Hidden Away

There are a lot of concepts that float around in American politics that make things difficult, and one of the big ones is: "It's okay when we do it." Consider the following exchange from a recent episode of Radiolab:

Hank Green: There were people who were like, "Shh, don't tell people about this."

Lulu Miller: There are some people, including climate scientists, who say we shouldn't even talk about geoengineering, like, at all.

Hank Green: Yeah. That—the main thing is you don't give the fossil fuel industry a way out that's not, don't burn fossil fuels anymore.

This is a sentiment that I've heard before. Public discussion of geoengineering, especially in forms that can be implemented today, is bad, because it leads people away from the idea that the production and use of fossil fuels must be halted as quickly as possible. In effect, the only acceptable answer to anthropogenic climate change is a massive overhauling of the energy infrastructure; accordingly any ideas that may lead people to believe that there are other solutions to the problem are bad on their face, and should be effectively suppressed.

I understand the logic here, even if I am more than a little dubious of the idea of decreeing that there is only one allowable answer to a problem; mainly because it raises questions about what problem is being solved. In this case, is atmospheric carbon the problem, or are the changes to the climate the problem? In any event, one could look at things this way; there is a moral imperative (reduce the introduction of man-made greenhouse gases into the atmosphere) and there is a concern that certain information (knowledge of viable geoengineering technologies) would lead people to believe it's acceptable to not obey that moral imperative.

Where things become wonky is when people have different moral imperatives that they seek to protect. Consider Florida's "Parental Rights in Education Act" colloquially known as the "Don't Say Gay" law. One could look at the legislation this way; there is a moral imperative (people should live within "biblical" idea of sexuality and gender norms) and there is a concern that certain information (discussion of sexual orientation or gender identities in classroom settings) would lead people to believe it's acceptable to not obey that moral imperative.

Although I suspect that the people that support the two positions would disagree on the similarities, in no small part because the discussions in question have taken on partisan valences, and Liberals and Conservatives tend to see their own positions as legitimate, and those of others as being taken in bad faith. (And to be sure, it's not a completely apt comparison. But it is, as they say, close enough for government work.) But the idea that one of the ways that moral imperatives are enforced is by withholding information concerning alternatives is a more common one than it is often given credit for. And one of the things that drives it is the idea that the stakes are too high to allow everyday people to make choices based on their own understanding of the situation and their interests. The perception that things must be a certain way, or a catastrophe will result that does not respect political ideology.

Off Target

Despite appearances, the man at the bus stop is not the intended subject of this photograph. Instead, it's the Target store behind him, on the other side of the intersection. It's one of nine, nationwide, being closed for "theft and organized retail crime." It also sits along my commute.

I don't live in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, and so don't know much about it. I am aware that it has a fairly significant homeless population. (After all, I've only posted about them five times in the past few years.) But people I know who live in the area were well aware of constant shoplifting that took place in this particular store.

When the news hit LinkedIn, the response was intense. It was far and away the most commented-on story in LinkedIn News for the day. And a lot of the comments were the standard: calls for more police, partisan attacks on Democrats in municipal government and general aspersions directed at the sort of people the commenter guessed must be behind all it it.

It is, however, worth noting that no level of law enforcement will compel people to endure poverty with stoicism and equanimity. Some number of them are going to feel that they are deserving of more than they have, and, accordingly will have no compunction against taking from others who they see as having either more than they deserve, or enough that sharing will not injure them. And while it is true that not all poor people turn to crime to improve their material circumstances, there is a reason why poverty is considered something of a predictor for crime. And one of the things about the Seattle area is that it's very easy to become poor around here. With homes that definitely qualify for the moniker "fixer-upper" going for several hundred thousand, if not more than a million dollars in much of the metro area, low income people have the unpleasant choice between living quite some distance away from where they work or needing to spend a significant percentage of their paychecks on keeping a roof over their heads. And it's easily possible that, if they don't go far enough away from the city, they'll be stuck doing both.

The nice thing about making crimes like retail theft into matters of character, as opposed to resourcing, is that it creates a justification for not doing anything. After all, bad character is bad character. Simply giving people access to resources won't change them for the better. In case you hadn't guessed, I'm a bit dubious about that line of reasoning, if for no other reason than I tend to hear it from a) laypeople and b) blowhards. Sure, better access to resources doesn't remove all of the incentives to criminal behavior. But it can give people less desire to take the risks involved.

In my opinion, the United States is too fragmented to solve problems like street crime well. The social distance between the various constituencies that make up the nation tend to allow for people to be on board with remarkably draconian punishments, secure in the understanding that they will be meted out only to those who are not like themselves.

As for stores like Target, their problems are only going to become worse if there isn't a better solution to poverty. As they close more stores, problems will migrate to follow them into the places where they still do business. After all, this is how one winds up with the Target in Redmond having a shoplifting problem of its own. And that can lead to much worse outcomes than are evident in Ballard. There are neighborhoods where bars on the windows of stores are common, and establishments refuse to take cash due to the difficulties in keeping it secure. The people who live in those neighborhoods of necessity suffer for it, if for no other reason than they're subsidizing the costs of the security measures that lend the places the air of a prison colony.

Sooner or later, something will have to give, even if a lot of people are betting that it won't. One hopes that when they turn out to be wrong, it won't be catastrophically so.

Unmeant

The fact is, humans need to experience meaning in our lives. [Emphasis in original.] According to research by the psychologists Login George and Crystal Park, this meaning comes in three varieties. First, there’s the kind of meaning acquired from ‘coherence’, or our sense that what we experience makes sense, and that we can understand and predict what happens next; for example, that clouds in the sky mean rain is likely.
You can be a materialist and find meaning in the universe

Of course, by this standard, bears also experience meaning, if it comes from something so simple as being able to understand the basic rules by which the physical world works. But, I will admit, this is a good way to get to a universal. Still it feels like a cheat; one may as well decide that meaning comes from water, that would also force humans to need it in their lives. Research articles are expensive to read, and I wasn't willing to pay for access simply to find out if Login George and Crystal Park used as simplistic a definition of coherence as Professor Tracy had done.

I'm going to take a moment and point out that the tripartite pillars of meaning are not the only formulation. Roy Baumeister, for instance, had a four-pillar definition, consisting of purpose, efficacy, value (moral justification) and positive self-worth. I once read a dialog on meaning where significance was the lone determinant. Compared to these simply being able to make sense of the world, to the degree that things don't change randomly from one moment to the next, seems like a very low bar.

But, as I said, this is what makes it useful as a buttress for the idea that people, as individuals, all need to experience meaning. I'm not even sure I can image someone with severe mental illness being completely unable to understand and predict certain events in their physical and/or social environments. And so the question for me becomes: of what use is establishing coherence as a source of meaning other than to universalize the experience of meaning, and thus have a ready-made answer for those people (like myself) who have no real use for a search for same.

Generally speaking, I understand how concepts such as purpose, significance or moral value fit into a sense of meaning that is intended to connect a person to the universe in such a way that they understand themselves to have some degree of importance to the whole exercise. How being able to predict that it will rain before it actually makes one wet is a little more difficult to decipher for me. Even as proof of the universality of the search for meaning, I find Professor Tracy's invocation of coherence somewhat odd; because rather than something that people need to experience in their lives, coherence, at least to some degree, is something that people have no option but to experience. No matter how random, or even actively chaotic, one's life becomes, gravity will still operate in a predictable fashion.

In that sense, I suppose the heavy lifting that coherence is performing in Professor Tracy's Psyche essay is heading off the question of why this supposed need exists. Thus far, all of the essays on meaning that I have read that claim that the need for meaning is universal have declined to explain why. As much as I understand that Professor Tracy was gratified by her ability to determine that her "existence actually matters to the universe" without recourse to a belief in the divine, I don't understand the basis on which she might assert that I am in need of coming to the same conclusion.

I am of the opinion that to be human is nothing more than to be a member of the species homo sapiens; perhaps more broadly including all of the various members of the genus homo, living or extinct. In this sense, humanity is primarily a factor of genetics. If one's parents are human (and to be the best of my knowledge, humans are incapable of interbreeding with anything else), then one is human. What more need be said? But I understand that for many people, that definition of humanity is too sterile, and something more is needed. And as such, there have been many candidates for some other trait that is required for "being human," with a need for meaning being a common candidate. I do not pretend to know which is right, but I am somewhat disappointed by the lack of interesting evidence for most pet theories.

Unprocessed

Dame Caroline [Dinenage, chair of the House of Commons media committee] then wrote to Rumble, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook owner Meta asking if they would follow suit.

In her letter to Rumble chief executive Chris Pavlovski, she said: "While we recognise that Rumble is not the creator of the content published by Mr Brand, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.

"We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand's ability to earn money on the platform.

"We would also like to know what Rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour."
Rumble rejects MP's 'disturbing' letter over Russell Brand income

Expecting that someone would have their income withheld on the basis of accusations? No wonder "cancel culture" has acquired a bad name. The fact that legislators would feel that it is appropriate to ask that media platforms take unilateral actions without allowing the accused the chance to defend themselves against whatever allegations have been leveled speaks to the need politicians feel to mirror the judgements that are rendered in the court of public opinion. (And, of course, Parliamentarian Dinenage won't be on the hook if it turns out that Russel Brand is cleared, and sues over the withheld funds.)

The problem with following the judgements of the court of public opinion is that they are fickle. This makes substituting those judgements for due process a more dangerous practice than it is often given credit for. The public is not accountable to anyone for popular opinions. Once can imagine a vocal segment of the public being up in arms over YouTube demonetizing a person's videos for some breach of the terms of service, where the public is on the side of the video creator. Legislators will have a difficult time in asking companies to follow their own rules if they advocate for those rules to be set aside every time they start feeling the heat from some or another group of their constituents.

But more importantly, deciding that the processes and procedures that organizations and institutions have for investigating and sanctioning violations of rules need not apply when some number of people are sufficiently vocal about it, or someone is accused of something unpopular has the effect of turning rules and the like into means of punishing people for being unpopular or the targets of public anger, rather than being the result of a formal finding of fact - even if that finding of fact becomes a mere formality. Concepts like democracy and the rule of law are not meant to be weapons wielded against those who are out of favor, because the perception that they are is what splits societies. Especially when it appears that people in government are looking to the private sector to get around the rules that government has set for itself and/or expects the populace at large to follow. This is what lends the letter from the UK's House of Commons media committee an air of illegitimacy. Russel Brand has been accused of "inappropriate and potentially illegal" activity; and while those accusations may be very credible, he hasn't been convicted of anything yet. Placing the focus on victims shouldn't be a means of circumventing that.

Russel Brand, like a lot of people who deliberately set out to push people's buttons, hasn't done himself any favors with his behavior. That's what makes him so vulnerable to this sort of tactic. It's easy to take the allegations being made as the truth of the matter, even though, to the best of my knowledge, no charges have been filed and all of the accusations have been made anonymously. This forces any accountability to be outside of the formal structures of the legal system. Parliamentarian Dinenage doesn't have many options in calling for accountability other than to appeal to the private sector directly. (This still doesn't make it a good idea.) Mr. Brand, having made himself look bad in front of the court of public opinion (likely because he didn't predict that behavior that he thought was simply "edgy" when he did it would morph into "predatory" several years later), now finds that the public believes him capable of open sexual misconduct.

This leaves legislators in a difficult position. The public has a habit of expecting elected officials to mirror their attitudes and preconceptions back to them. And failing to do so can result in a challenger running on a promise that they will do so. That promise may be implied far more often than it's openly stated, but its there nonetheless. And the public, being merely a rather large mass of individuals, is incapable of being consistent; there will always be people for whom this or that outcome trumps other considerations. And it's worth noting that politicians are members of the public themselves. Be that as it may, however, I think that it's important that people in government not advocate for going around government; it just doesn't end well in the long term.

Derailed

 

The homeless encampment of RVs that had been in this lot recently is now gone. Where the endless game of encampment whack-a-mole pushed them to, I don't know.

Conflicting

An aphorism:

I can understand how comforting the afflicted makes the world a better place. Afflicting the comfortable, however, seems to do the opposite. And I can see it becoming an endless cycle, with people undoing the comforts that others have worked to create in the sincere belief that the wrong people have been relieved of their afflictions. The newly afflicted, for their part, agitate for the restoration of the old order. Perhaps the problem is that afflicting the comfortable feels like justice. But to the person who feels their comforts are justified, it feels like victimization.

Striking Back

Former President Donald Trump has “no idea” whether Republicans will vote to impeach President Joe Biden.

But he does have a theory on what motivated House Republicans to launch a Biden impeachment inquiry: revenge.
‘They did it to me’: Trump says Biden impeachment inquiry might be motivated by revenge

I’m going to disagree with this assessment, as much as I think that a lot of people believe it to be true. Because I don’t think that simple vengefulness is what’s in play here. Partisanship makes much more sense. Sure, House Speaker McCarthy is using the fact that Representative Nancy Pelosi, the previous Speaker, opened her impeachment inquiries against Donald Trump without holding a vote first, but the idea that this line of attack against President Biden wouldn’t have occurred to anyone had Representative Pelosi not done it first is fairly ludicrous.

Speaker McCarthy does have some work to do to keep the Freedom Caucus and those sorts appeased. And there is a case to be made that he’s offering up this impeachment inquiry to do just that. Whether it will work is another matter entirely. But what’s much less in doubt is that fact that many Republican voters (and, it appears, a decent number of Republicans in Congress) think that President Biden has done something wrong. Given the dearth of evidence of crimes thus far, that may be the conflation of partisanship with morality speaking, but that’s something that’s worth keeping in mind on its own.

As the two major political parties have drifted even farther apart from one another, people see their partisan allegiances as being less about personal preference than they are reflections of being right thinking and having the nation’s interests at heart. Given this, I don’t buy into the presumption that had the Democrats been unwilling to impeach Donald Trump (knowing they had no chance of obtaining a conviction in the Senate) that House Republicans wouldn’t be feeling any pressure to make life difficult for Joe Biden. After all, the percentage of Republicans polled who approve of President Biden’s handling of the office was in the single digits last year(https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/rising-partisan-antipathy-widening-party-gap-in-presidential-job-approval/), and I suspect it hasn’t gotten any better in the interim. It’s difficult to imagine that anything that Democrats could have done, or held off from doing, during the Trump administration would change that. After all, Democrats and Republicans alike tend to see the other as unethical, busibody extremists. And about 27% of the population feels that neither of the two parties governs honestly and ethically.

Given these factors, even had nothing of the sort been floated when Donald Trump was in office, I suspect that we’d still be looking at a push to impeach President Biden now. Partisan animosity makes charges of wrongdoing much easier to believe, much easier to see as being part of a pattern of bad behavior and much easier to consider only the tip of an iceberg of wrongdoing that will become visible with a little work. If one understands that partisans tend to see their opposite numbers as more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent than other Americans (i.e., themselves) it stands to reason that the idea that President Biden has committed at least one impeachable offense would be relatively widespread among Republicans. And given that the entire House is up for election every two years, I suspect that many Representatives realize that if they aren’t convinced of the evils of the other party, someone who is will mount a primary challenge for their seat. That alone is enough of an incentive to seek the ouster of the President.

Ask Your Developer

So I kept seeing these advertisements in my inbox for "Kyndryl." Now, Outlook gives the top space of one's inbox over to advertising; there's a little "Ad" marker, but otherwise, they look pretty much like any other e-mail message, with the exception of the other major tell, they lack time/datestamps.

My first thought was curiosity over what it was designed to treat. Information systems deficiency, it turns out. Turns out that I'd mistaken the rebranded IBM Global Technology Services for a new pharmaceutical.

I'd never really given deep thought to corporate naming before; it's not something that comes up in my day-to-day life. Still, I have to have wonder about the choices that went into making a portmanteau of "kinship" and "tendril" into something that sounds like it's available by prescription only. Because it seems like something that if you didn't already have some familiarity with, you'd have no idea of what it was. And given that they're advertising to random people with Outlook accounts, they're likely spending a decent amount of money shouting their name into the void.

Past Its Prime

I think that one of the interesting things about the concept of media literacy is the understanding that the way a story is framed is important. I suspect the problem is that it can be difficult to tune into this without becoming suspicious of an outlet's motives; mainly because such framing is often partisan in nature, or at least show where someone's sympathies lie.

The framing of a story can also be about expectations, and who is understood to be best placed to take action on a given subject. I was checking through LinkedIn this morning, and they had a brief news segment on food expiration dates, titled: "Expiration Dates Waste Money, Food." It's linked to an article from The Wall Street Journal (which is always on the hunt for more subscribers), titled: "Here’s Something Past Its Expiration Date: The Expiration Date Itself" (subscription required, because it's The Wall Street Journal). Of course, given the theme of the article, the title is ironic, but that's beside the point.

In any event, the framing of the LinkedIn News snippet is that the "expiration dates" (which is a misnomer) are the culprit. Unless food manufacturers are doing something weird with their inks, it's not the dates themselves that are causing the problem, it's people's response to them, which is to throw away food once the dates have passed. But even that isn't really the problem, which is likely better described as: People's lack of knowledge of how to determine if food is safe results in them throwing away things that could be used. Because the expiration dates aren't the concern; the behavior is driven by the fact that for many people, "use by," "sell by" and "best by" dates are really all they have to go on, especially given the belief (correct or not) that it's possible for a food item to be invisibly tainted, and that the processes involved aren't "all or nothing."

And I'll admit to being one of those people. I'm not a stickler for the various dates that manufacturers place on food, but I do attempt to keep use of foods within those dates, and if I'm uncertain, I'm not going to experiment with it; out it goes. Because food poisoning or gastroenteritis really suck. And if I'm not confident that something won't make me ill, I'd rather skip it entirely. And I expect that this is the thinking on the part of a lot of people.

To be sure, the retail food landscape factors into this. Stack and stacks of "perfect" produce in grocery stores and supermarkets create a wariness of blemishes beyond the idea that one might be considered a less than conscientious host at a picnic or dinner party. And for restaurants, another source of food waste called out by LinkedIn, liability law can be unforgiving, especially in a society were a surviving a bout of foodborne illness can be like winning a (rather unpleasant) lottery; especially if one is a lawyer (for whom the situation is a lot less unpleasant).

In short, the overall task that people have difficulty with is one of risk management. But that's something that's been known about the public at large for a long time, because modern society is far too complex for people to be experts in the myriad of subjects that have possible consequences for them on a daily basis. Still, if the goal is to reduce food waste, the focus on dating is misplaced. Either people have to be better educated in how to assess risks through understanding risk factors, or the risks have to be somehow reduced. Expecting companies to take that risk onto themselves is likely not going to be successful, especially if any instance of getting it wrong will be costly.

Of a Mind

I was reading a blog post that set out to explain the dangers of groupthink, as seen through the lens of the beginning of the Satanic Panic in the early 1980s, specifically the connections that people made to Dungeons and Dragons. The author identifies four factors that they feel "contributed to the escalation of fear and the adoption of unfounded beliefs."

• Confirmation Bias
• Illusion of Invulnerability
• Pressure to Conform
• Outgroup Stereotypes

I can see the reasoning here, but these factors are present in a lot of different contexts, like organized religion, where one wouldn't say that the phenomenon as a whole is an example of groupthink.

I think that fear, rather than being a part of the groupthink phenomenon once it begins, is one of the major contributing factors to starting it. One of the important pieces of the Satanic Panic phenomenon is the idea that Satan was powerful, and sought human agents to act against the legitimate divine order. And it was fear of that which lead to people getting on board with the panic. And I suspect that this goes a long way towards explaining why it wasn't much of a thing were I lived at the time; the local religious landscape simply didn't take the idea of Satan, or Satanism, very seriously. I can't think of a single person I knew at the time who would have told you that the occult was real. So the sense of an external threat, or of being unsafe, that people needed to band together to fight wasn't there.

Similarly, I think another thing that drove the Satanic Panic (other than alliteration) was the fact that for many people, Dungeons and Dragons (and the occult), offered simple answers to otherwise complicated questions. When Patricia Pullen, founder of Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.), claimed that an in-game curse caused her son Irving to kill himself, she now had a direct answer to what many people find an intricate, and often unanswerable, question. One that moved her son's suicide from a mystery to a problem with a clear solution. And I think that when a group feels that they have answers to difficult questions, there is an incentive to simply go with those answers, rather than hold out for something else that may never come. And again, where I grew up, there was no difficult question that "evil supernatural forces" was a workable answer to. And so that specific incentive, to go along with the answer provided rather than put effort into a new one, wasn't present.

A lot of time has passed since that particular episode of the Satanic Panic. Enough so that it's easy to forget that it never entirely died out; the QAnon set of conspiracies, with its belief in the ritualistic abuse of children and Satanic overtones, keeps the moral panic alive, although at a much lower level than I remember it from my adolescence. Human nature, however, takes quite some time to change, and so the exercise of seeking to understand it in order to create a better present is a worthwhile one.

Peasy

Of the myriad conversations I found myself in over the long holiday weekend, the most surreal was one about homelessness and "crime." But, I think, that a lot of discussions of homelessness and "crime" have this quality, which is that they're spoken of as if they were dirt simple problems to solve, even when the person who claims so admits to having no idea of how they would (or anyone else) would actually go about crafting a lasting solution.

Part of it is, I think, that many people don't seem to understand the root cause of homelessness; which is that some number of people find that the least expensive housing available to them in the area in which they are attempting to live costs more than they can afford to pay for it. Which might seem obvious, but in that case I would remind everyone that my father's definition of "obvious" was something that's so crystal-clear that you're the only person who sees it.

The reason for the miss, in my own opinion, is the fact that very few of the people I speak to who consider homeless to be an easy problem to fix understand their own housing situation to be at all precarious. They tend to own their home, and perhaps one or two others besides. Even if they rent, they tend to do so out of choice, and while their might be circumstances that might warrant them moving for reasons not entirely of their choosing, they're not in a situation where that would land them on the street.

Even so, I tend to be surprised that their ideas of what should be done (vague as they often are) never seem to entail increasing the housing stock to the point that prices would start to come down. Rather they tend to be something akin to deportation or banishment, seemingly unaware that none of the municipal or state governments they think should be acting have the power to simply round people up, force them to go somewhere else and not return.

Likewise, their answers for the sorts of pretty crimes of poverty that bother them (and the only sort they seem to have any actual awareness of) also tend towards the cartoonishly simplistic. Want to stop people from shoplifting? A single security guard near the exit should handle that.

To be sure, what's really at work here is a fairly mild form of the tripartite structure that academics often ascribe to right-wing populism; a corrupt glass of "élites" in government do nothing about the homeless and/or petty criminals who, in turn, offer their political support to the corrupt in government. And, as always, it's "the people" are left holding the bag. The idea that these are problems that have existed for more or less the sum total of human civilization doesn't factor into it. Nor does the idea that the actions, and attitudes, may play a part. The answers to these problems are simple to implement and inexpensive to fund. Just ask them.

Pick Any One

I'm not a romantic. So I'm not in the target demographic for romantic comedies. So the Netflix movie Choose Love was not at all on my radar until NPR's Linda Holmes wrote an article about it. As I understand it, the idea here is that the viewer can determine which of three men the female lead, Cami, ends up with. As Ms. Holmes describes it, she made a dozen or so choices over the course of the movie, and those choices were dutifully reflected in the on-screen actions of the characters, even down to Cami's final choice of partner.

Ms. Holmes hated it. I could go into the reasons why, but I think that all of them were really beside her main point: that she was aggrieved on behalf of actors and writers, due to the fact that the "bespoke, AI-generated movie that I order up like a pizza" would put them out of work were the model to take off. In other words, this specific potential change to the motion picture and television landscape comes with consequences she's not in favor of, and so the products of that change are bad.

While I understand the sentiment, I don't know that it's a workable way to speak about these things. Lots of technological advances have come with the trade-off of allowing the public at large to lead materially better lives; at the cost of rendering the skills that people put years into making obsolete. Which, in turn consigns those people to low-wage jobs or long-term unemployment. And there is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with saying that we should slow, or even halt, the development of certain technologies for that reason. (Not, mind you, that anyone would listen.) But that's a different argument than saying that the products of those technologies are of lesser quality.

Technology marches on, mainly because it offers benefits to enough people that the people who end up paying the price for those benefits are seen as acceptable prices to pay. It's possible that we'll arrive at a point where that's no longer true, and the adoption of certain tech stalls, not because the technology isn't useful, but because the social cost seems too high. I don't know if that's what society will say to itself about such technology. But I think that we'll all be better off if it does.

The Final Link

I went to a social event today, and I was talking to a woman who had spent some time in my hometown of Chicago. One of the things that she found unsettling about the city was the corruption. She related a story of seeing a police cruiser run a stop sign and strike another vehicle; the officer driving the cruiser  confronted the other driver, telling her that she was at fault in the collision.

My interlocutor noted that she felt that she should step in and defend the woman, since she'd witnessed the incident, and the officer was clearly at fault. But she was at home for all of this, and she realized that if she intervened, and the officer understood that she lived there, he would know where to direct retaliation.

"You saw yourself as the last link in the chain," I said. "You could be there to defend her, but if the police came after you, no one would be there to defend you." And I think this outlook on the world, that looking out for others can lead to consequences that one will be left alone to deal with, is common in the United States, even though many people understand that it leads to people feeling isolated, unsupported and, perhaps most importantly, unwilling to take risks on one another's behalf.

This "every man for themselves" mentality figured into a surprising number of the conversations I had with people there, because they centered on the need for collective action to deal with this or that social problem. And it's difficult to rally people to collective action when the majority of their attention is consumed with the individual actions they have to take to look after themselves and those they care about.

It's a thorny problem, given the general difficulties of aligning the incentives of large numbers of people. (And it's made even more thorny by a general reluctance to make the first move.) But it something that I expect we'll have to solve, since I think that if circumstances have to solve it for us, it's going to be very, very messy.

Lockup

I was in the Target store in Redmond, not too long ago, and encountered this:

The other side of the aisle was more of the same.

I will admit that it wouldn't have occurred to me that Redmond would have a shoplifting problem that made it worthwhile to lock up all of the laundry detergent. But, interestingly, it seems to be going around; there are more than a few stores scattered around the area that have these sorts of locked cases for various items; like the Fred Meyer where all of the Lego sets are in similar cabinets. But it's not a universal concern, apparently. The Target closest to where I live doesn't lock up the detergent, and the closest Fred Meyer doesn't keep the Lego kits under guard. It seems to be a more localized phenomenon than I would have thought.

What's most interesting about the thefts of laundry detergents, is that this has been a thing for more than a decade now; a quick Google search turned up articles dating back to 2010 on the topic. For all that it's heavy and bulky to carry around, it's needed by a lot of people, fairly expensive and immune to spoilage, which makes it useful as a store of value. As I understand it, the thieves will either sell the detergent for cash, or trade it directly for other items that they need; nothing more convenient has come along in the interim.