Guess Which

Given that the presumed goal of generative automation is to render large swathes of the public unemployed, there have been a number of recent articles on whether this or that career path will be the thing that saves the economies of industrialized nations from the collapse of discretionary spending by the affluent, but not wealthy, segments of their populations.

Whether it's healthcare, services or blue-collar work like the skilled trades, news outlets are starting to run articles, centered around an individual and their story, designed to show people that there are well-paying occupations out there that people have been ignoring in their rush for soon-to-be-worthless college degrees designed to lead to knowledge work. And, of course, they're quick to note the low six-figure salaries that go along with them.

What's less apparent is what does the demand for these roles look like, especially if they're intended to be lifelines for millions of un- and/or underemployed people. Or, to be more precise, how elastic that demand is. To use a common example, take people who harvest foods. That demand is relatively inelastic... food isn't thrown away or allowed to rot by producers because there are literally no people available who could be employed to harvest it... it's that their margins don't make spending more on payroll worthwhile; the added costs needed to recover more of the produced food mean the math doesn't pencil out.

When the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined: Nursing Is the Surefire New Path to American Prosperity, the article opens with a nurse practitioner who now makes $120,000 annually and talks about how her and her husband are doing. But, being a WSJ piece, it's only available to subscribers, so I didn't read the bulk of it. But baked into that is the idea that "plentiful" jobs equals enough jobs for the people who might decide to enter the occupation. But how many nurse practitioners does the nation really need? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections by 2034, the number of nurse practitioners is slated to rise by about 40% from 2024 numbers. And I think that this is what's driving the enthusiasm. When one looks at the data, nurse practitioners are high on the table of Fastest Growing Occupations, and they're the first occupation to crack six figures in salary. But it's worth noting that they're farther down the list when it comes to the Occupations With the Most Job Growth (the difference being percentages for Fastest Growing and raw numbers for Most Job Growth). The BLS estimates that there will be more Software Developers added than Nurse Practitioners.

And if that sounds a little off, that's the problem with taking and (or even only some) these projections as givens. If one presumes that the BLS has guessed the factors affecting occupational utilization for software developers incorrectly, where does a confidence that they've called it correctly for nurse practitioners come from?

The problem with casting any job as a "surefire" bet is that it presumes to know the choices that people will make concerning those jobs. Will it so happen that "nurse practitioners are increasingly employed in team-based models of care, taking on tasks previously performed by physicians." and "Expanding practice authority [...] support[s] employment demand further?" The BLS expects the United States labor force to grow by 3.1% by 2034, when compared to 2024 numbers. Is that going to match increases in population growth? Will their general outlook on expanding and contracting occupations bear out?

But perhaps the bigger question is whether the expected transitions, assuming they happen in the way the BLS predicts, are efficient. An old contact of mine on LinkedIn asked whether nursing was "another option for would-be or laid off engineers." Maybe, but there isn't a lot of crossover there. How much of the time spend pursuing a Computer Science degree would really be useful if one made the switch to Nursing? And how many laid-off developers could really afford to return to college full-time to get the Masters of Nursing degree needed to be an NP? And if there's a rush to enter the nursing occupations, and they become oversubscribed, what happens then?

The problem that I've always had with career planning is an inability to see the future. And that's led me to commit to things that turned out to be less than expected. If we're really going to see a seismic shakeup of the employment market in the United States, expecting everyone to figure that out for themselves, based on whichever news articles they happen to come across is a bad idea. I would expect that there needs to be a plan that helps match people with jobs when they're selecting their educational paths. This, of course, is going to be freighted... there simply isn't enough trust that the United States will actually look out for the thriving of the citizenry at large, as opposed to the people who write the biggest checks to Congressional and Presidential campaigns. Which means that it's unlikely to happen. Hopefully what comes out of it won't be wasteful enough that it becomes clear that something better was needed.

Determinative

Security is never free, but policy determines who pays for it.
Bruce Schneier, "US Bans All Foreign-Made Consumer Routers," Schneier on Security. Thursday, 2 April, 2026

This is one of those statements that takes what would otherwise be a lot of verbiage, and boils it down into something both succinct and informative. The bigger picture, of course, is that Mr. Schneier's statement is true of everything. Safety, health, education, sidewalks, love... all of them can be slotted into that sentence, and it would still be true. One might even update the old canard of "Freedom is never free" with those last seven words to get something more worth talking about.

And "policy" covers a lot of ground. Sure law and regulation, but social norms and unspoken mores also count as policy, even if they are less stable; enforcement can be even more sure.

American society implements policy that does a lot of shifting of who pays for things. Sometimes, out of an apparent concern for the general welfare, but other times out of an apparent desire to hide the ball, and the true costs of things from those who eventually foot the bill. In the end, it's the lack of transparency of the system that causes the problems. Even without an intent to obscure things, the general opacity of the system means that the general public winds up supporting policies for which it will directly shoulder the costs, even when the intent is to have those costs borne elsewhere. And when anger boils over, and there is a hunt for the sources of people's misery, the search tends to focus in the wrong places.

It would be nice to be able to say that keeping Mr. Schneier's words in mind would help with understanding where the buck ultimately stops (or whose pockets it comes from), but the world is never that simple. Still, I'm pleased to have come across so articulate a distillation of the concept; I think that keeping it in my back pocket will help.

Promptly

With the understanding that I can't validate that this is even legitimate, this is another of those things that popped up on LinkedIn for people to have a good laugh at. It strikes me, however, mainly as weird. Sure, on the surface it's yet another "someone meant to have generative automation write something, and wound up sending the prompt, instead," but the prompt itself seems off to me.

"A warm but generic rejection email that sounds polite yet firm."

Don't companies have those? Who's actually expecting something other than a form letter? Why craft a new "generic" message for each rejected candidate? Isn't reusability the point of "generic?" This gives the vibe of using generative automation for its own sake: "We need to burn compute on a triviality to show that we're 'AI-forward'."

"Do not mention specific reasons for rejection."

I understand the rationale for this part of the prompt, but it still strikes me as risky. After all, there are likely non-specific reasons for rejecting a candidate that generative automation could come up that would still be a problem, if they aren't related to the job at hand. This is something that it strikes me that one would want laid out beforehand, for just that reason.

"Make the candidate feel like they were strongly considered even if they weren't."

Considering that the automation likely wouldn't know one way or the other to what degree a candidate was considered, I can understand having it default to implying that everyone was strongly considered. But I'm not sure that it's a good idea to have LLMs tell people something that may not be true... Once it's considered legitimate to have generative automation mislead candidates, even to spare their feelings, I'm not sure how one keeps people from asking the LLMs to deceive other stakeholders. And I'm not sure it takes much imagination to see how that starts ending badly, especially if the automation starts telling outright untruths.

"Remember to use the candidate name and company name variables."

Why is the company name a variable? Does it change somewhere along the way? This gives me the impression that this is coming from a third-party recruiter, who works with a number of different clients. I suppose that a holding company could have a lot of smaller companies under its umbrella, and centralized HR for all of them, but given that the company name shows up in other parts of the e-mail, it doesn't seem necessary to call it out again. And again, why not use a form letter? There's nothing in the prompt that calls for any candidate-facing personalization from their résumé or cover letter. I'm not sure what just using their name is supposed to do.

Of course, the fact that a prompt was sent to a candidate who was supposed to receive a rejection message means that messages aren't being vetted prior to being sent. Which makes some sense... after all, generative automation is supposed to be able to handle all of this. But even the prompt screw-up aside, if the idea is to generate responses to candidates on the fly, it seems that it would be wise to have something that checks things before they go out, if only to make sure that something entirely random didn't find its way into the message.

The final thing that stood out to me was the redaction. I understand why the candidate wouldn't want their name out there, but blanking out the company speaks to a fear of retaliation that I'm not sure is healthy. It's not like there's something in this message that points to anything criminal, or even unethical... a prompt was screwed up along the way. If pointing that out publicly is the sort of thing that would lead an HR department to blacklist someone, maybe we as the public (and yes, I include myself in that) need to start having higher expectations of the businesses we give our money to.

Motion

It's one thing to say: "The one constant in all of my dysfunctional relationships is me," but yet another to understand what that actually means for one's life.

Especially when one has, like I do, an internalized locus of control, because that means that looking back on those relationships, and why their dysfunctional, leads to the self. And one of the other traits that tends to go along with an internal locus of control is a certain lack of self-forgiveness.

Being the agent of the dysfunctions of one's life means not being the person one wanted to be, or, perhaps more acutely, feels one should have been. And this is where I think that the internal locus of control can be a difficult thing to manage, it lends itself to judging the self by the immediate snapshot of one's life, and the comparison of that to a counterfactual, either created by other's lives or an idealized version of one's own. Neither of which are useful guides.

For me, personally (which is weird, given my general dislike of writing about myself), I've developed a tendency to accuse my past self of errors in judgment, even as I work to really internalizing the idea that the choices I made, even when they didn't work out as I intended, were the best ones I could have made with the information that I had at the time. And maybe that's the stumbling block. I'm starting to think that it smuggles in an implicit criticism, even when my explicit goal is to avoid being self-critical.

And maybe that's because self-criticism is easy. It can be painful at times, but it doesn't really ask much of a person other than to take a look at some version of themselves and find them wanting. And it feels like a step on a path to change, even though there's no reason why the two are related. But self-acceptance doesn't mean accepting stasis, even if such a thing were possible. I'm starting to find that this is a more difficult lesson than it's given credit for.

Small Time

Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email, publish photos and documents

Is that all?

Okay, who cares? "We in ur e-mail, posting ur pics," doesn't really seem to move the needle in a shooting war. I would have thought that Iranian cyber-warfare would be more... warlike. If getting into Kash Patel's Gmail account is the best they can do, why are they bothering?

While President Trump's random boasting about Iran suing for peace comes across as complete fantasy, it's still been fairly clear that this is a one-sided war to this point, as Iran has no real way of defending its territory from U.S. air power. Accordingly, the United States can strike pretty much when and where it wishes. And, the legitimacy and necessity (and maybe the actual drivers) of this particular conflict aside, the Iranian military was unable to protect it's Head of State, and has been shown to be unable to protect it's own high-ranking members in the past. A simple hack of someone's e-mail account doesn't do anything to make the country seem more able to make a real fight of it.

Now, that could change if the United States puts soldiers on the ground in Iran. Taking and holding territory is always more difficult than launching in munitions from a distance. But it's not like this exfiltration of data from Director Patel's personal e-mail account show that Iran is more capable in that regard than one may have first thought, either.

In the end, this sounds like empty boasting. I guess we'll see if it turns out to be more than that.