Afternoon Tea 9.23.21 - Orbital Bombardment

Black Rose, Coal Withers, The Files Are In The Computer.

September 23, 2021

Anti-vaxxers are appropriating the name of a German antifa group, China pledged to stop funding coal plants globally, Evergrande robbed its own employees, the post-coronavirus commute remains bullshit, and the youngest among us do not understand how the files can be in the computer. It’s Thursday, September 23rd, 2021, and this is your Tea. Today’s vibe matches the Capybara, unlimited chill. If you’ve never heard of Air, correct that:

Anti-vaxxers have stolen an anti-Nazi group’s identity (Forward) Weaponizing the “White Rose,” the name taken by the WWII German antifa group led by Hans & Sophie Scholl, who were both executed by the Gestapo, has begun. And when we say that, we mean that we’ve seen the neo-White Rose recruitment stickers in parts of Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.

Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns (Reuters) & TikTok Maker Caps Screen Time for Youths in China (WSJ) When an entire nation advises that China is censoring certain discussions on phones sold in that country, it kind of gives away the game. No amount of virtue signaling will make up for the attempts being made by China to deploy the Great Firewall overseas.

China’s Xi pledges to end funding for overseas coal power plants (Politico) & China’s overseas coal power retreat could wipe out $50bln of investment (Reuters) While Xi Jinping’s pledge caused insane dust-ups in the energy markets, we’re pretty skeptical this will actually happen. If it does, $50bln is going to be change you find in the couch cushions for the fossil fuel industry. And you know what?

Evergrande Gave Workers a Choice: Lend Us Cash or Lose Your Bonus (NY Times) Now this is some bullshit. The company demanded that employees lend it the money they paid out in bonuses. And now the company, that borrowed millions from its own workers, that it had previously paid them, doesn’t plan on paying that money.

‘Donnez-moi un break,’ Johnson tells France over submarine spat (France24) While Boris is a world-class dolt, hearing that my dude actually thought saying “I just think it's time for some of our dearest friends around the world to prenez un grip about all this." would get the French, of all people, to listen, is actually comedy gold.

Air Force Secretary Kendall: If China can’t beat the U.S. in the air it will try in space (Space News) While this sounds like a pie in the sky prediction, Russia did apparently have orbital bombardment capability at one point before it collapsed. Does that mean we should follow in its dumbass footsteps? Probably not.

Microsoft and an Army of Tiny Telecoms Are Part of a Plan to Wire Rural America (BusinessWeek) That 120 million Americans still don’t have access to any form of high speed internet, should make 100% of our elected officials, no matter who they represent, ashamed.

On Commutes, Leaving The House, and Addressing Remote Work’s Problems (Ed Zitron) & The Myth of the Productive Commute (Anne Helen Peterson) It’s not just that all of these pro-return to office missives are being written by capital, not labor. It’s that we’ve all just spent the last year and a half proving the negation of every one of these stupid “return to work has vitamin C in it and stuff” articles. Anne Helen Peterson nails it (emphasis hers) with this passage:

With that said: the pandemic has underlined that most people working office jobs do not, in fact, need to be in their offices every day — and millions of people working those jobs were wasting unpaid hours of their day getting into those offices. If your presence is not necessary to do your job, daily commutes are a waste. Full stop.

This Is All Exactly What It Looks Like (Defector) David Roth is not only our favorite non-fiction writer working, he just produced the best writing on the state of crypto I’ve seen in years. So many quotes, but this paragraph is everything:

The hucksterish utopian rhetoric and blustering ambient scuzz of the broader cryptocurrency thing as it exists in this moment—the clammy slew of posturing experts, the open mendacity and barely concealed rube-running bad faith, the actual criminality and simple goonery that define its day-to-day—do the idea at the center of it no favors, but that is, more or less, the thing that always happens to any idea once people get ahold of it. Again, this is something that most people understand without really understanding how they understand it. At some point, when you are being lied to all the time and everywhere, you just know when it’s happening.

File Not Found (The Verge) While millennials make fun of Gen Z for never learning how to download music illegally, this article about how Gen Z college kids don’t understand folder structures and file systems is seriously worrying.

Poem of the Tea: Rudy Francisco does not miss. Fantastic modern poet.

Ideas have people much more often than people have ideas.

Yours,