More of the Same

For many in the ballroom at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night, the scene was painfully familiar. Shots fired, confusion and panic, and a sense that the normal order of things had been violently interrupted.
Political violence jolts the US once again - with a familiar response

This may be true, but for a lot of people who weren't in that ballroom, shots fired is the normal order of things. The United States is a pretty violent place, considering that it's not a third-world nation. Lethal force is often seen as a solution to problems, and not a problem in and of itself. While a lot of made of political violence, what's happening is that a segment of the American public that's normally shielded from the sort of violence that's an everyday occurrence in much of the country are starting to find that it's coming for them. Because more people are coming to the conclusion that some action or another is, in fact, a form of violence, and so violence in return is warranted.

While attempted assassinations often prompt yet another tiresome round of The Political Blame Game, the fact of the matter is that politics really has very little to do with it. It's easy to point to this or that bit of political rhetoric (often taken out of context) and claim that it's a driving force in the spread of attacks on people, but this is really only pandering to constituencies who want to see those not like them as willfully perverse. Because the United States doesn't look back on events like the American Revolution, or even the American Civil War, as tragic wastes of people's lives; they're seen as heroic, and necessary, undertakings. Many people in the American South have effectively retconned the whole history of the Civil War in service of that particular viewpoint.

As turning to violence starts to become less a trait of the poor, minorities and the generally marginalized and more a trait of Americans as a whole, I can understand how a certain level of hand-wringing becomes commonplace. But I can also understand why it doesn't do anything to arrest the shift. Because it doesn't do anything to either solve the problems that people are responding to, or to create conditions where the use of violence is seen as broadly disqualifying (as opposed to simply a cudgel with which to beat political rivals).

Collared

File under: Isn't it always the same? "Students seeking blue-collar careers face sticker shock."

Sudden and rapid increases in the costs of vocational training strike me as a failure of policy. What's needed is a greater focus on not only helping people see where their best paths for the future lie, but in growing the pipelines to those futures. What's driving up prices are large numbers of people crowding into a space that doesn't have the resources to expand to accommodate them. Allowing to things to get to a point where people are beginning to panic about their futures and then hoping that the for-profit actors who enter the space will place as great an emphasis on quality education as they do on  maintaining profitability for owners and investors is a recipe for bad outcomes. Because it's not like we haven't seen this play out before. Private, for-profit schools spend heavily to market themselves to prospective students (and their parents) and that expenditure has to be made up somewhere along the way.

In the end, it's like any other gold rush. The fastest path to wealth is not to be a miner, but to sell picks and shovels to the people who expect to use those tools to better themselves. Sooner or later, presuming that it hasn't happened already, some unscrupulous operator is going to open a school and decide that actually giving the students the tools they need to succeed in a career in the skilled trades is simply too resource intensive. And it only takes one to ruin a lot of lives, perhaps irrevocably. And this is going to happen because, as a society, the United States does not value the sort of planning and oversight that it takes to prevent it. "[A]n aspiring aircraft maintenance technician must shell out $40,000 for a 14-month course in Florida," because the up-front resources to ensure that there were enough programs to keep the cost down weren't spent. Meanwhile, Governor DeSantis recently signed legislation to ban local diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and block carbon taxes in the state. And this does precisely what to increase access to (and thus lower costs for) blue collar training programs? Hell if I know. But it projects to the Republican activist class that he shares the values that are important to them.

Just like when I receive yet another political fundraising e-mail (note the last time I interacted with a political campaign was in 2004) here in Washington (the opposite corner of the lower 48); there's nothing about training people for the skilled trades, or other jobs of tomorrow. It's hyperbolic warnings of how the world will come to an end if I don't start writing checks.

And this is why there are failures of policy. Because there tends to be little or no real concern for them until people are being pulled out of the wreckage and the hunt for guilty begins. I'm constantly reminded of George Will's statement that the United States does not attempt to prevent disasters; it simply cleans up after they happen. Despite the fact it's a bad habit, it's constant enough that one can count on it.

Mystery

Some things are just going to be mysteries. But I also know that I’ll always want to know, that I’ll always want everything to fit together nicely and neatly into a workable pattern that explains everything. And perhaps not coincidentally, tells me that I really see things as they are.

Imagine, If You Will...

Somewhere, in the past 12 years, that changed. The desire to know, the desire for things to fit together and, perhaps more importantly, the desire to understand that I see things as they really are, went away. I've become comfortable with the yawning chasms that dot my worldview; so much so that if I hadn't written in this blog that I hadn't, I would never have recalled it. (Which, honestly, is one of the things about writing it; it provides insight into my past self that memory alone is not up to the task of.)

I am reminded of the fact that I am poor at predicting the future, even when it pertains directly to myself. But I am also reminded of the impermanence of personality, and perhaps even the self. Back in 2014, I clearly had no inkling that my need to know and understand would change. I don't recall having been working to alter it at the time. But it has, in fact, shifted. I'm much more at peace with the idea that there will be mysteries in the world, and I've come to believe that it's hard to ever claim one knows anything while also being unwilling to be wrong. I think that I've become more comfortable with believing in general, and the understanding that I believe as I do not because it is demonstrably correct, but because it works well enough for me that I can get by on a day-to-day basis.

If I'm still around, and writing this, in 2038 (given the way my family has worked, that's very much up in the air as of now), perhaps I'll see further change in myself. Or whomever I am then.

Duped

I came across a LinkedIn post that was illustrated with a comic that in guessing was created by generative automation. Having an LLM create a brief comic in the style of XKCD, so that one can avoid drawing literal stick figures for themselves contributes to a world in which people will see something that looks like XKCD, and wonder whether it was created by a random computer somewhere, or if Randall Munroe has decided to sell out and shill for some random thing.

Not really XKCD

It occurred to me that this dilution of trust in XCKD isn't a problem for the people who use generative automation to copy it... but for Mr. Munroe, this has consequences, now having to pay costs for other people's actions among them.

Along with all of its other capabilities, generative automation can be an effective way to externalize costs. Because it doesn't matter if someone makes $100 from being creative, being efficient or saddling someone else with the bill; it still spends the same. And the more people come to feel that they're the ones left holding the bag for the benefits other people are receiving, the more pressure they will feel to externalize their own costs, just to keep up. Because that's nothing new; most likely, it's worked that way for all of human history.

That lack of a genuine functional difference between providing value and externalizing costs has always been a primary reason why technology doesn't live up to the promises made on its behalf, namely that the relationship between people and businesses will be partnerships; symbiotic, if you will. Because since a parasite doesn't contribute anything in exchange for the resources it receives, parasitic returns are necessarily higher than symbiotic returns. It's the same incentive that drives any form of rent-seeking; it exists when it's less capital-intensive than providing value.

And so the question becomes: How much parasitism can a system withstand before it begins to die? This is especially important in scenarios where the parasite can survive the death of the host; if people using generative automation to copy someone ruin that person's credibility, they can simply go on to copying someone else. It's a tragedy of the commons; there's a positive disincentive to preserve the original, if all that happens is someone else benefits. And eventually, all that's left is a wasteland.

Rejected

And the kind of helplessness that people feel, that leads to this kind of violence, is also unacceptable. And it's worth more scrutiny, from both the industry and our political leaders.
Nilay Patel. "Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman's 'unconstrained' relationship with the truth." Decoder with Nilay Patel. Thursday, 16 April, 2026.

Mr. Patel was giving an obligatory condemnation of violence, in response to the attacks on Sam Altman's home, which took place between when the Decoder episode was recorded, and when it was released. And I use "obligatory" here deliberately. Not in the sense that Mr. Patel felt some sort of pressure to make a statement that he didn't agree with, but in the sense that speaking out against violence is something that's expected. Mr. Patel had noted that the attacks on the Altman home didn't come up during the actual discussion with Mr. Farrow, and so it was clear that he was looking to head off criticism over that.

But what stood out for me was his labeling of a feeling of helplessness as "unacceptable." It seems that he was casting the blame for such emotions on the generative automation industry and the government, but the short statement that he made didn't offer anything to be done about it, other than have it scrutinized. Which is unlikely to happen. Because the kind of helplessness that people feel, that then leads to violence, has been around for quite some time. One wonders just what it would be about Sam Altman that would inspire people to look into it more deeply when the same people who Mr. Patel expects to do the looking have done such an excellent job of ignoring all of its previous incarnations. And the general public hasn't yet cared enough to punish them for it.

Because when people like Mr. Patel make the obligatory condemnations of violence, and advocate for someone (else) to do something about it, they tend not to offer an accountability mechanism to ensure that it's done. And maybe that's because, in the face of violence, they also feel a kind of helplessness, perhaps born of the realization that while they may have an audience, it's fairly tenuous. The public wants what it wants, and so while there are any number of people who will insist that the media leads the public, I'm of the opinion that the public more often leads the media.

And the public doesn't really have a problem with helplessness leading to violence, so long as it's directed somewhere else. Mainly, I think, because people don't see any other options. While Luigi Mangione is quite some distance from being a hero to the general public, there wasn't much in the way of condemnation for the killing of Brian Thompson on the grounds that it had foreclosed on, or even ignored, some better way of dealing with the problem. And so while Mr. Thompson's murder didn't solve anything, it did give people the idea that "one of the bad guys" had received what was coming to him. And, I suspect, had Mr. Altman been killed when his home was attacked, the same sentiment would have surfaced.

I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.
President George W. Bush. (NBC's "Today" show, 30 August, 2004.)

Creating conditions so that those who use violence as a tool are less acceptable requires large-scale disapproval of violence for its own sake, rather than out of disapproval for the specific ends to which violence (or terror) is being deployed. Even when those ends are punishing wrongdoers or acting in perceived self-defense. Violence of the sort that gains some level of public acceptance tends to occur when someone sees it as a reasonable response to the other person's actions (or inaction). It's rare for people, even a minority, to celebrate escalation. And the angrier and more upset people are, the less likely they are to see any given level of violence as an escalation.

I think that Mr. Patel's call for "industry and our political leaders" to scrutinize a general feeling of helplessness that then comes to be seen as the result of aggression against people, and therefore, a rationale for violence, may let the public off the hook, out of an agreement with the idea that most everyday people are, in fact, helpless. And maybe that's the problem that needs solving. But I think that the general public will need to be the ones who solve it. Which, when social trust is remarkably low, it something of a tall order. But trust is, in a lot of ways, a choice. So maybe step one is convincing people to make different ones.