Normality

J. D. Vance, Senator and running mate to Donald Trump, is having his life flash before everyone's eyes as Democrats and their allies seek to use his selection for potential Vice President to cast Mr Trump as Someone You Don't Want in the White House. Which means that every dumb thing he's said, or says. is being trotted out. Along with a few things he didn't actually say. Or at least, not in as many words.

The ellipsis ("...") in that screenshot is doing a lot of work, and not all it it above board, because generally, they're used for a couple of things. While they can indicate a pause or period of silence, a common usage in media of various sorts, when enclosed in brackets, like this [...], they indicate that part of the text has been deliberately omitted. And sometimes, that context is important.

Because not all of Senator Vance's critics are on the Left. White supremacist, and acquaintance of Kanye West, Nick Fuentes is also a critic, mainly because Mrs. Vance is Indian, rather than European. His complaint? “Who is this guy, really? Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”

This creates something of a quandary for the Senator. His remarks on the childless, for all that they've stirred up a teapot tempest, are basically meaningless. Giving parents greater rights than non-parents would involve an Amendment to the Constitution, and no rational person expects that to happen in the foreseeable future. And not even the highly conservative Roberts court is likely to be on board with something that directly contravenes the Equal Protection doctrine, regardless of the advantage it would create for Republican candidates for office. But this is likely going to be a close election. Trump/Vance can't afford to alienate any potential Republican voters. Not even the White Identity crowd.

And so the Senator chose his words carefully.

Look, I love my wife so much. I love her because she’s who she is. Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused — attacked — by some white supremacists over that. But I just — I love Usha. She’s such a good mom, she’s such a brilliant lawyer and I’m so proud of her.

Cutting out the center of this changes the tenor of his statement, and creates the "weirdness" that Mr. Shroff is responding so, even though it's of his own creation. But such is campaign season.

Skipping Out

LinkedIn News presented a story on the Pew report "The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children" today, under the headline "More Americans skip having kids." I read the entire report, and the LinkedIn headline didn't strike me as the primary take-away from the document, mainly because it doesn't actually compare parents and non-parents. It doesn't ask people in general if they want to have children, and why (not); while it inquires about expectations, the focus is on asking the childless why they are (or expect to remain) childless. And it doesn't track changes over time; comparing the reasons why adults 50 and over didn't have children to the reasons why adults under fifty don't plan to is not the same as tracking the changes in those reasons over time; the report doesn't have the 30+ years of data needed to tell us if those people who are now 65 years old thought the same was that current 35 year olds do.

But the headline was driving "engagement." People were making comments about how children are simply too expensive for everyone who wants to be a parent to become one, or how this is simply one more data point that proves that Americans are becoming more and more selfish. While it may be true that children have become, as one economist put it: "an expensive luxury good," and people have become more cognizant of the opportunity costs of having children in a world where there are so many possible things to experience, it's hard to draw definitive conclusions from expectations, especially when the relationship between people's past expectations and their current reality is not part of the survey design.

And if, as demographer Alison Gemmill points out to The Washington Post, “Historically, one of the reasons why we think the U.S. has had such a high fertility rate compared to other countries was related to unintended and unwanted pregnancies that resulted in births,” maybe "skip[ping] having kids" is the wrong way to look at things altogether.

Ride Free

LinkedIn News posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article on the increase in uninsured drivers, and how that is raising rates for remaining ratepayers. The demands for a crackdown on the uninsured were swift. Hoping to make the case that the situation wasn't as cut and dried as it may have seemed, one person offered up the following scenario:

A mom is raising two kids and inflation has been insane. Mom is educated, works hard and wants her kids to be able to enjoy life. Mom has cut back on everything SHE possibly can. She traded her car in for the least expensive car possible, she hasn't bought herself anything in ages. She has even taken on a side gig to supplement her income, but she just can't make "ends meat". So when it comes down to either being able to put food on the table or paying the high insurance bill, she lets one month pass, and then it comes the next month and it is double. There is no way she can afford that either. And then it lapses.

Now I am not an idiot - that is not every story by far. There are many idiots out there who we (including myself) are paying for, but not everyone is in that category. There are many families truly struggling. It isn't so black and white.

As an aside, part of me is curious why people always trot out impoverished mothers for these sorts of stories. There's nothing about this that precludes the hardworking parent being a father. But I suspect that the expectation that men should be able to pay their expenses, regardless of the circumstances, was at play here. I also thought that it was interesting that other people who weren't paying for their insurance were "idiots." Maybe it was simply shorter than "freeloaders."

In any event, intentionally or not, the commenter was making a case for an informal safety net, one that allowed the hypothetical cash-strapped mother to continue driving, in the absence of a formal safety net that had reached the conclusion that person mobility should be treated as a right, rather than a privilege. Now, given the fact that many people are feeling the pinch of prices being higher than they remember from the time immediately prior to the SARS-2-CoV pandemic, it's a safe bet that formally expanding government programs to pay the auto insurance premiums for low-income people is a non-starter. Especially given the fact that having access to a motor vehicle is widely regarded as a privilege.

People in the United States tend to be sensitive to costs, despite living in the largest economy in the world and enjoying a very high per-capita GNP, because wealth inequality tends to make people highly (and some might say overly) aware of their own relative poverty and precarity. It's part of what made Donald Trump President of the United States. Had more people been convinced that the broader economy was working for them, he wouldn't even have a viable candidate. And while many people on the political Left seem to be unable to wrap their brains around the appeal of Trumpist authoritarianism, the simple fact of the matter is that there is a widespread understanding that democracy fails to deliver the goods because it allows for too much corruption and flat-out wrongdoing within government. And too much looking the other way, when people do things that benefit themselves at public expense.

The debate over uninsured drivers, and which ones ma or may not be deserving of sympathy and understanding, is a microcosm of that broader sentiment. The public's impression of how good the economy is, and what kind of job that governments are doing is not driven by facts, but by feelings. The Wall Street Journal understands this; framing the article as uninsured motorists getting a free ride at other's expense may as well have been deliberately calibrated to remind people of their own feelings of being financially straited.

I'm terrible at predicting the future, and so I've stopped trying. But it doesn't require a crystal ball to understand that unless the next administration takes concrete steps to improve the public's sense of well-being, resentments are going to continue to grow.

Plot the Vote

When Vivek Ramaswamy was supposedly running for the Republican nomination for President, he floated the idea that the voting age be raised to 25 or thereabouts (I don't care enough at this moment to go look it up), with certain exceptions for military or "first responder" service. While people on the American Left were quick to jump on this as some sort of embrace of Fascism (pointing to the fact that only current and former soldiers could vote in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers) it was much more easily explained as a partisan plan to remove a group of consistently Democratic voters from eligibility, since the exceptions that the plan allowed just happened to be groups that tended to lean more Republican.

Republican Senator and Vice-Presidential pick J. D. Vance has similarly drawn fire for comments he'd made previously where he said that parents should basically have more political rights than non-parents. But again, this is another nakedly partisan suggestion. While plenty of parents are left-leaning, allowing parents to effectively have more votes and greater access to political office would mean a political advantage for Republicans, since people old enough to vote, but younger than the age at which people tend to start having children tend to be more liberal, and those people who do marry and start having children young are more likely to have Conservative mindsets. Again, nothing new here.

I'm not sure why these sorts of proposals aren't treated as the alternatives or supplements to practices like gerrymandering that they are. Especially considering that few people on the Republican side of things are going to see these as indicative of some sort of prejudicial thought process (or think it inappropriate, even if they do). As the American electorate ossifies into partisan camps that become an increasingly central aspect of voters' identities, finding new voters becomes more and more difficult. And so looking for ways to suppress turnout on the other side becomes the new go-to tactic for people looking to prove their partisan bona fides to the party faithful and activist class.

Distant Third

Given the recent news cycles concerning Donald Trump, President Biden and the general chaos that surrounds the Presidential election in November, one could be forgiven for allowing Robert Kennedy Jr. to slip one's mind. I certainly had until I came across this sign.

Depending on how many votes he ends up garnering in swing states, and whether that number is larger than the margin of victory, if his involvement in this campaign cycle is remembered at all, it will be as a spoiler by supporters of whichever major party candidate comes in second. Were he not a member of the Kennedy family, he'd would have garnered pretty much zero attention. The Libertarian Party and the Green Party, among others, are also attempting to contest the race for the White House. Most people don't even know that they've involved, let alone who their candidates are.

Being a "third" option for President of the United States may be a way to attempt to appeal to the disaffection that a segment of the electorate expresses every four years, but it's not a very useful thing overall. And I say this as someone who has voted for what is likely more than my share of "third party" candidates. These smaller parties would do better, I think, starting small and working towards the top. People understand the President to have immense power, but that's at least partially an illusion; Congress is where the action is. And a President who has little support in Congress won't be able to get much done.

But a mayoralty here, a state senator there and a county executive or two thrown in doesn't seem important enough for people to actually pursue; not when they're busy attempting to make a statement about something or other. For all that the Democrats and the Republicans come across as bickering children at times, they do actually have to do at least some of the work that's required to govern in the places where they hold offices. The smaller parties don't have that responsibility. And that may be why they don't have the backing to so much as influence the broader debate.

Stand In Line

With President Biden's announcement that he's not going to accept the Democratic nomination for President, and his endorsement of Vice President Harris, there's something of a debate over whether the party should simply go with her, or have an open convention and allow other people to make the case that they should be the nominee.

There are plenty of good arguments on both sides of that decision. The argument that I'm hoping doesn't come up is the idea that it's Vice President Harris's "turn" to have a chance at the chief executive role. The idea that Hillary Clinton was owed a shot at the presidency resulted in the Party Unity My Ass movement, otherwise known as PUMA (later taken to stand for People United Means Action) back in 2008, and while George W. Bush had done enough damage to the Republican brand that not even Senator John McCain had any hope of salvaging that election, in a closer contest, one could have imagined the infighting among the Democrats being a factor.

Vice President Harris, while not quite as unpopular as President Biden, is not what one would call a rising star within the Democratic party, and her perceived weakness as a candidate is a large part of what has prompted calls for an open contest. Casting the nomination as something she's entitled to will not satisfy people.

In any event, the Democrats have some work ahead of them. Formal, public, preparations for who would follow President Biden should have started for years ago, as opposed to over the weekend. Anyone who can count knew that the President would be in his early 80s at this point, just as Donald Trump will be four years from now. An open nominating contest is one thing; bickering over who should be the nominee will simply waste time that the Democrats really can't afford to not make full use of. Leaving aside any talk of entitlement to the nomination will help speed things along.

The More You Know

I've seen this image many times, and I get it. But there's an implication that somewhere in the blue area is a reason to be unkind to someone.

The rationale for kindness should be more than simple ignorance of the circumstances of someone's life. Because there's no amount of knowledge capable of making unkindness a means of improving the world around us.

The Knowledge

I receive newsletters from The Economist, and in today's was a question about the shooting at this weekend's Donald Trump rally:

The left thinks the shooting was just a performance; the right sees an inside job. Will the truth matter?

For me, it's a given that the truth doesn't matter, because this isn't a question of fact, but of identities. Identities of distrust, mostly. There are questions that one can ask about the attempted shooting this past weekend, and given that the assailant was shot dead on the scene, he won't be able to answer any of them. And so certain people have started doing what they always do, convince themselves that whatever theory of the case appeals to them, motivated by their prior beliefs is the correct one, and focusing in on those facts that support their cases. And questioning, sometimes quite vociferously, any official narrative that contradicts them. It's a way of feeling certain about the world, and it's something that means more to people than factual accuracy in the eyes of others.

It's also a way of expressing a group identity; one that, in American politics, is often defined in terms of opposition to a sinister, unpatriotic and duplicitous Other. And so those official narratives that contradict their neat (sometimes too neat) versions of events become proof that the sources of those narratives are allied with the Other; either willingly or through having been duped. Whatever the reason, they are also not to be trusted.

I, for better or for worse, am okay with a world in which I am certain of very little beyond "I think, therefore I am." So I have less need to craft ego-syntonic, but otherwise suspect, theories of the case. This is not to say that I am any more trusting of official narratives; after all, those narratives are just as self-serving as my own narratives. I'm just unlikely to see a hateful conspiracy on the other end of things, given the general tendency of people and organizations alike to tell stories about things in a way that serves their own interests and insulates them of potential negative consequences.

In the end, I suspect that the simplest explanation for things is also the most likely; the Secret Service, having come to view much of what they do as a formality (after all, the last high-profile shooting of a candidate for President was before I was born), was somewhat lax, and Donald Trump quickly assessed the situation, concluded that the immediate danger had passed and saw (and then took) an opportunity to present himself to the audience as he wanted them to see him. It also wouldn't surprise me to learn that Mr. Trump was prepared for something like this to happen. He knows that he lives in the United States, and guns are common. He also knows that he has a penchant for alienating people outside of his base of support. There may well be people who were genuinely surprised that someone came after the former President, but I doubt that Mr. Trump himself was among them.

To the degree that "the Left" and "the Right" have their own conspiratorial explanations for Saturday's events. those are matters of group identity and loyalty. As far as the people who hold to them are concerned, their theories are the truth of the matter. For the rest of us, there are other concerns that are more pressing.

Misillusioned

 "Spray of bullets shatters nation's illusion of security" says the BBC's headline.

The illusion of security and safety in American politics – built over decades - has been dramatically shattered.

Anyone who was under any illusions that American politics has anything remotely resembling security and safety hasn't been paying much attention. Threats of violence, and actual violence, against politicians has been a constant background hum for some time now, with Democrats and Republicans blaming the other, while refusing to see the parts that their own rhetoric about "battles between Good and Evil," "the future of the nation" and "existential threats" play in creating this environment.

And the way media in the United States tends to work isn't helping anything. Upon learning that the person named as the shooter may have donated $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project through another group called ActBlue, Reuters contacted both groups for comment. What is Reuters expecting them to say, other than some guy by that name donated about enough money for a fast-casual lunch a couple of years ago? What are these groups going to be able to add to the conversation, other than helping to make themselves targets for the already burgeoning set of conspiracy theories growing up around this? Which will lead to more threats and likely more violence. (Which, apparently, will not be learned about by anyone at the BBC.)

As the American public has come to see politics as higher and higher stakes, and an ethos of "if you're not with us, you're against us" has become common. the conflation of political opposition, or even neutrality, and deliberate harm/violence has grown. And it's dangerous to insist on seeing someone who understands one to be willfully perverse, or even Evil, as well-meaning. And so both sides find themselves responding to what they demand be seen as extreme positions; up until the moment they adopt those positions themselves. Once people start sincerely buying into the idea that a victory for the other side's candidate will literally jeopardize the future of the nation (not to mention the future of the believer and the people they care about), then violence becomes a reasonable course of action, specifically because it's seen as a response to prior violence.

Neither the Democratic or Republican ecosystems are able to take responsibility for the escalating rhetoric, because to so would be seen as week; the other side would pounce, and the activist class that both parties rely on to keep the public engaged with them would walk away. And fundraising, considered a requirement for any chance at electoral success, requires the appearance of a chance at electoral success. A party seen as unwilling to go almost to the absolute edge would lose the funding it needs to push its message to the set of largely indifferent people who become the margins of victory in "swing" states and districts.

When staying in place isn't workable, and going back completely unacceptable, the only path still open is forward. Even when that way lies bloodshed. It's been this way for pretty much all of the recent past. Security and safety haven't been illusions in this worldview; they've been deliberate delusions. A perusal of any functionally complete news archive would reveal this. But one would have to want to see it.

Magazine Half-Full

You can tell a decent amount about a new organizations politics from the way they report stories and the sources they use when doing so. Consider the following, from Axios:

The U.S. is on pace to see a drop in mass shootings compared to last year, but the number of incidents so far this year has already far surpassed the mid-year totals from a decade ago, per the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

But the drop from last year, has been substantial, on the order of 23%. Conversely, to get to 2023's numbers from 2014 is a 13% year over year increase. The drop for this year alone erases most of the overall increase since 2020. So why rain on the parade?

Likely to remain in step with their Left-leaning audience, for whom guns are terrible and aught to be banned is conventional wisdom.  Nothing the current level of reduction is remarkable likely wouldn't resonate as much as fact that it fails to make up for a decade worth of increases. Because it's not that Axios doesn't mention the decline. It simple comes later in the article, and then there's an immediate "Yes, but:"

Framing this as a positive development, and sticking with that, fails to package up audience anxiety, which means it's likely to be of less interest, as far as editors are concerned. Which is unfortunate, because perhaps everyone could use a little less anxiety.

Upon a Star

The Democratic Party has a problem in Joe Biden. Not his age... people understood that he was old when they first elected him in 2020. Rather, it's the perception of cognitive decline. That, and the fact that President Biden, at least publicly, feels that he's entitled to be the Democratic nominee for President based on his willingness to run.

The Democrats are in this unenviable position due to two words: Wishful thinking. There were suspicions that President Biden was unlikely to be up for a second term in 2020. And I think that then-candidate Biden knew this. After all, he said at the time: “I view myself as a transition candidate,” and “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

It just turns out now that he doesn't want that future to come about prior to 2028. But I think that, as far as the President was concerned, that was always the plan. And in this, yes, I'm accusing the President of being dishonest. Because that's part and parcel of American politics. He told people what they wanted to hear, but without actually making a commitment to anything.

And the Democratic Party went along with him. Which meant not putting in the work to groom successors in the past four years. And so now, they're in the position of having a candidate who more and more people are convinced is incapable of doing the job. There will be attempts to keep the anti-Trump coalition of 2020 together, but anti-Trump is not the same as pro-Biden, and it's likely that many of the people who turned out in 2020 won't bother this November. The only question is whether there are enough of them in swing states to sink the President, and if enough of them skip the election as a whole to sink Congressional Democrats at risk of losing their seats along with him.

Variable

The thing about generative automated systems ("A.I.") is that they're something of a black box. Prompts go in, outputs come out, and what happens in between is anyone's guess. And this can be something of a problem. If you ask a generative automated system a question, and I ask the same question, and receive a different answer, what do we make of that?

There was a LinkedIn post today that asked: "Why is the chairman of Toyota anti-electric vehicles?" It showed ChatGPT being given that prompt, and then giving an answer. "The chairman of Toyota, Akio Toyoda," it said, "has expressed skepticism about a full transition to electric vehicles (EVs) for several reasons:" It then proceeded to list the reasons.

But since when is "skepticism about a full transition to electric vehicles" equivalent to being "anti-electric vehicles?" Equating those two things struck me as odd. But it's in keeping with colloquial English, so I could see how ChatGPT could assemble that answer. But I wanted to be sure, so I entered the prompt into ChatGPT myself.

It told me: "The perception that the chairman of Toyota, Akio Toyoda, is anti-electric vehicles is not entirely accurate." It went on from there to list reasons. Then, in summarizing, it noted: "It's important to note that while Toyoda has expressed reservations about EVs, Toyota is not completely opposed to electric vehicles."

This was more like it. But why the difference between the two answers? Why should one iteration of a question take more time to explain the answer than another instance of the same question? I suspect that this is going to create concerns about how trustworthy generative automated systems are, but also the people who use them. Because maybe ChatGPT did actually give two different answers to the same question, or maybe one of us is a dab hand at Photoshop. How would you know? And this is something that the companies that offer generative systems are going to have to deal with.

Across the Water

Mount Rainier, as seen from the deck of a Washington State Ferry. A longer lens would have come in handy here, but one must make do.

Whispers

File under: You don't say...

A local source said the target was a room allegedly used by Hamas police.
Air strike on Gaza school kills at least 13 people

When I saw the headline, I knew that somewhere in the story, there would be an accusation that Hamas was using the building for something or other. It's pretty much a given. Such rumors serve the Israelis, in the sense that the deaths of civilians can be laid at the feet of Hamas. But they also serve Hamas, because Israel is more or less guaranteed to act on them, which generates sympathy for the Gazans throughout the region, and with people who understand that the broader Palestinian public is on the receiving end of a raw deal in this war. Accordingly, it would be interesting to find out the identity of this helpful "local source," although I expect we, the general public, never will.

I would say that the number of civilian casualties of the fights between the Israeli Army and Islamic militants has always been high, but that presumes that this really is a fight between organizations, rather than populations, and there are times when I'm not at all sure this is true. While those people who consider themselves civilians on both sides of the conflict may feel that it's inappropriate for the other side to target them, I'm not sure that the broader Israeli and Palestinian populations still buy into the idea that there are innocent people among their opposites.

Back in the Google+ days, one of my contacts found it ironic that people considered fighters legitimate targets, but not the civilian populations that supported them. I suspect that this opinion is more widespread than people are prepared to concede. Israel faces criticism, because it's considered to have a professional military that should be able to minimize the overall death toll, and the government says that it tries, but I wonder if their hearts are really in it. Hamas has earned the designation of a terrorist organization for making it pretty clear that, as far that they are concerned, there are no innocent Israelis; the events of October 7th of last year, that kicked all of this off, were proof enough of that. But it also appears that they are willing to see everyday Palestinians be in the line of fire. It's said that every orphan is a future Hamas fighter, but it still seems like a remarkably high price to be willing to pay. The death toll among Palestinians is always higher than that among Israelis; Hamas' tactics seem destined to result in a continuous attrition of the population of Gaza. And Gaza simply can't win a lopsided war of attrition.

Xáat Kwáani

 

An Alaska Airlines 737-800 in its "Salmon People" livery. Seen at SeaTac Airport on July 4th.

Hands Off

 

I wonder when stores will return to a model of effectively being basically pickup locations, where customers were not able to browse the merchandise.

If you'd told me, prior to my going into Target, that socks and underwear were a major target of shoplifters, I would have thought you were pulling my leg. Yet, here we are. Row after row of locked cases for Fruit of the Loom and (perhaps ironically) Pair of Thieves.

I'm not at all tied in to the lives that most lower-class Americans lead. That's why I have no idea why anyone would bother shoplifting undergarments in large enough amounts that the Target store I was in had them on lockdown. And perhaps that's a problem.

Of course, I understand that poverty is a problem, and a situation that makes many people both desperate and cynical about rules. And so it made sense that people would steal baby formula; it's expensive and it's not hard to find a buyer who won't ask questions. Likewise with laundry detergents; nearly everyone uses it, and the chance to get it below MSRP is attractive. And I presume that something similar applies to socks and underwear. But I'll admit that I'm guessing. Maybe people are simply starting to find the prices of boxers to be out of reach of their budgets.

And I suspect that I shouldn't be guessing about it. Not because there would be a news story on it, if I just channel-surfed long enough, but because it's a bad thing for people on different rungs of the economic ladder to be completely out of sight of one another.

Insubstantial

So the latest tend story to be bandied about in my LinkedIn feed is that of "Ghost Jobs." CBS News had a piece on them last week, citing a June survey from Résumé Builder. But the topic goes back farther; the BBC posted a story a couple of months ago, and financial services company Clarify Capital conducted a survey in August and September of 2022, and updated their story last October.

The findings of the surveys, such that 43% of employers used "ghost job" listings in 2022 to "keep current employees motivated, and this year that 62% of employers wanted to "make employees feel replaceable" are, predictably, prompting reactions.

But, as a contact of mine on LinkedIn pointed out some years back: Whenever you see something that outrages you, stop and think.

The Clarify Capital survey had 1,045 respondents, who are simply described as "managers" who were surveyed about Ghost Jobs. Résumé Builder outsourced their survey to the market research firm Pollfish, who put together a cohort of 649 hiring managers who completed the survey. "To qualify for the survey, all participants had to be over 25, have a household income of at least $75,000, have an education level above high school, have a manager-level role or higher, and work at a company with more than 10 employees. Respondents also had to indicate that they are involved in hiring at their company via a screening question."

And that's it. That's all we know. No data on company size or location, industry. No information on weighting or margin of error. According to the North American Industry Classification System Association, there are upwards of 1.5 million businesses operating in the United States with 10 or more people. To conclude, as Clarify does, that "1 in 5 managers [didn't] plan to fill open job positions until 2023," or, as Résumé Builder does, that: "4 in 10 Companies Posted a Fake Job Listing This Year" is to presume that the self-selected cohorts of respondents for the surveys are representative of the overall business community. But there's no good reason to presume that.

So I'm going to borrow a line from FiveThirtyEight, and label this a "Bad Use of Polling." The surveys don't really say anything useful because there's no way of relating the findings back to the actual business environment. In fact, they don't really even define "Ghost Jobs." Clarity Capital implies a definition, but doesn't actually give one, and Résumé Builder mostly uses "fake job listings," and CBS does the same, saying "or 'Ghost Jobs'," but nothing more.

This is becoming a story because it plays on the anxieties of worried job seekers, concerned that they're spending precious time chasing roles that don't actually exist. And packaging up anxiety to present peoples fears to them is how websites generate views and advertising impressions. And because there's no actual useful data behind any of this, it's just amorphous enough to provoke worry. But I think that it also affirms people's general suspicions that corporations are up to no good, and toying with people for their own cynical ends.

So are there enough false and misleading job postings out there that someone needs to take action? Maybe. But no-one knows; the surveys don't tell us.