Like Sunday Morning

I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and as I approached an intersection, I noticed an older woman dancing on the other side of the street. There was no music, no-one was singing; she just danced there, near a lamppost by the corner. As I was crossing the street, she stopped dancing, and stood in place, as if she was waiting for me.

"It's not easy," she said to me, as I stepped onto the sidewalk. "It's not easy being homeless. It's not like that Lionel Ritchie song." The old  Commodores' song came to mind almost immediately, and sat in the back of my head, waiting, while the woman continued to speak. She looked older than me, but that's the thing about homeless people; living on the streets ages them, so it's hard to guess their ages from looking at them.

"You be careful out here today, okay?" She then turned away from me, and I walked on. She hadn't asked for anything; which was good, because I hadn't brought anything to spare and my car was a few blocks away.

I walked on; I was meeting a friend. There were a few other homeless people nearby; I presumed that there were services for them of some sort in the building. One corner housed a city office, closed for the evening.

"You see, I've begged, stole and I borrowed," I sang gently to myself as I walked away. I didn't suspect the woman would be there when I came back through that way later. She wasn't. Neither were the others. I wondered if they'd found safe places to spend the night.

Having spent the early part of my adult life in Chicago, I wasn't as acquainted with homelessness as I am now, living here. The climate there was much less forgiving, especially in the winter. I can understand why people here both see the problem as insurmountable, and expect the city and county governments to fix it anyway. It's that desire for someone else to bear the costs, of course, that stands in the way of the necessary trade-offs to reduce the number of people on the street. Such, of course, is the way of things.

Reboot

Leaders in D.C. and Silicon Valley are worried the public backlash against AI and data centers will hamper the development of this staggeringly powerful and existentially dangerous technology. The new label is part of a broader effort to shift the narrative.
Trump and CEOs try to shed AI's toxic branding

Someone, whether that's Jensen Huang or Donald Trump expects this rebranding exercise to work, and I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be right. Because these are relatively intelligent people (yes, even the President) and they wouldn't attempt something like this if they didn't think it had a reasonable chance of success.

I want to call that out as a problem, but it's really just the nature of the beast. In order for this to backfire in people's faces, a fairly large number of people need to, in effect, have nothing else that they need to pay attention to. And that simply isn't the case right now. Schemes like this make people upset when the presumption is that they count on the fact that people are stupid. So any expectation that suddenly going from calling generative automation "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence" will actually change the public perception of the technology becomes a marker of contempt. When it's really simply the realization that most people don't know enough about the topic to understand that the change is, at this point, purely semantic because they have other, more important things, to devote their attention to.

And if I'm going to criticize "leaders in D.C." for anything in this, it's the fact that so many people are too busy keeping their heads above water to have the time to be more conversant in the technology. As for leaders in Silicon Valley, if they weren't trying to snow people about the benefits of their new technologies, then I'd be worried.

Both Ways

The understanding that "no one is coming to save you/us" is that people who are unable to help themselves will not be helped by others. But perhaps implicit in that individualistic ethos is the idea that the same audience will not mobilize to help others who cannot help themselves. And this makes sense; it's the way reciprocity works, and reciprocity is not always a positive thing. It's not uncommon to find people angrily declaring that since they received no outside aid in a difficult time of their lives, they plan to refuse any pleas for any from other people.

But given that, I wonder if the ethos of the individual becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain degree. As people buy into the idea that they are on their own, and cannot rely on the assistance of others, do they also buy into the idea that going to the aid of others is either foolish, or a luxury that they cannot afford. There is a degree to which the focus on sparking feelings of poverty in people may be too central to the way Americans talk to one another. Making it clear that it's everyone for themselves may be useful in fostering self-reliance, but there's a reason why Thomas Hobbes described life a world in which people could not effectively cooperate as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Allied

The "American Infrastructure Alliance" has formed to push for data center growth in Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas. Supposedly, the goal is to work with state and local governments on "responsible development" and, in so doing, head of potential moratoriums on new sites. (As opposed to the America's Infrastructure Alliance, which concerns itself with transportation, and the AI Infrastructure Coalition, which is a different group.)

Personally, what I was looking for in the Axios story on the outfit was some indication that they would come out against data center projects looking to have the elected officials they read into their projects sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. After all, if the point is, as International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers international President Kenneth Cooper says, "development that benefits workers, communities and our nation," then the developers should be willing to lay all of their cards on the table, no?

Personally, I suspect that the group isn't going to be as effective as its members may want it to be. Because the issue isn't really benefits... it's costs. Data centers have a very high level of perceived costs for the communities in which they are situation. Water usage may be overstated, but in places where the electrical grid needs to be updated or expanded to manage the extra capacity, power costs go up, and data centers are are often large, ugly and noisy. And while the labor unions that have signed on to the group are touting the jobs that will be created are mostly going to be temporary... it may take a small army of electricians to build out a data center, but it won't need all of them to maintain it. And if the union workers who build data centers live elsewhere, the impact of their wages on the local economy will also be short-lived.

The various businesses and unions that are backing this new alliance are going to have to make the case that the benefits to the communities where data centers will be built will match or outweigh the costs to them. But part of what allows businesses to be successful is often the ability to externalize costs (like not having to pay for training data), and the expectation that communities will "take one for the team" has already been articulated by some parties.

If the idea that this is simply another scheme to transfer wealth from rural communities to corporate shareholders and union executives take hold, this project will be dead on arrival. Considering the substantial head start that idea already has, this "American Infrastructure Alliance" likely has its work cut out for it.

PS: I went looking for a website for the group, to see what they had to say in their own words, but didn't manage to turn one up. Maybe it's a bit early for that yet.

Fractured

"The Opinions" from the New York Times is one of the podcasts in my regular rotation. A recent episode is part of a continuation of Robert Siegel's Friday politics wrap-ups that formerly ran on National Public Radio. David Brooks has retired from the New York Times, so there's been something of a rotating cast presenting the Conservative position in the discussions. This week, the chair was filled by Timothy Carney of The Washington Examiner and American Enterprise Institute.

While Messrs. Carney and Dionne were discussing how the Democrats could appeal to more conservative/Evangelical Christian voters, Mr. Carney made the following comment, which I quote here, at length, because I want to capture all of the context.

And that Religious Right is just harder for the Democrats to reach when you've got the national party -- I mean the Biden Administration, and Biden wasn't some crazy Culture Warrior, they changed documents to say "chestfeeding" and "birthing people" instead of "breastfeeding" and "mom." That cultural extremism, that's going to turn off people who, you know, are just regular churchgoing people in the Middle America, who might not even be 100% pro-life. They might not even care so much about the cultural issues. They just want somebody who seems sort of normal. And I think that is, part of Iowa, and if Democrats want to win that place back, you know, they're going to run candidates in those places who are more moderate.

Can those people distance themselves from the national leadership, or can the national leadership and the Democratic Party dial down the culture warring?

Mr. Carney's contention that use of terms deigned to appeal to the transgender community and other parts of the Democratic constituency that wants to push back against (or even completely overturn) conventional gender norms is "cultural extremism" and "culture warring" struck me as interesting. Changing some government documents is going to an extreme, and prosecuting the Culture Wars against Christians in the United States? That's all it takes? After all, there's no change in law in the example that Mr. Carney notes. Nothing new is being enacted on a policy level with the change in terminology. It's just the adoption of Progressive ideas of inclusive language. While I understand that (and why) this may be a big deal to some people, if that's what counts as extremism, I wonder what "more moderate" will need to look like in practice.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Mr. Carney spoke of inclusive language as "going to turn off people who [...] might not even be 100% pro-life." Inclusive language and abortion rights are not the same, even if both positions are associated with Progressives. Which brings me to my next point...

As the conversation continued, E. J. Dionne made the following comment, which I think is more important that in was credited for:

[T]he alienation between these two constituencies, is kind of a push-pull thing, because for an awful lot of liberals, including some religious liberals, the dominance of a hard Religious Right on the Conservative religious side has really turned off a lot of people.

One of the things that I have understood to be true about the United States for a long time now, and I don't believe will change anytime soon, is that the American public is not unified. Further, many of its factions have mutually hostile relationships to other factions. And I think that this is because many people see themselves as the primary characters in other people's stories.

I've told this story several times before, so I'm going to keep it short. In my time at a HBC/U, other students didn't see the fact that I spoke like a White kid from the suburbs as being the result of growing up in a suburb that was approximately 90% White. They saw it as an intentional repudiation of themselves; I had made a deliberate choice to not be like them, as a way of placing myself above them.

For many conservative/Evangelical Christians, people don't reject conventional gender labels and roles because those labels and roles don't work for them. They do it out of a desire to oppose conservative/Evangelical Christians and Christianity more broadly. And the same with abortion. This is why Mr. Carney conflates the two issues. There are many Conservatives who understand the entire Progressive (or more broadly Liberal) project as a hateful plot against their just deserts, rather than something with a rationale, and goals, of its own.

And this is a problem for the Democrats, because their coalition is made up of a number of smaller interest groups, which may or may not have much in common with one another, but (in certain races) can damage the prospects of the whole by staying home on any given Election Day. The LGBTQ-et cetera cluster of Democratic voters wants to be shown that they matter and are important. And there are Democratic politicians, candidates and party operatives who want to make that show for them, as a means of delivering something to a voting block that they can't afford to ignore. But the alienation (or, if you'd rather, hostility) between them and the "just regular churchgoing people in the Middle America," means that any overtures to the one are going to be seen as an attack on the other. But each side feels that it has a right to such overtures, and sees the resentment of the other side as unjustified.

This places Democrats in a difficult position, because it's then difficult to mobilize parts of their coalition to turn out for them without also giving Republicans ammunition to drive hostile factions to turn out against them. Because there's no such thing as distancing oneself from the Culture Wars, "Woke 1.0," or some or another flavor of "extremism." There's simply distancing oneself from people, and their interests. Mr. Carney suggests, without coming out an saying it, that Democrats should exile the transgender community to the political wilderness, in hopes that they'll pick up enough "regular churchgoing people" in places like Iowa to make up the shortfall. And in so doing, he legitimizes the alienation between those two groups, when that's part of the problem the nation needs to solve.