens have since died but others have joined with Dawkins and Harris to become part of the culture wars, moving away from dealing just with science and religion and going on to attack postmodernism and so-called ‘woke’ ideologies that they attack in the name of science. In the process, they have started to espouse deeply reactionary views and seem to now be more at home with right wingers and even MAGA types, as can be seen by their vociferous opposition to what they consider to be censorship by the left and what they call ‘cancel culture’. Under the banner of defending free speech and science, they now defend those who have been condemned for their sexist, Islamophobic, racist, and transphobic views.
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