Soft Lies

Remote work exacerbated the divide between knowledge workers and management. While high-speed Internet is comparatively pricey in the United States, when compared to other countries, it's still inexpensive enough to be more-or-less ubiquitous, and, as a result, most people who can command a knowledge worker's salary can afford it. And a number of them expect that expenditure to free them from needing to actually commute to their jobs.

Employers, on the other hand, have started requesting, or requiring, people to come back to offices. The reasons for this are many, varied and in the mind of the beholder. Business executives claim to be looking for serendipity and interplay between co-workers to spark creativity and productivity. Distrustful workers claim that it's a cynical ploy to get people to quit; and thus lower headcount without resorting to laying people off. Some business analysts have noted that managing teams for output (as opposed for time and activity) is a skill, and when management doesn't have it, their lives are easier when everyone's in one place. Either way, it's something of a brewing fight, although given today's very soft job market, one where management has the upper hand.

This hasn't prevented people from being upset about it, and when people are upset, one can be sure that social-media types will be quick to step up and tell them "hard truths." Mainly, that they're right, and whomever disagrees with them is wrong, stupid, evil or some combination of the above.

And this is where my own brand of cynicism comes out to play. Because I've seen this movie before. Some time ago, in fact.

94.3 percent of the time [Senator] Obama never really tells the audiences anything uncomfortable though he boasts that he will 100 percent of the time. What he promises them instead is to tell people they don't like (auto executives and Wall Street fat cats) what THOSE GROUPS don't want to hear.
John Dickerson "Obama's Closing Argument" Slate Magazine, 21 April, 2008

And if pretending to tell people "uncomfortable things," "hard truths" or "things they don't want to hear," when one's really doing the opposite is pandering when a candidate for political office does it, it's pandering when some internet rando on LinkedIn or X does it.

People accept being pandered to because it affirms them and their worldviews. People like that. And I don't blame them. I'd probably like it, too, if it didn't immediately make me suspicious. But suspicious I am; along with dubious that people who run multi-million-dollar businesses don't know what they're doing.

But it's also true that I understand who wins when one fights the law, and so I prefer to work within the system. And doing that means understanding why the system (or, more accurately, it's management) does  what it does. And listening to rabble-rousers tends to work against that.

Main Street

Not a lot going on.

This is Main Street of the next suburb over. It's pretty quiet, which it is a lot of the time, unless there's some sort of event going on. The street was closed, and the parking spaces given over to the restaurants, during the SARS-2-CoV outbreak back in 2020, and it's been closed to automotive traffic ever since. The resulting detour is something of a pain, but people are used to it by now. What's interesting is that the closed street makes the place feel sleepier than it actually is. I think the particular mix of businesses is what leads to that, since one can find bustling places less than a block away.

Nested

I'm pretty sure that this is the nest of a bald eagle. They're pretty much the largest birds in this region that nest up high. Either that, or birds have discovered condominiums.

The problem with a photograph like this, of course, is that there's nothing to give it scale... if one doesn't know how big these power line towers are, it's difficult to guess at the size of nest on top of it. So maybe this picture, taken from a slightly different angle, will help with that.

King of Wishful Thinking

Joe Biden says he could have defeated Donald Trump.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence because one can paint it whatever color one wants. President Biden's counterfactual is an example of this. I understand the logic; if one presumes that Vice President Harris lost because she lost a greater vote share than Donald Trump did in the all-important "battleground/swing" states, then it stands to reason that if President Biden had been able to keep all of those votes, he would have won.

Except for the minor fact that there is absolutely no world in which President Biden kept all of his 2020 voter coalition.

For starters, by 2020, there were a lot of people who were fed up with the Trump Administration. By last year, it was the Biden Administration's turn to have worn out its welcome. It's really difficult to look back over his four years in office and imagine the majority of the public saying "yeah, gimme more of that." Not to mention the fact that President Biden had been showing his age during the 2020 campaign season; by last year, he was seeming positively decrepit. There was also the matter of being a "bridge." Candidate Biden had been able to read the room well enough to understand that people did think that he had eight years in the White House in him, but the fact that he never publicly committed to only serving a single term tipped his hand as to his ambitions, and those ambitions prevented him from having the Democratic party put the wheels of succession in motion, which they really needed to be doing. And Mr. Biden's apparent belief that he was owed two terms prevented him from getting down to business from the jump. Case in point; his Executive Order on border security from June of last year. There's no reason that should have waited until 2024, when it could have been just as easily enacted in June of 2021.

The President has run afoul of the same thing that plagued so many Democrats and their supporters, the idea that Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general were so self-evidently loathsome that any viable alternative was a shoe-in. Running a winning campaign takes work, work that Vice President Harris didn't have time to lay the groundwork for, and that President Biden apparently lacked both the energy and the mental sharpness for.

And mistaking loyalty to the President for loyalty to the nation, or even to the party, the Democrats as a whole waited until it was evident to anyone paying attention that President Biden was in serious trouble before acknowledging that he hadn't managed to keep the voters that had elevated him to the White House satisfied, let alone enthusiastic. And he certainly hadn't made inroads into the rest of the electorate. Not that the President himself would have confessed to that, having a million and one reasons for his low approval ratings, except for understanding that he wasn't getting things done in a way that resonated with the public. At least President Biden has creeping (or maybe sprinting, take your pick) senility to blame. Democrats in general should have known better.

Production

In this LinkedIn post, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's founder, mentions "productivity" twice in making the case that technology won't cost people their livelihoods. But he never mentions "demand." It's wonderful to presume that new automation tools will do the drudge work, thus empowering people to be "better humans," "unlock new skills and deepen natural talents." But if (and it's still an "if") this does, in fact, happen, what goods and services are going to be produced that will either allow people to support themselves, or free them from the need to work for other people, in order to sustain their standards of living?

I've asked people this question, and I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. A lot of people have turned to something along the lines of, "it's coming, so there's nothing to worry about." My response to that tends to be this: "I don't worry about it, because anxiety helps nothing. But hope is not a strategy." I understand, at least to a degree, the potential and promise of the current crop of generative automation systems, and, if it's ever a reality, artificial general intelligence. But potential and promise don't pay people's bills.

Mr. Hoffman says: "Ultimately, the surge in productivity will guide business leaders to a realization: the right move isn’t to do the same work with fewer people but to create even greater value by leveraging more employees with new AI-driven superpowers." And I understand that, but "value" is not objective; it depends on other people to realize it; and they tend to want a return on their investments. And producing "value" in the form of goods and services that people don't have the resources to pay for is unsustainable... if it weren't, there would never be a reason for layoffs.

Demand is not infinite, especially when it's being driven by people who are uncertain about their economic prospects. And right now, generative automation is fueling uncertainty about those prospects. And people like Mr. Hoffman are focused on the supply side of the equation. (I would point out that there's a reason why Ronald Reagan's Supply Side orthodoxy earned the nickname "Voodoo Economics" in the 1980 presidential campaign.)

 Cars, for example, are valuable. But I already have one; the fact that someone with an AI-driven superpower has designed a new one doesn't automatically mean that I'm going to spend the money to upgrade. And if enough cars are sitting on lots, history tells us that business leaders will determine that the right move is to have fewer people create fewer of them.

This is why the exclusive focus on productivity seems misplaced. It appears to presume that whatever is produced will drive enough demand for itself to keep employment high. But the problems of "business leaders" are not identical to the problems of the public at large. In a society where well-paying employment for everyone who wants it would mean that businesses are less efficient, the interests of the public and the interests of investors will be at cross purposes. And business leaders are not equally beholden to both groups of stakeholders.