Grist

Nobody in Particular started in late December of 2006. Which means that I'm about a couple of months away from having been at this for 20 years. What started out as an attempt to make myself a better writer has become something of a compulsion in the meantime, with an early goal of averaging 13 posts per month turning into a minimum of 13 and an average a bit north of 15. Although not all of those are text posts... I do post photographs I've taken while out an about on an irregular basis.

But I have been thinking of winding things down by the end of the year. In part because I don't know that all of the time that I've spent in front of my keyboard has, in fact, made me a better writer, but also because I'm starting to feel that Alphabet, which owns Blogger, is simply helping itself to everything I post here and dumping it onto the massive pile to training data for the latest version of Gemini, having granted themselves a limitless license via their terms of service.

To be sure, that doesn't bother me, in and of itself. If the text I've posted here is useful, then it's useful. But it's also a reminder of one of the contradictions of generative automation. The companies that produce and sell it hold it out as something that can bring massive benefits to everyone, not just the wealthy investor and executive classes. But if the technology is that amazing, and will produce so much value that it will make literally everyone wealthier, why couldn't OpenAI, Anthropic and so on have borrowed the money to pay people for training data? Why resort of casting the whole of the open Internet as "fair use" and engaging in piracy of books if the technology was going to create enough to make everyone whole?

While it's fashionable to just presume that everyone over a certain net worth is greedy and grasping, and then call it a day, I do find it useful to pay attention to what the people whose job it is to make money on investing consider to be good investments. And if generative automation is only a good investment because the most important inputs are free, then it's worth being suspicious of the claims of enough returns to give some to everyone in the end.

Sorcery

Except in this case, the party out of power says: “Don’t worry, I can solve all your problems. I can lower prices by just” — name a different scapegoat — “the billionaires! We’re going to punish the billionaires, and that is going to make your health care cheaper,” or what have you.
Catherine Rampell, “There Are Solutions to This Crazy Economy. Voters Will Hate Them.”

One of the side effects of this sort of "magical thinking," as Ms. Rampell termed it, is that it can license (and I suspect it does quite often) a belief in political Evil. After all, if there's something quick and straightforward that one's preferred political party can do that will result in an immediate fix to people's problems, then it stands to reason that those problems only persisted because the quick and straightforward thing was not done. And if it's quick, straightforward and simply wasn't done, then it stands to reason that the party in power didn't do it because they're deliberately perverse.

Sure, it's in overly simplistic answer to a complicated situation. But isn't magical thinking always like that?

Defection

 

Crosstalk

One of the things that gets me about American politics is it's tendency towards "let's you and him fight." Especially when social media enters the picture. The following was posted to LinkedIn, but I'm sure that it's popped up in any number of other corners of the Internet:

For the record, I don't have much faith that either of these men are being quoted accurately here.

According to the picture, Dave Ramsey believes that poverty comes from poor choices, whole Jon Stewart sees the cause as predatory financial policies. Fair enough (maybe). But my first question was: How are these men defining "poverty?"

The Federal guidelines for poverty are listed in terms of annual income: $15,960 for a single adult and $33,000 for a family of four, for instance. Nothing in what Messrs. Ramsey or Stewart say have any bearing on people's actual incomes; expenses, including frivolous ones and housing costs, don't reduce a person's income as paid to them by their job(s). So whatever understandings of "poverty" the two of them are referring to, it's not the Federal poverty level.

And since there isn't any other context, there's no indication that whatever other definitions they using align with one another. Or, for that matter, that one of them is responding to comments by the other. It's just Dave Ramsey going the "personal responsibility" route, while Jon Stewart is leaning more into the "systemic factors" side of things. I suspect that their placements on the right and left side of the image is not a coincidence.

This is the sort of social media post that's designed to produce an emotional reaction where one person is cast as a sinner, and the other a saint, based on the reader's own political (or maybe simply politicized) viewpoint. And I don't really see the utility in that.
 

Jeffersonian

[Vice President J. D.] Vance over the weekend said, “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion.”

“They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn’t listen,” he wrote in a social media post that reposted a video of a French building burning.
Trump, Vance blame immigration for French riots

When I read that, the first thing that came to mind was: "Does Vice President Vance has any understanding of what sparked the protests?" The simple fact that Muslim Students of France supported the protests doesn't make them immigrant-led. Next, however, was this:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.
Thomas Jefferson "Notes on the State of Virginia" 1785

Of course, the primary difference between Vice President Vance and President Jefferson (although he was not yet President when he wrote "Notes on the State of Virginia") is that Thomas Jefferson was willing to point out that White people could be, and had been, dicks. (And that this state of affairs was likely to continue.) Vice President Vance, feeling a need to pander to a White Nationalist movement that believes it has never done wrong by anyone, cannot be so forthcoming. And so he simply makes the bogus case that something about differences in skin color prevent pluralistic societies.

So how does the Vice President account for the modern United States? Does he honestly believe that the presence of say, Native Americans, Hispanics and East Asians raises "fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility?" If so, where does the fault lie? Last I checked, it wasn't the Native Americans who attempted to exterminate native megafauna in the name of denying people a food source. Last I checked, Mexico didn't appear to have much outright hostility to Americans who wanted to go live there. It wasn't the Japanese who placed White Americans into internment camps and then helped themselves to things left behind. So if he's waiting for the United States to devolve into internecine violence along racial lines, who does he think will start that fire. When you look at people who take to mass shootings in the hope of igniting a race war, it's not recent arrivals from the third world pulling the triggers.

Okay, granted, the Industrialized West isn't really set up to manage a program that relieves world poverty by taking people in from poor nations. A massive influx of people seeking the benefits of a modern welfare state is going to cause problems. But if Vice President Vance is under the impression that the only people who can get along with Europeans are other Europeans, maybe he should ask himself where the responsibility for that might lie. Because "the real distinctions which nature has made" are unlikely to be the culprits here.