Vector

There is a type of fraud, perpetrated against job seekers, termed a "Contagious Interview." The tactic has been around for a few years now, and like many fraud tactics, has been evolving and spreading. Originally, it was targeted at developers: a fraudster would ask a job seeker to clone and execute code from code hosting platforms, like GitHub. The code package would have a malicious payload attached to it, and if it was run in an insecure environment, that payload would be installed on the target's computer/network.

It's taken a while, but the technique is now being deployed against other job seekers. Some examples I've heard of are people being asked to record videos of themselves for verification purposes or even something as simple as being sent a Zoom link. In each case, the target is presented with an error message or dialog box that informs them that a driver, or their Zoom installation, is out-of-date and that specific commands need to be run in the Terminal to address this and continue.

Of course, updating camera drivers or video conferencing software doesn't require Terminal commands; this fraud depends on targets following instructions, even when they don't understand precisely what they are doing. And that relies, at least in part, on a certain amount of anxiety. And there's no shortage of anxiety among job seekers today. Someone flustered by a potential roadblock between them and an interview is much more likely to follow dodgy instructions than someone feeling more secure in their situation.

And, of course, someone stressed from being unemployed will find being stolen from via malicious software running on their computer to be a bigger blow than someone with a steady income. But money is money, and the fact that a dollar, pound or euro goes a fairly long way in a poor or developing nation means that people there will continue to target people in wealthy nations who are looking for work. It's a form of resource curse unto itself, and one that will keep evolving, so long as the world's poor have easy access to websites and people's inboxes.

Handed Over

“James Madison’s design — ‘ambition must be made to counteract ambition’ — assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive. He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.”
The Week, quoting Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post.

I understand Mr. Zakaria’s point, but I feel it somewhat obscures an important factor. For many Republican lawmakers the congregants in “the personality cult of one man” are the people whose support they need to be reelected. No matter how well a lawmaker’s chosen policies might serve the nation as a whole, they cannot implement them if they are voted out of office.

Donald Trump controls the Republican Party because he is able to influence it’s activists and primary electorate to vote in accordance with what he understands his interests to be, because those voters believe that those are also their interests. And this is due to a long history of “the political establishment,” as it were, paying lip service to making people’s lives better, but sacrificing their direct interests at nearly every opportunity. Donald Trump only needed to have just enough credibility to get people to think that “this time might be different,” and he was in.

Republican members of Congress have the ability to neither counteract the ambition of the President with their own ambitions nor to jealously guard their powers against the executive, because any ambition other than using their powers to be an instrument of the President’s will is punished by the “MAGA” base. And a public airing of the missteps that brought Congress to this place won’t do anyone any good. As long as those people who are motivated to turn out for Republican primary elections believe that if President Trump stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone to death, that it would be the best thing for them and the nation at large, the Republican party doesn’t need to “surrender its institutional ambition;” it has already lost any ability it may have had to retain it.

The best way to save a home from a fire is to prevent ignition. Once hoses are being taken from the hook-and-ladder and attached to hydrants, the question isn’t “Will the structure burn?” but "How much of it will remain once the flames are extinguished?”

Mr. Zakaria’s point, at least as quoted by The Week, starts with noting that for partisans, corruption isn’t about what is being done, but about who is doing it. This interpretation of The Rule of Law is nothing new at this point. This is a function of the fact that holding a member of one’s own “tribe” accountable comes with costs. People who understand impartial application of the rules to be fundamentally unaffordable are predictably unwilling to pay what it asks.

Exceptionality

Anyone can be an exception to a rule. But when a large number of people all claim to be the same exception to the same rule, they have simply defined a new rule.

I find it interesting which supposed "rules" of society are so broadly unpopular that that the appear to exist for no other reason than to allow people to loudly proclaim that they are an, if not the, exception to said rules.

I suppose it's another way of seeking meaning in life by being better in some way than other people, by presuming that the "average person" blindly, or by virtue of their own mediocrity, falls into some or another undesirable category, when living, breathing examples of such people are nearly impossible to actually find.

The Mountain is Out

 

"The mountain is out" being a local idiom for a being a clear day.

Puget Sound is one of the best places to get a good view of Mount Rainier, and since I had occasion to ride the ferry today, I decided to take advantage of the sunny weather to get a few shots of it.

It's a deceptively placid vista, given that Mount Rainier is still an active, if slumbering, volcano.

Degrees of Human

I've seen a number of "The most valuable professionals of the next however many years will be" posts on LinkedIn recently. If you've seen them, you likely know the sort; they generally end in some bland aphorism about "being human."

And I get it; the goal is to affirm that there's a way to dodge the generative automation "jobpocalypse," at least for a time, by presenting some or another skillset as being immune from automation. But also as accessible. I checked the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' Fastest Growing Occupations data, and according to that, the most valuable professionals of the 2024 to 2034 period all have a "Doctoral or professional degree" which, according to the National Center for Education Statistics will run someone about $20,000 a year (or about $50,000 with living expenses factored in) on average for a 4 to 8 year program. So, it's understandable that telling people that things they can learn during evenings and weekends will move them to the top of the pile is enticing.

But it doesn't speak to how high the pile actually is. "The people who are getting ahead are doing X" does not entail that everyone who does X gets ahead. If the number of people who have skills that combine "business and data" (to use one common formulation that I've seen) is fairly large compared to the actual number of roles that will exist, then people with those skills might be "the most valuable professionals" on a relative basis, but not an absolute one. And honestly, I haven't seen any particularly scarce skills on people's lists.

These sorts of posts strike me as being an outgrowth of American individualism, placing the onus for being in-demand on the individual, rather than seeking to understand what the broader society would need to look like to keep the overall demand for human labor high. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but as a strategy, history tells us that it doesn't work as well as it's often advertised. As individuals, "leaning into our humanity," whatever that means, will not, in and of itself, solve the problems that will arise if ubiquitous automation torpedoes the careers of a significant number of people. It's going to take something somewhat more focused on the broader question of aggregate demand than that.