Philip Brewer

Opposing surveillance, supporting freedom

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:19:57 -0500

Prompted by EFF, I sent the following message to my representative:

I strongly oppose government surveillance of U.S. citizens, so I’m asking you to please vote no on any bill that includes a clean reauthorization of Section 702. Real reform is possible and has more support than ever. Several bills would do much to rein in Section 702 surveillance and protect Americans’ privacy, and do so without hurting national security. 

We live in a globalized society in which Americans are constantly communicating with people overseas. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has proven many times over that they cannot be trusted with discretion to warrantlessly query communications collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Americans should not lose their constitutional rights to private communications because of a mass surveillance authority that provides federal law enforcement with backdoor access to them. 

Please, reform Section 702. 

I urge you to urge your representative to work to reform section 702. Here’s a place to start:

https://act.eff.org/action/congress-has-until-april-20-to-take-action-on-702-tell-them-not-to-drop-the-ball

Things are amazingly more bad than markets seem to think

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:17:55 -0500

For no reason I can understand, markets seem to think that (with the cease fire with Iran) things are going to return more or less to normal, more or less immediately. This is false. It is not just false, it is so far from the truth that I don’t understand why way more people aren’t panicking.

There are so many problems with oil supply delivery right now—so many more than just the Strait of Hormuz. A lot of oil and gas production infrastructure is gone. A lot of oil and gas distribution infrastructure is gone. Even where the production infrastructure is still there, since there’s no way to ship out what is produced, production is being shut in. Production that has been shut in will take weeks to get started again. And it won’t be started again until it can be delivered.

At the same time, shipments of oil and gas that came out through the Strait just before it was closed, are probably only now reaching their destinations—meaning that it is only now that refineries are finding themselves without their next input for refining. The refining facilities are going to have to shut down. And just like the production facilities, it will take weeks to get them started again. And they won’t be started again until the people who run them foresee reliable, steady deliveries of crude.

These effects are already obvious in the observed spread between spot prices (the cost of a barrel of crude to be delivered right now), which are high (although not as high as I think would make sense), and futures prices (the cost of a barrel of crude to be delivered in a month), which are also high (but not nearly as high as I think would make sense).

The same is true (with various differences in details) with helium, nitrogen for fertilizer, aluminum, and who knows how many other commodities that used to come though the Strait.

This all matters because the knock-on effects are going to be huge. Higher fuel prices—much higher, and for much longer than the markets are currently anticipating. Higher food prices, due to the shortage of fertilizer reducing food production, especially of corn—which is a major input to both meat production and to ethanol production, meaning another way it feeds-through the higher energy prices. Higher helium prices feed through to shortages of computer chips—which were already under strain due to AI-related data-center demand.

In the background of all these are Trump’s tariffs from a year ago, the impact of which was eased in many different ways (the pause, various rate cuts, firms stocking-up ahead of the imposition of the taxes, the supreme court decision ruling that the worst of them were illegal), all of which delayed the main impacts for months. For some reason, the markets seem to think that those impacts would quit showing up in comparison to the year-ago numbers (since the tariffs were announced one year ago), but in fact are probably only now fully showing up in reported numbers.

My take on all this is that every aspect of the economy is going start getting bad, and then going on getting worse. The getting-worse phase will go on at least for months and months, and very possibly for a year or two or three.

Inflation spiked up to 3.3% last month, but that is only the start. That’s just the energy-price spike. As soon as those effects feed through to other prices, they’ll all go up. And as soon as those high prices start forcing people to cut back on other spending, we’ll see at least a recession, and very possibly worse than that. And that’s all before actual shortages or fuel and food start impacting every aspect of people’s lives.

Oh, and as I’ve said before: Don’t imagine that having some idea about what things are going to be higher-priced or in short-supply gives you the sort of insight that will let you invest to make money off these circumstances. The real-world impact of these things are going to be chaotic enough that any particular investment could go very badly wrong, even if your understanding of the general direction of events is correct. And, of course, the government is going to trying to protect their supporters (oil companies and tech billionaires, mostly) so they may well be bailed out. Any investments that suppose that things will go badly for them in particular may well go spectacularly awry.

Fencing mask

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:33:11 -0500

Most members of my HEMA club have painted their fencing masks in some way that’s meaningful to them.

I had long wanted to do so, but the thing I wanted to paint—the face of a sloth—was going to require at least three shades of brown, which I feared might be difficult to find. But when I finally went and looked on Amazon for acrylic paint markers, I found a set of acrylic markers in 12 different shades of brown!

I ordered them, they arrived yesterday, and I have painted my mask:

My brother confirms that I have met my goal:

Steven D. Brewer 🏳️‍⚧️

@stevendbrewer@wandering.shop

@philipbrewer Truly an image to inspire terror in your opponents!

2026-04-05, 1:57 pm 0 boosts 1 favorites

My most hopeful scenario for Iran

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 06:41:51 -0500

Recent news is that a contingent of ground forces have arrived in Iran. The markets still seem expect that Trump will chicken out (which seems likely) and that things will return to normal in the Gulf (which seems very, very unlikely).

My most hopeful guess at this point:

Trump chickens out, declares victory, says we have a deal with Iran, and pulls out.
Europe and Asia make a deal with Iran that conditionally opens the Strait, with Iran deciding who can transit, and collecting large tolls.
Europe and Asia start getting deliveries of oil and gas and fertilizer and helium. Because of the gap already embedded in deliveries, prices spike up in the meantime.
Because the U.S. is an oil and gas exporter, our prices spike up less (but still spike up, because there’s a global market), and reduced supply of fertilizer and other things from the Gulf means other prices spike up as well, producing an inflationary recession that rivals the worst of 2008 and 2020.

All my other guesses are similar, except that my scenario is preceded by a step 0 in which a bunch of U.S. soldiers and marines are killed while failing to reopen the Strait.

If I were negotiating for Iran

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:52:24 -0500

The U.S. has supposedly provided a “15-point plan” to Pakistan which has supposedly passed it on to Iran.

I have no idea what’s in that plan, nor what Iran’s reaction has been. But I do have some ideas about what would be a reasonable response by Iran. If I were in their shoes, this would be my starting point for negotiations:

We can resume enriching uranium, and start enriching it to levels that would allow us to build a nuclear weapon.
We can proceed to developing a nuclear weapon.
We can accelerate work on intermediate and long-range ballistic missiles.
We can continue to arm proxy organizations throughout the region.
The U.S. and Israel will pay us substantial reparations so we can rebuild destroyed facilities.
The U.S. and Israel will apologize for attacking us and killing our senior government officials.
Once these items have been agreed to, Israel and the U.S. will stop attacking Iran. Iran will stop attacking Israel, the U.S. and other Gulf states, except that we reserve the right to use military force in the Strait of Hormuz, and against other oil export facilities, such as those on the Red Sea.
As progress is made on these items, we will gradually reopen the Strait, under strict Iranian control, with the right to approve, inspect, and tax every cargo, in perpetuity.

Now, I wouldn’t expect the U.S. or Israel to agree to all that, but it seems like a reasonable starting point for negotiations.

Trump is such a moron for having put us in such a situation. And he’s such a crappy negotiator, that I suspect we’ll end up with something very much like that before the war is over.

Oh, and I’m upgrading (downgrading?) my stagflation forecast to be more inflationary and more recessionary than I’d been assuming.

2026-03-24 09:3

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:41:18 -0500

Just a few days after the equinox, and already you can see that the sun is rising north of due east.

2026-03-22 14:19

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:32:21 -0500

A pretty good run! 4.01 miles in 1h 5min 55s, for an average pace of 16:25 and an average HR of 140 bpm. I don’t auto-pause the run tracking, so if I’m running a 14-minute mile (still pretty slow) and stop for 2 minutes to take a selfie for the blog, that shows as a 16-minute mile.

PDFs defeat AI?

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:49:21 -0500

I just heard a teaser for a story on how PDFs have become ubiquitous, with the supposed downside that AIs have a lot of trouble reading a PDF. The implication was that was bad, but I thought “Awesome! I’m going to have to switch to PDFs for more of my output! Oh, and I think I’ll start using TeX to produce more of that output!”

If you’ve ever read the contents of a PDF file produced by TeX you’ll understand.

2026-03-17 13:49

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:53:26 -0500

Ashley is pleased with her new toy, but perhaps not as pleased as Jackie. 🐕

The new stagflation starts to bite

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:17:45 -0500

I’ve known since before the inauguration that the economy was facing stagflation. The tax cuts would boost the deficit, raising interest rates. The tariffs would boost prices, producing inflation. Both those things, plus forcing out immigrants, would tank the economy, producing stagnation (at best), yielding stagflation.

I wrote about this more than a year ago, in Our new upcoming stagflation. We are now seeing it, even before the war started.

I’m actually a little surprised we didn’t see it sooner. I credit the delay to a few things. First, Biden had left the economy in really good shape. It took a lot to tank it. Second, even though it seemed to us that Trump was “moving fast and braking things,” it’s just hard to move that fast on things like tax cuts, imposing tariffs, and deporting migrants—even if you’re willing to break laws to do it faster, these things take time. Third, Trump always chickens out, so we didn’t get the threatened tariffs on schedule; we got watered down tariffs after a delay.

However, the stagflation is here. Check out this graph of Real GDP. As you can see, in Q4 it had fallen almost to zero. The economy wasn’t shrinking, but it was stagnating.

At the same time, inflation had quit coming down. Here’s a graph of Core PCE, the Fed’s preferred inflation index. After getting down almost to 2% (the Fed’s target) about 8 months ago, it reversed course and has been bumping along close to 3% since then.

I think all of these things were about to get worse. Even with the Supreme Court’s ruling that a major part of Trump’s tariffs were illegal, there were plenty of others that aren’t going away. The tax cuts are still in place. Immigration has virtually come to a halt, many immigrants have been detained or deported, and any sensible foreigners with skills that they can apply elsewhere are fleeing the country.

So: Stagflation was already here. But things are about to get much, much worse, because now there’s a war on.

That has already spiked up oil prices. Those won’t feed immediately into Core PCE (which excludes food and energy prices), but will feed in over time, because higher energy prices make everything we produce more expensive. And, of course, wars are fantastically expensive, meaning that the deficit will blow out way worse than it was already going to, which will lead to higher interest rates (soon) and higher taxes (later).

Oh, and don’t expect AI to save us. If you listen to the business news, you know that the only reason the economy isn’t in much worse shape is that businesses have been paying huge amounts on AI infrastructure. As I wrote in my AI bubble post, I think a large fraction of the data centers and model training that that money got paid for will turn out to be worth much less than was paid for it.

So, where are we? Well, about where I thought we’d be, as far as the economy goes—in a modest stagflation that could be fixed pretty quickly, at the cost of a substantial recession, if the Fed had the guts for that. Except that now we’re in a war too.

I can tell you how to arrange your finances to survive a stagflationary period, but I can’t tell you have to survive a war. Wars are very bad, much worse than recessions.

If you know how to survive a war, let me know. If not, good luck.

Bread with all the gluten

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:37:00 -0500

When I was 2 years old, I was in the hospital twice with digestive issues, and came out with a diagnosis of celiac.

This was in the very early 1960s, when nobody knew diddly squat about celiac, and there were no gluten-free baked goods, and no indications on labels or menus that all kinds of ordinary things in restaurants and grocery stores had gluten in some form or another. My mom did the best she could to avoid giving me things with gluten in them, and taught me to explain to people who were trying to feed me that I couldn’t eat wheat, oats, rye, or barley.

I think nowadays people think that oats don’t have gluten, but we didn’t know that then, so we did our best to avoid all of them.

I ate this half-assed gluten-free diet until 1976, when went away for 6 weeks to a National Science Foundation summer program. I was living in a college dorm and eating in a college cafeteria, and found it too difficult to follow my diet. I found that my digestion was about the same as before, and just quit worrying about staying gluten-free. (Until I got married, and my wife thought that, if I had celiac, perhaps I should avoid gluten. And it was much easier in the 1990s to find gluten-free food.)

Fast-forward another decade or so. Blood tests for the antibodies to gluten became available. I got those tests done, and discovered that I’d never had celiac.

So, one thing I like to do these days is hark back to having to avoid “wheat, oats, rye, or barley,” and subvert it, by baking bread that contains wheat, oats, rye and barley.

Which I did today:

Artist Date, March 2026

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:40:08 -0500

In the years that I was particularly suffering from season depression in the winter months, I found various things that helped. (Click the SAD tag to see various posts on the topic.) One thing that was kind of in the middle in terms of both value and effort was taking myself on an Artist Date. (There’s an Artist Date tag as well.)

Lots of different things can quality as an Artist Date, of course, but I usually used the term to refer to going to someplace (anyplace) that I found inspired me. At the top of the list, because there’s already art, which helps me get into the right frame of mind, is to go to an art museum or an art gallery. But almost as high is going to a natural area, or some place like the Japanese Garden at Japan House.

I haven’t been particularly depressed this winter, but the Krannert Art Museum had an exhibit of textile art that Jackie wanted to see, so we decided to make an artist date of it. On a whim, we added the Conservatory, which has a greenhouse with a bunch of tropical flowers, and is always nice to visit in the winter, because it’s warm and sunny. (Sunniness, of course, depends on the sun being out.)

It’s hard to get a good picture of the art museum, except by just taking pictures of individual works of art, which I don’t like to do (out of courtesy and for copyright reasons), but I thought this one was valid:

There was a term (that I have already forgotten) for having numerous paintings covering the wall, rather than a spaced array of individual paintings.

And this one was produced as part of the WPA’s Federal Arts Project, by artists who were paid a modest wage to make art that belonged to the government (and all such work is copyright-free):

As I said, I wasn’t really depressed, so it didn’t so much matter that the Conservatory greenhouse gave of a clear view of the complete lack of sun:

Still, I’m feeling just a little inspired.

Arm strength in longsword

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 08:21:39 -0500

For the first couple of years I was doing longsword, I had real trouble keeping my arms extended and pushing my hands up (due to a lack of strength, lack of endurance, and lack of the habit).

I did all manner of training to work on this—exercises for arm strength, especially overhead pushing, endurance training for those same exercises, and of course sparring to train the habit. (See in particular Fitness training for longsword.)

I’m not there yet, but it no longer seems to be my worst problem. Here’s a sparring match with one of the better fencers in our local group:

I’m not quite all the way there, so it’s a thing to keep paying attention to, but it’s no longer my biggest problem.

They want serfs

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:13:09 -0500

A pretty good recent episode of Gil Duran’s Nerd Reich podcast had an odd hole in it.

In the one I’m talking about, the one with Quinn Slobodian, Quinn explains that there’s a reason the many efforts to create a seastead, charter city, network state, and such never go anywhere: They’re unnecessary.

[Y]ou don’t actually need to create a new polity to have your own sense of entitlement and privilege reinforced in every imaginable way, and to have your own economic comfort facilitated by the institutional arrangements of the state in almost every way. With some creative accounting and some use of offshore havens and trusts and so on, you can really game the whole thing very well already, right?

Having said that, they do talk a bit about why, given that there are already tools to protect your property and money (freeports, trust, special economic zones, and the like), anybody would work so hard and spend so much money to create an actual place that’s outside the control of any government. They don’t quite come around to answering that question, which I think is unfortunate, because I think they both know the answer.

The people pushing these efforts want serfs.

They don’t want workers who can join unions. They don’t want software engineers who hesitate to create autonomous munitions or tools for surveillance capitalism. They don’t want maids or pool boys who feel free to resist their advances.

They want the right to be mean to people, in a situation where the people have to just take it.

That’s what places like Próspera offer that you can’t get from a family company incorporated in a special economic zone.

Claptrap immunity

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 15:19:22 -0500

Stephen Miller would have ICE agents (and the rest of us) believe that they have “immunity” to perform their “duties.”

This is, of course, false. Depriving any person (not just citizens) of their rights “under color of law” is its own crime. But it is in that light that we should view their position on face masks as admitting that they know they have it wrong:

The administration’s perceived need for face coverings evocative of Iranian secret police and Russian security agents helps us recognize that assertions of state supremacy and citizen insignificance are claptrap…

Source: All the king’s masked and anonymous henchmen

If they were immune, they’d not hesitate to show their faces. The fact that they feel the need to keep them hidden makes it very clear that they know they’re totally exposed in a legal sense.

Another Valentine’s Day feast at home

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:45:27 -0600

Ten years ago, instead of taking Jackie out to a restaurant and sitting with a bunch of other couples wanting to overpay to order off a “special” Valentine’s Day menu, I decided it would be more fun to cook her my own little feast.

As my inspiration, I reached back to October, 1991, and the very first meal I ever cooked for her. (She was threatening to go home because she was tired, and I said, “No! Stay here! I’ll fix dinner! You can just take a nap and I’ll do everything!”)

Some of the details have varied (the flourless chocolate cake was new maybe 4 years ago), but rock cornish game hens and long-grain and wild rice have always been there.

Go Left, Young Writers!

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:02:07 -0600

Okay, this is really, really good. About writers and writing (via @doctorow).

Makes me want to write some proletarian literature.

Characters in proletarian literature are often misled into believing that their individual flaws account for their miserable conditions, but then encounter a union organizer or a wise old Wobbly who tells them the truth, setting fictional men and women on the revolutionary path.

Source: Go Left, Young Writers!

2026-02-02 09:32

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:38:51 -0600

Although it has gotten a bit sunny now, it was very grey at dawn and for a good hour thereafter, so I think we are guaranteed an early spring.

I couldn’t be bothered to take a boring picture of the grey, so instead here’s a picture of moonrise from yesterday’s last dog walk:

I bought a second pair of Cresta lined pants

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:07:51 -0600

Three or four years ago I got a pair of LL Bean Cresta pants, which proved to be very satisfactory hiking pants: Fit me, okay in rain or wind, sturdy enough, excellent pockets for hiking.

(They turned out not to be sturdy enough to stand up to the depredations of a puppy, but that’s neither here nor there.)

That winter I bought a pair of Crest lined pants, which turned out to be similarly excellent: All the things I liked about their summer pants, plus nicely warm, without being so bulky or so insulated as to be a problem.

I’ve had them for a couple of winters now, but until this year, I didn’t actually wear them much. It’s quite typical to have two or three or four really cold days in a winter, maybe even two periods like that. But really, one pair of lined pants nicely does the trick. I wear them for my dog walks until the cold breaks. Then I wash them, and they’re available for the next cold snap.

This year has been different. Cold, cold, and more cold. More than a week ago I looked at the forecast, and realized that I’d be better off with a second pair of these pants.

So, I ordered a second pair. They came yesterday. So last night I put my previous pair in the laundry and today I wore my new pants for my first two dog walks.

Once again, most satisfactory.

(It’s too hard to take a selfie that includes my pants, so instead here’s a picture of Ashley. I wanted to give her neck a good scritching, so I took her collar off, so she’s all naked.)

2026-01-26 12:16

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:02:56 -0600

Jackie and I started baking sourdough long before the pandemic, baking a loaf pretty much every week since the early 1990s.

Today’s loaf: citric acid, ascetic acid, salt, diastatic malt powder, olive oil, honey, oats, bread flour, prairie gold whole wheat flour.

2026-01-26 09:24

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:26:30 -0600

This is exactly right, and we’re all going to suffer for it (along with all the other things we’re going to suffer for because of Trump).

The best summary of Trump’s trade “philosophy” comes from Trashfuture’s November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that’s rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.

Source: Pluralistic: Trump and the unmighty dollar (26 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2026-01-23 16:01

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:04:01 -0600

Okay, I’m going to tag this “allegedly funny,” because that’s the tag I’ve got for this sorta stuff. But this is legit funny:

Instead, FEMA staff have been encouraged to use terms like “freezing rain” in their public messaging, the sources said.

Source: Don’t say ‘Watch out for ice’: FEMA warned storm announcements could invite memes | CNN Politics

2026-01-23 08:10

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:20:42 -0600

Let me just say, I am 100% down with taking a snow day, but calling it a general strike.

Imaginary stock indexes

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 10:38:27 -0600

There’s a broker offering a new product, that I’d have been all over 30 years ago. I think they’re calling it a “generated asset,” where they create a personal stock index just for you (based on a prompt to an AI), and then create an imaginary index fund for that imaginary index, and then (I assume) invest in the underlying stocks on your behalf.

Of course, you could do that yourself, but it would be awkward, probably expensive, and definitely fiddly, with a need to track the index over time.

So, instead of that (I assume), the company just promises to pay you the value of your index, and (I assume) hedges its promise by holding the underlying shares—and since this synthetic investment is a service, they can lump all these promises together and invest in all the underlying shares, and be generally sure that their hedge will be close enough that even very large stock moves won’t cost them more than investors are paying for access to this service.

As I said, I’d have been all over that 30 years ago. Now, not so much. I’ve gotten lazier and more conservative with my investments as I’ve gotten older.

But it did make me think what I’d want to invest in, if I were to create a synthetic index, and it occurred to me that the companies that are putting the least amount of money into AI crap will do much better over the next few years. So I asked confer.to if it could give me “a list of large corporations ordered by how much they talk about AI in their reports to investors.”

Sadly, the answer was no:

Based on the available data, I can’t provide a specific ranked list of large corporations ordered by how much they discuss AI in their earnings reports. While the information confirms that AI is a major topic in 2025 earnings calls across the S&P 500, the detailed company-by-company ranking you’re looking for isn’t publicly available in the sources I checked.

Here’s what we do know:

AI is a dominant topic: In Q3 2025, “AI” was cited on 306 S&P 500 earnings calls, the highest number in the past decade.

Significant increase: This is a large jump from the five-year average of 136 mentions and the 10-year average of 86.

Sector leaders: The Information Technology (95%) and Communication Services (95%) sectors have the highest percentage of companies mentioning AI.

Market impact: Companies that mentioned AI in their Q3 2025 calls saw a higher average stock price increase (13.9%) compared to those that didn’t (5.7%) since the end of 2024.

While sources like Yahoo Finance and MacroMicro track the overall trend and volume of AI mentions, they don’t publish a specific, ordered list of corporations ranked by the frequency or depth of their AI discussions in earnings reports.

This type of granular, ranked data is typically compiled by specialized financial data and analytics firms (like FactSet, which provided the data to Yahoo Finance) and is often part of a paid subscription service.

Perhaps the specialized AI tool that this broker uses to create its imaginary indices has access to the fine-grained data about AI mentions in earnings calls with investors. But I don’t care enough to go to the trouble of looking.

Poking around at the St. Louis Fed’s Fred graphing tool (to come up with a graphic to include for this post), though, led me to the graph at the top, which is of the “Nasdaq Global Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Index,” which “is designed to track the performance of companies engaged in the following themes: Deep Learning, NLP, Image Recognition, Speech Recognition & Chatbots, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity and Big Data.”

So one option to get what I want would be to just go short on that index.

I don’t think I’ll do that either.

2026-01-18 13:34

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:41:43 -0600

Turns out Cory Doctorow and I think a lot alike about the AI bubble, but he also has stuff to say about how to speed along the popping of the bubble, which would be a good thing. (Bubbles that pop sooner do less damage when they do.)

so I’m going to explain what I think about AI and how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: “How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm.”

Source: The Guardian