Welcome back to the Stove Top weekly newsletter. As usual, each edition has a few brief stories and finishes with a mix of interesting links, hot takes, and good reads.

Enjoy.

Google Has The Internet Up In Arms

The main way I pay my bills is by curating TLDR. It’s a tough job that takes up a lot of time, but besides keeping me off the streets, it also exposes me to everything happening on the web.

And one thing I’ve seen a lot of chatter about recently is something known as “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI).

Written by a gang of Googlers, the idea behind WEI is to provide websites with an API telling them whether the browser and the platform it is running on are trusted by an authoritative third party (called an attester). The hope is that by doing this, things like social-media manipulation and phishing would become a thing of the past.

Basically, Google is pitching WEI as the cure for the internet’s bot problem.

Everybody agrees that an internet free from bots would be a better internet. But WEI’s critics aren’t buying that WEI is the way, arguing that:

• It’s an invasion of privacy, as you have to fork over even more of your data before visiting a website.

• It will likely advance the “enshittification” of the internet, as developers would have the power to turn away anybody not using an approved browser configuration (i.e., those approved by the big tech companies).

Now, it’s important to remember incentives here. The main critics are rival browsers that would be shut out if WEI becomes a reality, such as Firefox and Brave.

But that doesn’t mean they're wrong. A web in which developers can turn back non-approved browsers isn’t exactly a free web, and it’s not like Google has completely altruistic motives behind this idea. An internet with WEI would be an internet where a lot of people would be using Chrome without an ad-blocker. Obviously, Google wouldn’t hate this.

It’s easy to imagine WEI turning the internet into a place of walled garden operating systems that spy and advertise as incessantly as cable TV.

And just wait until the government gets a hold of this.

The Military Is In Free Fall

I used to think the US had an unbeatable military. So unbeatable that we probably could cut defense spending a bit, especially after seeing Russia’s abysmal performance in Ukraine. If that poor-ass country could fight off one of our main “rivals”, why do we need to be spending so much on the military?

Well, Noah Smith has made it abundantly clear that I am wrong. The US military is weak sauce right now. So weak sauce that it’s entirely possible we wouldn’t beat China in a war right now:

• Our military technology isn’t head and shoulders above China anymore.

• We have a serious ammo problem, mainly because we only have a third of the defense workers we had in 1985.

• The ammo problem is so dire that we would run out of munitions within a week of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

• The rate at which China is acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment is 5-6x faster than us.

• China can build ships 200x faster than we can.

Noah has made it abundantly clear we have a military industry problem. But one thing he didn’t point out is our military recruitment problem. The Army, Navy, and Air Force all missed their recruiting targets by thousands despite offering enlistment bonuses of $50,000.

Those numbers aren’t going to get better anytime soon either, with only 23% of the youth population even physically eligible to serve and a culture that is becoming increasingly unpatriotic.

So, we have a military-industrial base that is nowhere close to where it needs to be, and a population that is either unable to or uninterested in serving. Not good.

Now, you might be thinking that defense spending is evil because wars are evil, and you don’t want America to go all imperial and shit.

Look, I get it. I don’t like war either. But the best way to avoid war is through strength. The bully has the option to stop bullying. The bullied just has to hope the bully is feeling merciful.

It’s better to be the bully.

Being A Digital Nomad Would Be Fucking Miserable

I’ve been in Europe for a month now. For three of those weeks, I was doing work. One of those weeks I (for the most part) took off.

The week without the work was a million times better than the week with the work. And it really made me realize how miserable being a digital nomad would be.

It’s a glamorized life, and for a while there I thought it’d be cool to be a digital nomad for a year or so. See the world. Meet a bunch of interesting people. And make a US salary while doing it. Sounds like a pretty good deal.

Yeah, sike. Vacation with work isn’t vacation with an income. It’s just work in a different place. Except at this different place you don’t have any of your usual amenities, you don’t know anyone, you’re working weird hours (in my case, late at night), you’re always moving around, and finding good WiFi can be harder than finding a leprechaun.

If you’re thinking of being a digital nomad, my advice would be don’t, unless you plan to stay in one area for an extended (months) amount of time.

And if you’re thinking of doing work on your short vacation, I strongly advise you otherwise. It’ll just make the vacation less fun, and instead of coming back home rejuvenated, you’ll come back exhausted.

Make vacation vacation again.

Surveillance

• All whole foods will take payments via Amazon palm-scanning soon.

• Apple is threatening to shut down FaceTime and iMessage in the UK unless they back off their surveillance push. Thank God because the UK has completely lost their shit on this one.

• Worldcoin is sketch sketch.

• We should all be using Tor.

• The Pentagon has developed AI that can determine whether you’ve done something wrong just from your texts.

• A bill stopping the government from buying data without a warrant is getting closer to becoming law. The NSA is not happy.

• The stores are watching you with facial recognition technology.

• Even though facial recognition has netted 0 arrests in the last 9 months in New Orleans.

• Mind-reading technology is so damn scary.

• The FBI accidentally used the banned Pegasus spyware. Lmao, yeah right.

• AI police vans are watching you drive.

• Wildlife surveillance tech is being used to watch you.

Extras

• Wheat prices go brrr.

• Google is trying to replace me with AI.

• They want us to stop filming cops. One more check against power eroded.

• Top colleges discriminate against low-income students.

• Japan’s population is toast.

• As if we need another thing to worry about pertaining to climate change, we now have to worry about ancient pathogens emerging from permafrost.

• Biden is stopping US investments into Chinese tech.

• Vacation is cool again.

• A robot is going to take your job.

• Niger is dealing with a coup.

• LeBron’s I Promise School kind of sucks.

• Facebook took down Covid posts at the White House’s request.

• California is trying to silence researchers who studied its education system. Doesn’t seem promising.

• Elon Musk owns the stars, for better or worse. I think it’s probably fine.

• The long history of nobody wants to work anymore.

• Nobody is better at dodging taxes than the wealthy.

• The police aren’t very good at fighting crime.

• I wish I was Trump’s lawyer right now. I’d be freaking rich.

• Arguments of moral superiority are inevitable.

Until next time, ✌️

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