Afar

I'm of the opinion that "media bias" (which is really just media outlets seeking to give their audiences what they want) exists more in the realm of story selection and framing than in outright manipulation of facts or making things up. Sure, an outlet might be more or less likely to treat something as credible, based on its political leanings, but this is still, as far as I'm concerned, a function of the audience's desires.

In any event, NPR (which tends to be my poster child for this thesis) recently ran an article on a Wisconsin pastor who was barred from re-entering the United States after having gone to Guatemala to visit his mother, who was ill. In fairness to NPR, this story comes from an outfit called "Religion News Service," so it's likely that it was reported in other outlets as well.

It's another example of the understanding that outcomes should be driven by whether or not the subject is a good or bad person, rather than whether or not the rules point to that outcome. While Reverend Paredes and his family are portrayed quite sympathetically, the article itself notes: "Soon after, he was notified by the U.S. government he was ineligible to apply to return to the U.S. until 2035 because of a 1991 deportation order."

And while the pastor claims that he was unaware of any such order, there's nothing in the piece that notes that no such order actually exists.

This is the sort of advocacy piece that might better serve its intended audience if it focused more on changing the immigration system, so that the rules were clearer and more accessible. And perhaps more broadly publicized. Reverend Paredes seemed to be under the impression that since immigration officials weren't chasing him around, that he had been cleared to stay in the United States; when that wasn't actually the case. He may have received bad legal advice when he consulted with a lawyer before returning to Guatemala, but had he himself been better versed on the rules, he may have understood that something didn't add up properly. Yet this story is more about the outcome, than the process. And I think that this contributes to the idea that the American Left is in favor of open borders.

There are stories to be told about the way that the American immigration system works. More of a focus on making that system better may be of more help then the human-interest stories the seem to dominate the coverage. 

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.