Proxy Fight

One James Easton has been arrested in connection with the shootings of three young Palestinian men who were headed to one of their grandparents' home in Vermont for dinner.

According to Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad, "in this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime." I, however, would beg to differ. It's not particularly difficult to look at what went down, and conclude that Mr. Easton (presuming that he is, in fact, the assailant) was not motivated by hatred of Palestinians. Given the frequency with which Americans turn to violence as a means of dealing with things, the shooting can just as easily be interpreted as a show of support of Israel. After all, if Israel doesn't do a particularly good job of making the distinction between Palestinian resistance and Hamas terrorism, why should the American public necessarily be any better about it? And while vigilante action is sometimes viewed as a hate crime (especially in cases where there is a difference in race), it isn't always, and there's nothing inherently hateful about people taking the law (or their own morality) into their own hands.

As much as both Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians see themselves as the victims of hate crimes, it may be more accurate to say that this is simply how a certain subset of the American public takes sides in this conflict. It's simply another problem where violence is seen as a solution.

Storytime

Last week, I was visiting family in the rural South, and this gave me the opportunity to talk to people that I wouldn't otherwise rub shoulders with, like some of my family members' neighbors. What's interesting about conversations like that is understanding a perspective on the world that one might not otherwise be exposed to. Even short talks can give perspective.

While we were talking to one of the neighbors, the subject of a local store came up. (Judging from the number of people who'd mentioned this particular place in conversation, it must have been fairly popular.) Apparently, it had recently been sold to new owners, apparently Indian immigrants. The money for the sale had, we were told, come from "the government." And not in the form of a small business loan, or anything like that. The neighbor told us, with all of the conviction of someone who'd read the paperwork themselves, that "the government" simply gave money, no strings attached and no questions asked, to Indian immigrants, specifically so that they could purchase local businesses that were for sale, and thus displace the locals from the area business community.

The line of reasoning appeared to go something like this: Since everyone in India is poor, immigrants to the United States simply couldn't have enough money to buy a business. And people in Washington, D.C. don't care about what happens to rural Americans. 2 + 2 = 4.

I didn't bother to mention that I was dubious about the math. The neighbor clearly saw their logic as not only impeccable, but self-evident, and I hadn't spent more hours than I would have liked getting all the way down there just to argue with the locals. Besides, in the end, the logic, faulty or not, wasn't relevant. It was simply an article of faith that explained a change in the local environment that didn't make sense otherwise. It speaks to an emotional reality whose power is unconnected from a broader picture of the world.

In that reality can be seen the tripartite structure of Populism that's become associated with the American Right; there are "The People," the corrupt "Élite" and those Others who have something they shouldn't, because the Élites gave them what rightfully belonged to the People. It's an explanation of why what Is differs from what the person understands Ought to be. And it offers up villains locally and at a remove.

It's an expression of suffering and anxiety that is ignored because the story that it's attached to is too ridiculous to be paid any attention to. And so, when someone does pay attention, when they do take the time to notice how people are feeling, they earn a loyalty seems difficult to fathom.

MWWS: The Game

Not long ago, I was in a Barnes and Noble, and noticed that they had three different versions of the Unsolved Case Files game. These are games in which the players attempt to solve fictional crimes by examining the evidence given. It can be seen as a variation on How to Host a Murder and similar games; except that in this case, the players are not themselves the suspects.

The company makes a number of different cases, including one of a rabbit so that young children can try their hands at detective work, but the three games in the photo above are the only ones I've ever seen offered at physical retail outlets. The cases with male and/or non-White "victims"? Nowhere to be seen.

This creates an interesting variation on "Missing White Woman Syndrome," as it's often called. But it also raises an interesting, but not new, question: Whose preferences are driving this? There's no reason why Barnes and Noble, or Target, or a holiday pop-up store couldn't put the Buddy Edmunds or Sandra Ivey cases on sale. But I've never seen them offered in a physical store, and I've started looking to see what cases are offered when I come across these. So why are they apparently only available from online retailers? Are the retail buyers acting on their own preferences? Or are they presuming that they understand that the target audience would mainly be interested only in these three cases?

The opening to pass the buck that this creates is one of the things that stands in the way of further progress on "race relations" in the United States. No-one really has to take any responsibility for anything. Companies can blame the public at large, and the public at large can blame companies.

To be sure, this is a minor concern. Given limited shelf space, companies have to make choices as to what products they're going to sell, if there are a number of them in a line. And it's not like people are exactly clamoring to have the other cases made more widely available. It's just one of those things that caught my attention.

In A Barrel

I just came back from doing a little traveling, and flew to Seattle from Chicago O'Hare airport. And was reminded of something that first occurred to me in 2004, when I was flying out of London Heathrow. Namely that airport security is, in a lot of cases, set up to protect airplanes and, to a lesser degree, airports, more that it is to protect travelers. And, in so dong, shows that terrorism might not be the threat that it's been made out to be.

Whether it was due to the layout of the terminal, to renovation or something else, I don't know, but the lines for the security checkpoint wound up cramming a lot of people into a fairly small space.

The line continues around the corner to the right...

The point behind terrorism is to bring about some sort political change. Violence is a means to that end. Accordingly, it doesn't necessarily matter what sort of violence is used. If the goal is to protect people from acts of mass violence, packing them into a relatively enclosed space like this seems to defeat that purpose, because anyone who can show that they have a boarding pass can get to this point in the airport. The security checkpoint, the destination of these snaking lines, is out of the frame to the right. So it wouldn't be particularly difficult for someone to enter this space with the bomb or a gun.

So the fact that no-one has chosen to attack the security lines of airports can be said to demonstrate that terrorism is pretty difficult to pull off in many societies where the tools of terrorism are decently controlled, and/or that there isn't a lot of motivation for such attacks.

Because while the security apparatus of the airport would prevent a person with a gun or a bomb from getting to one of the gates or on to an aircraft, this setup does little to protect the people actually flying. This is morbid, but a person with a weapon, standing at the point where I took this picture, would be capable of doing a lot of damage, pretty quickly. A few people could coordinate even more mayhem.

And I suspect that I'm not the first person that this has occurred to. It's possible that for most airports, there simply isn't anything to be done about it; the design and layouts of spaces that pre-date the War on Terror weren't put in place with this consideration in mind. So I'm not contending that this is proof that The Powers That Be are prosecuting the War on Terror in bad faith, or that it's indicative of deliberate Security Theater. But this sort of bottleneck, one that places a lot of people into a small area, seems counterproductive if the goal is to protect those people, rather than the travel infrastructure.

6 o'clock Oracle

I've been spending time with my mother recently, and that means doing something that I haven't done in some time; watching network television news. My general gripe with the news is that it engages in what seems like a lot of fearmongering, mainly in the service of driving viewership; mildly frightening stories draw in viewers.

But it also gives at least some of those viewers the idea that the world is in terrible shape. My mother's view of the world is fairly dark, as it's beset by violent crime, warfare and ecological disasters on all sides. In short, she no longer sees the stories that are presented on the news as a curated view of local and world events, but as an accurate reflection of the current state of things. Even though, on an intellectual level, she understands that television newscasts are not capable of presenting the whole of current world events with any level of completeness or nuance.

I doubt that the news has enough of an influence on people for the generally negative tone to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, mainly because the actions that people take in response to what they learn from news media rarely rises to the level of something that would catch the interest of the news media. But it can be hard to shake the feeling that the worse people feel about the world, the less likely they are to take actions that will make it feel better to them. 

Missed A Step

I was watching television with my mother when a story came on about car thieves using "relay attacks" to steal cars. The basic idea is fairly simple; an antenna is used to amplify and relay the signal from a key fob inside a a home. A receiver is brought close to the car; since the car is receiving a signal, it believes the key fob is close, and allows the car to be entered and started. The story was a stereotypically dramatic one, including a woman calling for more police presence in her neighborhood to combat the problem.

Of course, my mother was worried. Her car, after all, has a keyless entry and ignition system.

But things weren't as simple, or as dangerous, as presented. Mom is a tea drinker, so I asked her if she had a tea tin in the house. She did. So I used it to demonstrate that with her key fob closed inside the tin, the signal was blocked, and the car couldn't be opened or started, even with the tin sitting on, or in, the car. Problem solved.

The idea of a Faraday cage is an old one. Faraday bags and boxes are readily available. Not to mention tea tins. Accordingly, there was no reason to present this as a clear and present danger. But the story as presented seemed calibrated for the scare factor. Not all journalism should be, or can be, solutions journalism. But when the solution is simple, there seems to be no real reason to omit it.

Touched Up

I am somewhat forgetful. Although that's not really the correct way to put it. It's likely more accurate to say that I can be inattentive, and thus liable to forget things that I would otherwise remember. It's a trait that I've lived with for  I am also, it turns out, something of a perfectionist, and that makes it difficult to leave well enough alone.

These paired traits prompt me, from time to time, to go back through Nobody In Particular and see what I have written in the past. And when I find errors, to update them. Even to the point of deleting posts.

Other than the fact that I'm bad about proofreading posts before I publish them, this exercise has shown me that I have a tendency to be verbose when I have the time to really work on a post. That was part of the rationale behind The Short Form; to not pontificate at length about a topic that I'd put enough thought into that I was able to distill it down into a sentence or two. Especially when all that I would otherwise be doing is complaining about something or someone. (Despite the fact that I'm not all that happy with the generally negative tone of Nobody In Particular, I know myself well enough to realize that it's not going anywhere; in part due to my personality, and in part due to the media that I take in.)

While posts that are condensed down enough to qualify for The Short Form strike me as more sophisticated, my longer (or over-long) posts strike me as being more thoughtful. I suspect that this is due to seeing long-form journalism as being less click-bait than short-form journalism, which sometimes seems to be little more than factoids wrapped in bits of superfluous verbiage. In any event, since this exercise has yet to make me into an amazing writer, I'm going to keep going back and making long after the fact edits to posts, and catching glimpses of the self gone by in so doing.

Milestone

The United States is a strange place. I'm not particularly well-traveled, but overseas trips would routinely feature requests for explanation of this or that phenomenon that had come to be associated with America. Generally for the worse. (When a conversation opens with "what's up with" or "why on Earth does," it's pretty evident that one's going to have some explaining to do.) The great thing about answering these sorts of questions was that they forced me to understand what I thought about the topic. And I suspect that it's the best thing about this blog.

Because the United States isn't necessarily any less weird from the inside than it is from the outside. It's simply somewhat more explicable, due to some insider knowledge. But only somewhat.

For instance, I still don't understand the media's habit of portraying Donald Trump as having done something newsworthy every time he's simply being a jackass to people he (and by extension, his voter base) doesn't like. He referred to people as "living like vermin" in the United States, and pledged to prosecute members of Joe Biden's family and persecute people not authorized to be in the country? Why is this at all noteworthy? Democrats responding with outrage? You don't say... This story has become so shopworn that you could write it in advance. Yet it always seems to make it into the headlines. I have no idea why.

While we're on the topic, I don't claim to have any understanding of many Americans' seeming addiction to "outrage." I'm not going to claim to have been raised a Stoic, but I was always taught that public emotionality simply wasn't useful in reaching a goal. People on both sides of the Israel-Hamas conflict have been expressing outrage over everything from the actions of the side they disfavor to the fact that other people favor that side, and it hasn't moved the needle. The warring parties have other things to worry about than dueling protest marches in the United States, and the United States government had already decided whose side their on. So I'm never clear on what people hope to accomplish, other than being seen to be outraged.

This is the three-thousandth post here at Nobody In Particular, and for all that I've turned these things over in my head, and spend time typing them out for this site, I don't feel that I have any greater understanding of these (and several other) aspects of the modern United States. And, honestly, I doubt I'll gain any more insight going forward. But the intellectual exercise of "thinking out loud" about them may at least help me understand, and hopefully explain, other parts of this odd patchwork of a nation.

Save For Later

In the wake of Ohio voters deciding that they wanted abortion rights to be part of their state constitution, Republican Senator from Ohio J.D. Vance took to X to lay out five insights that he felt explained the outcome. Part of insight Four is that the pro-life side needs to do a better job of persuading people to see things (and then vote) their way.

And I'm not just talking about 30 second TV commercials--I'm talking about sustained, years long efforts to show the heart of the pro life movement.

Fair enough. This is, after all, one of the facets of participatory government; enough of the participants have to be persuaded to structure things in the way one would like. But then, as part of his conclusion, Senator Vance notes:

There is something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children.

So... about that "much better job of persuasion." When was that going to start, exactly? Because as near as I can tell, "the heart of the pro life movement" is currently about looking down on people who have concluded that being pregnant is bad enough for them in one way or another that they feel the need to do something about it.

This strikes me as one of the problems with the way people talk politics in the United States; they make public statements, with the presumption that they people they're making statements about are somehow incapable of encountering or understanding those statements. Why would anyone want to give someone who thinks of them as having been tricked by sociopaths into being a child murderer the time of day? Especially when those supposed sociopaths are working for something that the person thinks is in their best interests?

Senator Vance is far from the only person who tends to see the present as being a time to insult the people that they claim they need to persuade of something in the future. The question becomes: When does this future actually arrive? Yes, Senator Vance was speaking to fellow supporters of the pro-life movement. But did he really need to remind them that they consider pro-choice messaging lies, obfuscation and propaganda? Or that they consider the practice of abortion to be morally bankrupt? Who in the pro-life movement hadn't received that particular memo yet?

Persuasion relies on the person one is attempting to persuade seeing one as being on their side, or at least understanding their problems and interests. Public statements portraying people as dupes of the dangerously mentally ill work directly against that, because it betrays a lack of trust. I use this analogy a lot, but I'll come back to it because I think it's apt. When I pull up to a automobile showroom, the salesperson who greets me may very well be convinced that I'm driving the wrong car. But their first move is almost always to complement me on my current automobile, and from there, find out what needs it doesn't meet that a car they can sell me will fulfill. If they think poorly of me for my previous choice, the last thing that they're going to do is say so anywhere that I'm going to find out about it. Good salespeople don't disparage their customers where their customers can hear them.

American political discourse is often too suffused with moral certainty for its own good. Morality doesn't care what someone's interests or needs are; it simply demands obedience. No need for persuasion. It's part of the reason why Republican lawmakers in the Ohio legislature attempted to change the threshold for ballot measures to succeed. But moral stands also sanction looking down on others; after all, they have to be unintelligent, gullible or immoral to have done wrong, correct? So why have any respect for them?

Because persuasion requires seeing the other person as having a right to do as they are doing; it requires seeing that persuasion carries the burden of proof. It's burden that a lot of political speech in the United States simply refuses to shoulder. Because "sustained, years long efforts?" There will be time for that tomorrow. Today is best spent reminding the righteous of their superiority, lest they forget.

Emformation

The problem that I often have with media is that I look to it for information, not emotion. "Here's something to know about the world," is different from "here's how you should feel about this aspect of the world." Of course, given that, I should have known better than to read "Behind the Curtain: What AI architects fear most (in 2024)" when I saw it on Axios this morning. I suspected what was coming; vague warnings of an immanent threat, and nothing in the way of workable solutions that the reader could implement.

Actually, let me take part of that back. I deliberately read articles that I suspect will engage in fearmongering because I do find them somewhat informative; they tell me about what media outlets, and their sources, understand their incentives to be. And Axios was pretty clear about their incentives in this article. The conclusion of the column is a mix of anxiety triggers and flattery, directed at the reader. It's open about the idea that "realize a new problem is coming," while subtly insinuating that a large part of that problem will be the credulity of other people. Axios readers, it hints, are alert and know when someone is trying to trick them... even if "one leading AI architect" finds that they themselves "no longer can distinguish fake from real."

That "one leading AI architect" is one of five people that the Axios journalists spoke to for the column. The others were a "a former top national security official," who warned that Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin was up to no good, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who claimed that open-source "AI" models couldn't be trusted because only closed models were capable of self-policing, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, whose main contribution was a platitude concerning industry collaboration, and finally, "a senior White House official," who sounded the alarm over disinformation, fraud and cyberattacks.

The obligatory mention of the "sick use" of AI for revenge pornography was apparently thrown in by the authors of the column themselves. Maybe they couldn't find anyone else willing to invoke that particular hobgoblin.

In any event, no-one was saying anything particularly noteworthy or sensitive. So why were three of the column's five sources anonymous? The whole of the AI industry refuses to acknowledge advances in text, image or video generation? No one in the national security establishment would put their name to speculation that Vladimir Putin is looking to sow discord in the United States? In the entirely of the Biden Administration, there wasn't a single person authorized to say publicly that generative "artificial intelligence" could potentially make it easier for people to mislead people or mount cyberattacks? Sure, they likely wouldn't have been names that I, or most other members of the general public, would recognize. But at least then there would have been an avenue for some follow-up via Internet search.

To be sure, articles like this also give me insight into a another group of interest: the readership of these publications. This goes beyond Dahlia Lithwick's observation to Stephen Dubner that  "If you scare people’s face off, they will click." The reason why the commodification of people's anxieties works is that people don't see news coverage as playing on their fears. Instead, they see it as providing valuable information... that just happens to coincide with their existing anxieties, which are mainly about other people. In other words, the world is a terrible place because of the unintelligent, credulous or unethical among the populace (a group of people that, of course, excludes the reader), and there are people who seek out items that remind them of that, because they are also reminders of their own exceptionalism. To be sure, I don't know how large a group of people this is, in the end. All things considered, it doesn't have to be very large to keep any one publication afloat, so I'm going to go out on something of a limb and conjecture that it's not a majority. It's just large enough to keep the wheel spinning. Which, really, is all the wheel needs.

Felling The Pull

"The Israel-Hamas war is creating tensions at work" is a reasonable enough headline. It gets to the point, and deals with the subject at hand. Well, actually, part of the subject at hand. It might not be readily apparent, but the current fighting in Gaza is not the only conflict going on in the world. Humanity has always been something of a combative bunch, and there are fights going on across the globe. What differentiates the current fighting between Israel and Hamas from the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Somali Civil War or the border dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan is twofold, a) the current level of attention paid to it by media outlets here in the United States (and elsewhere for that matter) and b) the lack of agreement on who is the aggressor and who is the victim. Although there is a third point, that lines up with both a) and b), both sides have large domestic constituencies who are making the case that they are in the right, and are deserving of support from both the public and the government of the United States. In the section of the Puget Sound region where I reside, backers of Israel have been making their case. Signs and flyers calling on people to call politicians on behalf of Israel or to donate money to Israeli causes or organizations have popped up in several areas. If there are people doing the same thing for the Palestinians, I haven't come across any yet. (Although it's possible that I've simply been unable to pick them out of the campaign signs as easily.)

Backers of both sides feel that each party has the right to be acknowledged as the single wronged party in this case, and for their own feelings as to who is correct to be validated by those around them. This isn't something that is unique to this particular conflict. What makes it different is the fact that the fighting between Israel and Hamas is happening overseas. There are any number of domestic disagreements that cause workplace (and other place) tensions, because the backers of various sides feel a sense of entitlement to the support of people who would rather be doing something else. It's one of the main drivers of what is now called "cancel culture," which goes way back in American history. The tendency is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon, but if it is going to be addressed, it's likely better to deal with the phenomenon as a whole, rather than speaking of each of its discreet incarnations as if they were unrelated to one another.

No Problem

What gets you re-elected and what solves problems are sometimes like oil and water. And solving problems makes people mad. Nobody wants to make anybody mad because that's not how you get re-elected. But were going to have to do that if were going to fix this.

Senator Claire McCaskill. February 2011.

I was reminded of this statement from Senator McCaskill while I was on my way to drop off a ballot yesterday. While driving, I came across this campaign sign:

I don't live in Bothell at this point (although I used to), so I hadn't really been following the city council race there. But Bothell has been the site for a good amount of apartment construction. After all, it's how one creates housing for a number of people in a relatively small footprint. Given that even a relatively small single family residence can run more than $800,000 in the vicinity, for many people, apartments are going to be their only way into to living in the area.

The greater Seattle area has a homelessness problem in large part to the relative dearth of a apartment, and other multiple-family, homes in the area, which has resulted in very high housing costs. But for the people who own the housing stock, that's not their problem. The lowering of their valuations that would result from increases in housing availability is their problem. And that's where people like Mr. Swanson come into the picture.

The "apartment explosion" is barely making a dent in the local supply of housing, given the number of people who want to live in the area. And so while I won't solve the lack of housing that's driving the high homelessness numbers, it can at least reduce the upward pressure on prices. Really solving the problem would require a lot more apartments, condominiums and townhouses than are currently under construction. But for local homeowners, at least when I've been present for the conversations, the answer to homelessness is basically to force people who live on local streets to live on distant streets, so that they'll be in someone else's cities and neighborhoods.

Fixing the housing supply in the Puget Sound area is going to make people mad. An adequate supply of housing, will, more or less by definition, lower housing prices locally. And people don't like solutions to problems that come with costs for them. Especially not when there's always someone who will run for office on a platform that says that it's only other people who should pay costs.

Something For Everyone

Recently, Elon Musk met with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Rishi Sunak. And, being Elon Musk, said some things that drew people's attention. I'm going to briefly touch on a couple of them.

"We are seeing the most disruptive force in history here," Mr. Musk said, before speculating: "There will come a point where no job is needed - you can have a job if you want one for personal satisfaction but AI will do everything.

"It's both good and bad - one of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life."

Most people picked up on the "but AI will do everything" part, and, no surprise, that tended to cause worry.

Musk had a potential answer for that problem during Thursday's conversation with Sunak. "We won't have universal basic income, we'll have universal high income," he argued. "So, in some sense it will be some sort of level up, or an equalizer, because everyone will have access to this [technology]."

And that's the second thing that I wanted to touch on. What Mr. Musk is saying here is that new technology will render human labor obsolete; but that won't be a problem, because it will also create post-scarcity.

I'm dubious about the first part of that formulation, and have no belief at all in the second. Generative "Artificial Intelligence" will render a number of jobs more efficient than they are today. In practice, given the way businesses operate, this means that it will render some number of them obsolete. Sure, it might create a number of new jobs, but there are unlikely to be anywhere near as many prompt engineers as there were formerly, writers, technical support specialists and other roles where a sophisticated auto-complete function can manage the workload. But despite the broad portfolio of things that Generative "A.I." can handle, it can't do everything, given that, by definition, Large Language Models don't create novel solutions when there's already an answer in the database, and don't understand the world in a way that allows them to understand when they've auto-completed their way into erroneous statements. Accordingly, the very natures of the systems involved leave gaps that will have to be closed by people. And this leaves open the idea that new jobs could come along that only humans could do. Artificial General Intelligence, code that can handle any cognitive task a human could perform as well (or better) than a human could perform it likely could, on the other hand, would carry a substantial risk of rendering human labor obsolete; because it wouldn't leave any gaps that it would be unable to close, outside of simply preferences.

But decades of predictions notwithstanding, Artificial General Intelligence doesn't appear to be on the horizon, and there's no current indication, that I'm aware of, that Generative A.I. is bringing it closer. I admit to not being an expert on the topic, but given that AGI would render GAI completely obsolete in short order, one would expect that were it close, people would be talking about it.

The subject of post-scarcity is a little different, because it's not really about how much stuff there is to go around. Not in the end, anyway. What creates a post-scarcity society is the fact that any given individual has the ability to access any resources they need to sustain themselves, without needing to trade for them; people aren't directly in a position of needing to rely on other people to give them necessary resources. It doesn't matter if there's enough food to feed a group of people if that food is in the hands of someone who a) has an enforceable property right over it and b) isn't interested in parting with it. Ubiquitous access to automation and artificial intelligence isn't going to suddenly gift people with access to the raw materials needed to guarantee themselves access to food, clothing and shelter, nor would it suddenly make private ownership of property obsolete in places like the United States.

And this leaves a number of people with a gnawing anxiety that advances in automation, and an expansion of the types and numbers of jobs that will be automatable, will leave them without access to resources, and nothing of sufficient subjective value to trade for them. And Mr. Musk's utopian vision is not going to be enough to assuage those concerns.

And Effect

While there is a lot of chatter about how wrong economists (as if economists were some sort of collective intelligence) were about recession predictions, there are a fair number of people who believe that the United States is, in fact, in a recession. And they could be right; after all, the beginning of a recession is always declared after the fact.

And one could be forgiven for thinking that a recession is still in the cards for the near future, given the steady trickle of news about layoffs in company after company. I've spent a decent amount of time on LinkedIn recently, and my feed has been something of a downer recently. There have been a number of notifications of layoffs (and even company closings) recently. To be sure, there have also been people celebrating their new roles, but those are individual events, and they don't manage to balance the news of groups of people losing their jobs. I wondered what this would mean for confidence numbers, so I hopped over to The Conference Board's website, and, sure enough, Consumer Confidence in the United States is down by 1.7 points.

I'm curious as to the degree that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because sometimes, there's no better way to be ahead of an event than to be part of its cause. One company's employees are another company's customers, and each round of layoffs makes other companies that rely on the public's discretionary income think that maybe they should start cutting production, costs or both, in order to not be caught flat-footed when demand takes a dive. And the snowball simply grows from there.

To be fair to businesses, they're simply following their incentives. After all, they have a responsibility to look after their stockholders' investments, and no real responsibility to the public at large, or their employees; at least not in the same way. And positioning themselves for a recession that doesn't come is considered more responsible than not being prepared for one that does. And labor costs are seen as something to be done away with, rather than a necessity for the economy at large to function.

It's also worth pointing out that government has it's own part to play in all of this. The United States government, being unwilling to tailor either spending or taxation to prevailing economic conditions, is unable to respond to those conditions without creating more problems down the road. Although, given that the United States does have a representative government, most of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of various constituencies, especially those that have the wherewithal to fund campaigns, and those that prefer to be the passive audiences of those campaigns, rather than seeking out information themselves. (Representative governments punish the non-participatory, regardless of the reasons for non-participation.)

In any event, there seem to be a lot of forces conspiring to ensure that a recession occurs late, rather than never. The business community is simply more open about its plans.