Hidden City

 

I know Seattle was around here, somewhere...

The final sunrise of 2025 never materialized, as a pretty thick morning fog had settled over the area. The annoying thing about these is that they're never consistent... within a half-mile it could seem completely clear.

Which Economy

It's a simple enough question:

I mean, have you SEEN the economy these new adults have graduated into?

And I understand the reason for asking it. It's a plea for understanding and grace to be extended to young people, who, having put in the time and effort to undertake a college education, now find themselves in a situation in which jobs, especially entry-level jobs, have become scarce. And I understand the invocations of "the economy" or "this economy," as way of explaining it. It's a simple shorthand for the position that the United States finds itself in now, with depressed demand for labor.

But hasn't this been the goal of "the economy" all along? The modern United States is very good, and has been for some time, at creating all of the goods and services that people are ready, willing and able to pay for without need of the entirety of its labor force. And while many people seem to value their own vocations quite highly, it doesn't take much to reveal that any number of them begrudge others theirs; if putting some number of people out of work is what it takes to feel wealthier, then so be it. Couple this with the understanding, expressed to me by a small number of people I know, that the demand for labor moves, but never really goes away, and one can see the dilemma that many people over the years have found themselves in; the fact that they can't find work that's valuable enough to support them, in a society that believes that there's enough valuable work for anyone who wants it.

Which leaves out the fact that the government has taken it upon itself to prevent labor from becoming scarce enough that employers are forced to raise wages (and thus, presumably, prices). And that means that somewhere in the area of one in twenty to one in twenty-five people who are actively engaged in looking for work (remember the Unemployment Rate is dependent on the Participation Rate).

For people in that 4 or 5 percent (which can be a few million people or so). every economy is a bad economy, simply due to the perception that government interventions or none, there's enough work out there for everyone who wants it. And this leaves people wondering both what's wrong with them, and what they need to in order to fix it.

And that leaves aside the efficiency gains that businesses chase as a matter of daily operations. Because every dollar paid to an employee is a dollar that isn't going to shareholders, some of whom can become quite upset about that fact.

So there are always going to be new adults who graduate into a world that's actively hostile to them making enough money in for the formal employment sector to support themselves, even in the "good" times. It's the nature of the beast. It's receiving a lot of attention right now, because the overall consume outlook doesn't seem rosy for anyone. But maybe the problem is that it's seen as actively bad for it to be rosy for everyone.

Virtual Camera

Racist AI fakes are now a business — and a political tool. You don't say...

At the end of the article, Axios quotes organizational psychologist Janice Gassam Asare as saying: "I would just encourage people to be a little bit more cautious when they see something on social media, and ask yourself, 'how do I know that this is actually real?'"

I felt that it was missing the "pretty please with sugar on top." This is, after all, an article that notes: "One user ID'd a video they shared as fake, but still encouraged others to share it because it justified their viewpoints about alleged SNAP fraud." If people care more about whether information validates their worldview than whether it's real, what good does it do to "encourage people to be a little bit more cautious?" That lack of "caution" is getting them precisely what they're looking for.

I wonder if Axios had informed Ms. Asare, when they asked her for her comments, that they already believed that people were deliberately sharing fictitious video narratives. Maybe they did, and maybe it wouldn't (or didn't) make any difference, but the general tenor of her comments, and the article as a whole, put the cart in front of the horse, as I see it.

Because the thing about "framing a guilty person," as the saying goes, is that it presupposes that the person is guilty. The only point behind framing them is that there otherwise isn't enough evidence to connect them to the crimes one believes that they're guilty of. When someone fakes and shares a "video [that] shows multiple Black women screaming and pounding on a door with the caption 'store under attack'," they're not doing so out a desire to tar innocent people; they're engaging in using fiction to tell what they understand is a truth, and the people they're likely to share it with already agree with their viewpoint. Because to do otherwise would be to invite pushback.

Racism is a fairly popular pastime in the United States, because at the base of it is a hierarchy of deserving. That existed long before generative automation. Faked video may facilitate its spread, but it was spreading just fine previously.

Riches for All

It is certainly a nice gesture of the Dells, but there will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money. 

There will be universal high income.
Elon Musk

A bit of proof (if any were needed) that having a high net worth doesn't mean that someone understands how money works. Because the United States already has universal high income... it's all a matter of when one sets the baseline; even poor people can have pretty significant incomes by the standards of 1825, 1925 or even 1975.

But poverty isn't simply about one's access to money.

Whether Elon Musk is sincerely being utopian to the point of inanity is left as an exercise for the reader, but it's worth pointing out that he's not the only person who appears to have difficulty understanding how money operates in practice; I've come to the conclusion that the biggest obstacle that many people have to understanding Economics is a general inability to understand the role of money in the big picture. Part of this is simply that people just don't think about it all that often... it's not something that comes up regularly enough that most people really need to understand it. But I also think that the way money is dealt with in both news and entertainment media is also at work; mainly, I would guess, because it's easier to explain things in terms of dollars and cents.

Unreturned

I was listening to the Altruism After USAID episode of Slate Magazine's Money Talks podcast a few days ago, and the guest, NPR's Mary Childs made the point that in the wake of USAID halting disbursements to non-governmental organizations and the like, that the money being withheld couldn't be replaced by philanthropic organizations.

My first thought that this was a matter of will. After all, if the United States government was no longer paying to fight malaria, and instead giving the public tax cuts, nothing stops that selfsame public from deciding to donate the savings to charities and keep the programs funded. The Trump Administration and Elon Musk's DOGE operation targeted USAID because they understood that many Americans feel poor enough that they resent the government giving money to ameliorate the problems of people far away.

But a moment's further thought put that idea to bed. After all, the federal budget isn't balanced; it's propped up by some pretty serious borrowing from global capital markets. Of course, people expect that the United States is good for it, which is why the government can borrow at favorable rates, but it's debt all the same.

And that's really the part that private philanthropy cannot replace. No rational lender is going to loan a charity several millions (or perhaps even tens of thousands) of dollars to save lives in third-world countries. Because there's no profit in it. Not even China, which makes a big deal out of its investments in poor nations, is doing so out of generosity; they expect a positive return, and when nations start defaulting on payments, China is going to start claiming assets as collateral. Charities, more or less by definition, don't impose repayment terms that entail seizing what few assets poor nations still have.

Given the fact that the United States borrows simply to keep the lights on and doors open towards the end of the fiscal year, some amount of the funding that USAID was providing was in the form of money borrowed from elsewhere. Specifically because poor countries tend to be bad investments, for any number of reasons.

Perhaps it's time that this was more openly acknowledged. There's nothing wrong with the understanding that, as a wealthy nation, the United States has an obligation to alleviate poverty in other parts of the world. And it's true that many Americans overestimate (sometimes wildly) the amount of money that goes into such philanthropy, as a proportion of their annual taxes. Still, this is part of what representative government is all about; having to make the case to the people who will be, ultimately, footing the bill.

And Then, There Was One

So this was an interesting LinkedIn post:

My AI vendor upgraded the terms of service.

For 12% more cost per month, I will get only 60% of the monthly credits for my use. Less for more. Sounds like a great upgrade... for them.

Time to drop my provider, I guess.

Are the costs finally reaching the consumers now? Have the AI vendors run out of free money they can use to keep costs artificially low?

The last sentence stood out for me in in the context of the third line; this person believes the time has come to drop their generative automation provider, because that provider can, apparently, no longer afford to keep compute prices artificially low. This is the genesis of the the process that Cory Doctorow terms "enshittification." As companies find themselves in the position of needing to show a profit, they are forced to raise their prices. The resulting flight of their customer base hobbles them, they enter a death spiral, and are either forced to exit the market or are acquired by another player. The number of providers shrinks until the overall market is highly consolidated, and then prices start rising to repay investors for the subsidized costs that have lured in customers all this time. And because all of the remaining players are raising their prices (or there are no other remaining players), customers have nowhere else to go, even if lock-in effects aren't present.

And since all of the market players are now very large, new entrants to the market are at a sizable disadvantage... in order to compete, they'd need to have unbeatably low prices, which would require a large amount of up-front investment... which would need to come from people and organizations that aren't bought in to the current market principals. So there's nowhere to keep moving to for investor-subsidized services forever. And. of course, investors realize this; the whole reason they're subsidizing costs for customers at this point is the expectation that once the market consolidates, they'll make all of it back, and more.

One commenter noted that State of the Art (SOTA) models based in China have very low costs, but without insight into their economics, there's no way of knowing whether those prices are artificially low, themselves. Nothing prevents the government of China from attempting to ensure the Last Provider Standing, and thus the one that benefits from being able to squeeze customers, is a Chinese company. But even if they aren't, if they can force other nations to take over the role of subsidy provider, that's still a benefit to them.

Either way, this mindset of "not artificially low is too high" is being penny-wise but pound-foolish. The unwillingness to pay what one believes that things actually cost out of a pervasive sense of one's own poverty has never ended well. And while this time might be the first, I don't see much investor money backing that position.

Questioning

I was listening to a podcast today, and the host brought up the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis. Listening to him, it struck me that what may actually have been at work was an answer to a mystery that exists mainly in people's imaginations.

The general gist of the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis is that the constants of nature, including the fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, et cetera, have to be within very narrow parameters for "life as we know it" to exist, and this isn't something that can be easily (if at all) explained by the Anthropic Principle. For instance, if the strong nuclear force were the slightly-to-somewhat stronger nuclear force, and everything else were unchanged, fusion would work differently than it does in our current universe and so stars would operate differently.

The idea that the constants of nature being their current values purely by chance is highly unlikely gives rise to the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis being part of an argument for Intelligent Design; something had to set the constants to their current values, and that something is an immensely powerful deity.

Fair enough, I suppose, but... how, exactly, do we know that there are lots of different possible values that these constants could have? After all, we have a sample size of precisely 1. And, given that the whole of the Universe and the Observable Universe are not the same thing, potentially less than that.

And in this sense, the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis seems to be the answer to a question that there isn't actually enough information to ask. Rather, it's a solution to a question that comes into existence if certain assumptions that have been made about the nature of the physical laws of the Universe turn out to be correct... and even that assumes that scientists will be able to test them at some point.

Granted, I'm neither a scientist or a theologian, but I'm at a place in life where I'm okay with not knowing, and the very distinct possibility that no-one will ever know. It's a mystery to which I don't need a solution. The question is only as interesting as the answers that people produce to it. In part, because there are other, closer questions; ones that it does make sense that we may be able to answer, and those seem to be much more fruitful places in which to invest attention.

Accusatory

Using generative automation for things is quickly becoming a cardinal sin, and this is leading to an interesting social media phenomenon; calling people out for using generative "A.I." as a means of leveling a criticism without actually engaging with whatever it is that's being presented. It is, in effect, a form of ad hominem.

I suspect that it's a form of the Liar's Dividend, although not in a manner that I saw coming. While it does seek to sow distrust of others, it's not about the quality of the information itself, as had usually been noted. Here, it's a form of moral accusation, one the serves to disqualify the writer from further consideration of their ideas. I'm curious to see how long it lasts: Is this something that the Millennials and the cohorts that follow them will carry with them as a generational habit, or is it simply a fad that will fade away as the technology does whatever damage it will do, and then simply becomes part of the background noise?

I think, at least for now, it will be the latter. Most people today don't strike me as being committed Luddites (in the original sense of the term); they're not likely to give up things they want, or give up some portion of an attainable standard living, simply out of opposition to the technology that enables it. Once whatever is going to happen happens, there will be no profit in standing athwart history shouting "Stop!" Even in a race to the bottom, no one wants to be the last one to cross the finish line, and while generative automation may be worth complaining about, if younger people were any more likely than Generation X or the Baby Boomers to pay more money that necessary simply to support their ideas of the way the world should be; well, the world would look very different now. 

Bedrock

It's a simple enough sentiment: "The foundations of trust are reliability and integrity."

But, I would hasten to add, the foundation of reliability and integrity is trust. I first encountered it as a bit of snark, but "he who never wins and never quits is an idiot" is more true than I think many people are willing to give it credit for. Keeping one's word and keeping one's commitments are both predicated on the idea that there will be a payoff in the future.

And I think the problem is that the people who preach things like reliability, integrity and grit are so accustomed to the payoff happening that they don't realize that for many, if not most people in the world, it's not a given. If reliability and integrity are simply avenues to being taken advantage of, people aren't going to display them. Not out of a disdain for virtue, but out of a belief that virtue is an expensive path to receiving nothing in return.

Work To Do

I was listening to the most recent episode of Malwarebytes' Lock and Code podcast, this one on the topic of "pig butchering." I find the topic of online scams and frauds interesting, but perhaps just as importantly, being in the know can be prophylactic; a lot of what makes people vulnerable to being defrauded is not knowing the red flags that the person they're communicating with isn't who they claim to be, has ulterior motives or both.

But Lock and Code tends to repeat a mantra that I'm not 100% on board with; the idea that "anybody can be scammed." This isn't something that I find to be untrue, but I think the phrasing of it can give people the wrong idea. A lot of pig butchering schemes have a distinct romantic angle, the mark believes that they've encountered someone who genuinely cares for them, and is attempting to help them out; someone who could be a life partner as well as an investment partner.

But that's not a vector that everyone is susceptible to. Some people are going to reject the idea of an attractive stranger suddenly seeming to want a relationship, and others are going to look askance at the "investment opportunity" being offered. That doesn't make such people impervious to all fraud schemes, but it does inoculate them against this one.

I think a better way of putting it is that for any given individual, there is some amount of work that would fool them. And what protects most people is that for these schemes to operate at scale, the amount of work on any initial approach tends to be fairly low. But for more targeted schemes, a fraudster may be willing to put in quite a bit more effort.

This, for me, is the value of podcasts like Lock and Code; the knowledge shared makes low-effort frauds less effective. Because the biggest risk factor for being drawn in by a supposedly misdirected text message from a random stranger is not realizing that this is a common lead-in for all sorts of schemes. Knowing may have been half the battle on the old G.I. Joe cartoons, but when it comes to online fraud schemes, 85 or 90% may be a better number.

Sure, random podcasts, blog posts and news articles are never going to make anyone absolutely impervious to trickery; anyone willing to put in the work may find a way to get to their target. But these resources increase the amount of work that needs to be done, and given the number of schemes where the initial amount of effort is really minimal, that can save a lot of people a lot of grief. 

Petitioning

Conservative Political Action Committee "Let's Go Washington" is attempting to get a pair of initiatives on the ballot that I suspect that many people would describe as anti-transgender. So today, they were at my usual grocery store (which doesn't allow for initiative petitions on the premises) looking for signers. Apparently, they'd telegraphed this move (or word simply got out), as "Washington Families for Freedom" (which sounds like a Conservative group itself) was there urging people to "Decline to Sign."

If I were a betting man, my money would be on WFF to win this one, either now, or once the initiatives make it to the ballot. Washington state is pretty Blue, and Trumpist candidates don't do well in statewide elections. Granted, Let's Go Washington is a PAC, and not a person, but something tells me that they're Trump-aligned enough that it's going to take more than ignoring the wishes of property owners for them to pull this one off.

Yo Ho Ho

The United States has apparently seized a tanker ship carrying oil from Venezuela to Cuba. The stated rationale for this is that the ship has been sanctioned for, at some point in the past, carrying oil from Iran, when that nation was barred from exporting.

I hadn't realized that vehicles could be sanctioned this way. Until now, I'd been under the impression that sanctioned were always leveled against individuals and organizations, whether those were businesses, governments or other entities. I looked at a United Nations page on sanctioned vessels, and it seems the main penalty there is that such ships are to be barred from ports. Which, honestly, seems kind of toothless to me. After all, if someone is sending goods into North Korea, it makes sense that they would simply use ships that had the range to make it all the way there without needing to make any stops along the way.

So in this sense, the Trump Administration seizing the ship makes a certain amount of sense. What I'm a bit dubious about is the fate of the cargo.

Asked what would happen with the oil, Trump said: "We keep it, I guess."

US seizes sanctioned oil tanker off coast of Venezuela, Trump says

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like it's making the United States Coast Guard into commerce raiders at best, and privateers at worse. But maybe there's some rule that says that people ship things on sanctioned vessels at their own risk.

Still, it creates a perverse incentive for President Trump, at least, to wait for sanctioned vessels to load up on cargoes and then seize them, if the cargo is then free for the taking. This is an act that I can see other nations getting in on. Although President Trump does seem to have a real soft spot for anything having to do with petroleum.

But I wonder about the real goal here. It seems fairly clear that this is a means of putting pressure on the Maduro Administration, although knowing President Trump, I'm doubtful that much thought has gone into what happens if it works. There may be an attempt to set up a pro-Washington client government in Caracas, but I'd be willing to bet that any such effort would be doomed to failure, especially if it seemed that the United States was hoping to set up the sort of cheap resource hub that the Bush Administration supposedly had in mind for Iraq. I suspect that Russia and China already have accounts set up to bankroll and anti-American insurgency if President Maduro loses his grip on power.

The United States playing pirate as a way of throwing its weight around will, of course, have consequences. But not for the President or Congressional Republicans. The rest of us will have to wait and see what this most recent act of international bullying costs us. This could be a very expensive tanker's worth of crude, when it's all said and done. 

Crackers

I somewhat understand the drive for "representation" in holiday nutcrackers. Black people are going to walk past the display, and they're going to want to see themselves shown there. But for me, what this really demonstrates is a lack of basically Black stories. And so the Black community winds up having to attach itself to other people's stories.

And I understand that this, in part, is what Kwanzaa is for. It's a Winter Solstice-adjacent holiday for Black people. But I don't know that it really does the job. It has a Hallmark Holiday feel to it, and I've never met a Black person who actually celebrates it. In my own family, it never rated a mention.

And maybe that's the real problem. There isn't a push for something genuinely Black (whatever that would end up meaning) to mark this time of the year. 

Watching

Data Protection Commission Ireland has posted a video online, titled "Pause Before You Post." This was brought to my attention on LinkedIn, which noted its use of AI. The implication was that "Pause Before You Post" was created entirely with AI, but I'm not sure.

In any event, "Pause Before You Post" is a stereotypical "stranger danger" public service announcement. It show a young girl, Ava, and her parents in a shopping mall, while random adults make comments that demonstrate they understand some of the details of Ava's life. The soundtrack could have come from a slasher movie, and Ava spends most of the video looking suitably frightened of the people who address her. And, of course, it's hinted that one of those adults might be a pedophile.

The root cause, of course, is shown to be the parents' social media posts. They've been sharing random details online, and creepy strangers have been reading them. And since these strangers are creepy, they've been speaking to Ava with a familiarity reserved for friends and family members.

I get it, but I wonder if there wasn't a better way to go about it. "Pause before you post" is sound advice, but the underlying message seems to be "treat the details of your child's life as state secrets," rather than "understand who you're sharing things with." Of course, almost anything shared online can become public. After all, someone can simply take it and repost it publicly. But while public posting may be the default, for many platforms, it's not a requirement. If a parent wants to share a self-deprecating post about being late to pick their daughter up from soccer practice, they can simply choose to only share it with online "friends"/contacts. But it's easier to get a message that everyone one doesn't know might be dangerous, or have designs on one's children, into a 40-second video spot. Nuance often takes more time than people feel they have to communicate.

As far as the "AI-ness" of it all, the only thing that really stood out for me was the fact that Ava was the only visible child in the spot. Maybe it's just how modern malls are, but the place seemed really sparsely populated in general. There's nothing odd about that, in and of itself; extras can be expensive, too, and the idea that Ava and her parents are alone in this situation adds to the overall sense of creepiness, but it was something of a reminder that generative automation isn't ready to replace people wholesale yet.

I rate it a "C," for being an effective vehicle for a too-simplistic message. I have a dislike for scare tactics, especially when there are better means of reaching the same goals, but perhaps this is why I'm not in advertising.

Believing is Seeing

I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight. The first strike, the second strike, and the third and fourth strike on September 2 were entirely lawful and needful and they were exactly what we would expect our military commanders to do.
Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)
Pentagon leaders brief lawmakers on U.S. boat strikes, fueling debate over legality

I understand Senator Cotton's viewpoint on this. The Trump Administration has to be in the right, and so his perception of events has to align with that, even if, to an observer, it doesn't seem to make much sense. The original video of the September 2nd strike against an alleged group of drug smugglers shows a small boat, but still fairly large for two people in the water to manage, that doesn't have any obvious weapons on it. What fight were they attempting to stay in? One with a naval force that could strike them at will and that was invulnerable to anything they may have done in reprisal?

This is part of the problem with modern politics. Senator Cotton's statements seem more driven by partisanship and/or loyalty to the President than anything else.

In what seems like yet another in a long series of misguided efforts to prosecute the War on Drugs by going after the supply of narcotics, the Trump Administration has declared open season on boats that it determines have drugs aboard. Why anyone things that a tactic that has failed time and again will suddenly start working now is beyond me. But a lot of the reaction to it is necessarily partisan. Republicans have to line up behind the policy and Democrats have to be vocal in their opposition to it, independently of its merits. And this means the "debate" over the legality of what certainly carries at least the appearance of extrajudicial murder, is really just another political shouting match, the outcome of which is more closely tied to the President's approval ratings than to the actual events that are supposedly under consideration.

And at the bottom of it all is the public, and its various factions.

As long as the Trumpist corps of voters understand the drug trade to be a hateful scheme to victimize them, being perpetrated by South Americans who unjustly resent them, they're likely to be more or less in favor of the strikes. And the members of Congress who rely on their votes, like Senator Cotton, are going to have to mirror their viewpoint back to them, or be replaced by someone who will. Likewise, as long as Democratic voters understand this to be a racist persecution of poor people in Latin America, their members on Congress are going to have to speak out against it. And as long as each faction views the other's viewpoint as proof of their wrong thinking, the conflict will persist.

Unquiet

 <rant>

And here I thought the quiet part was that companies openly discriminate in their recruiting based on factors completely unrelated to job performance.

One can blame this on some sort of biological imperative to discount that which is more easily available (unless, it seems that money is involved; people always seemingly grab the easy bucks), but maybe what it's really about is feeling justified in one's prejudices, and the willingness of, well, many of us, to bow to that.

Being Black, I've been told to not have a profile picture on LinkedIn. Being a Gen Xer, I've been told to expunge my early work history from my profile and résumé. I know people who profiles photos are black-and-white so that they appear to be fair-haired, rather than gray. People use different names in in order to seem more employable. And now there's an endless line of people telling us that the green "Open to Work" banner is really an enormous red flag.

Not because these things are somehow disqualifying; none of them are supposed to matter once one makes it to an interview. But because the gatekeepers of the employment world are supposedly graded (by themselves or others) on how well they make the process of recruiting new employees into a status game.

Prospective employees are treated like Labubus, Stanley tumblers or the Power Nine. If they don't lend the company an air of exclusivity, or make it feel somehow special, the fact that they can do the work, and do it well, doesn't matter. But when was the last time you saw a company crowing about how awesome and unique their new Product Manager was? When was the last time anyone made a purchasing decision based on how much work the seller's Talent Acquisition people needed to do to hire a middle manager from another company?

This would make sense if it showed up in the bottom line, or in stock prices. But literally no-one cares if someone builds a team by hiring a dozen long-term unemployed people. There's absolutely zero riding on this.

But we play the game anyway. Well, I do, at least. There are jobs that I've done, and done well, but there are no traces of in my professional history, because I'm supposed to be pretending that I'm younger than I am until I get in front of someone who can afford not to care.

It's a strange game, because no-one receives anything for winning. It's a pretense that often simply adds work to the process for everyone involved, supposedly because the appearance of doing more work is the valuable part.

</rant>

Twinned

When I tell people that I don't do much with generative automation in my personal life, they'll sometimes ask if I'm in the "anti-AI" crowd. Which is reasonable... generative automation is catching on, and a lot of people see real potential in the technology.

And so do I, for that matter. But at present, I'm a bit cautious about it. Call it a variation on Erwin Knoll's "Law of Media Accuracy," which notes that the media is always right... except for the rare stories of which one has firsthand knowledge. And, interestingly, I've found this to be true. Media stories of which I have firsthand knowledge are exceedingly rare; but in the few cases I've encountered, I've always found errors in the details. Nothing major, but noticeable.

And I've noticed the same with generative automation, especially with Google, since Gemini is now incorporated into the search functionality. About six months ago, I noted that the LLMs would note that Aurora, Illinois was a fictional city. Today I was looking for something significantly more niche.

There is an old tabletop role-playing game called Gemini. It was published by a Scandavanian company named Cell Entertainment at around the turn of the century.

Now, the fact that it shares its name with Alphabet's generative automation offering is going to be confusing right there. So the fact that someone reported difficulty in finding it via a Google search isn't a surprise. But Google didn't really help matters any...

The fact that the AI Overview doesn't include Gemini in its list of "Tabletop role-playing games with 'Gemini' in the name" speaks to Knoll's Law. I know that there's a tabletop role-playing game named Gemini, only because I have a copy. If I didn't, it would be reasonable to conclude that it didn't exist, even though the AI Overview never actually says as much.

To be sure, if one includes "Cell Entertainment" in the search, then the AI Overview is right on the mark, noting the year of publication and a general description of the setting. But this requires knowing the publisher of a game that was obscure when it was first published, more than a quarter century ago.

And this is why I don't do a lot with generative automation in my personal life; the amount of information that I feel I need to have about a subject to assess the automation's accuracy (and hence, its usefulness) obviates the need for the automation in the first place. And the fact that, when the name of the game is paired with the name of the publisher, the AI Overview recognizes that it's a tabletop role-playing game calls into question the processing of the original search terms.

Sure, I could feed prospective Nobody In Particular posts into Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot and task them with editing things for me... but the whole point of this exercise is to make me a better writer. Outsourcing that task to a generative automation system defeats the purpose.

So, like I said, I do understand the potential of generative automation. But I think that it's going to be a while longer before that potential is realized. 

Autumn Fruit

Today I learned that there are apple varieties that mature in mid to late November. It hadn't occurred to me that apples grew to this late in the season, but I walked past a house that had a tree in the front yard. (The apple tree that overhangs my yard tends to have dropped all of its fruit by mid-September.) I presume that it has something to do with the local climate; the general lack of frost makes for a longer growing season.

Trolling for Cash

Almost immediately, “people started noticing that many rage-bait accounts focused on U.S. politics appeared to be based outside of the U.S.,” The Verge said.
X update unveils foreign MAGA boosters

Number of people surprised by this turn of events: Probably zero.

The piece points out that for people in Africa and Southeast Asia, the income provided by winding people up on X can be significant. And when people need income, they're not always going to be picky about how they get it. The modern Internet is awash with people who are pretending to be someone and/or somewhere they are not, because their real identities and locations aren't valuable. After all, no one really cases what a Russian or an Indian thinks of American politics. But this random fellow American that one knows nothing about who just happens to have something to say that aligns with one's preconceptions? They're certainly worth a follow and not all manipulating people.

Because, supposedly, whatever viewpoint or information is on offer helps prove that The Other Side is not only wrong, but deliberately perverse. And that's the important thing. With Americans desperate to score points on one another, and that desperation having advertising dollars attached to it, it's to be expected that people from other countries would want to get in on the act, even if they aren't part of a foreign influence campaign. Income, after all, is income. And the worldwide nature of the attention economy allows people from poor countries around the world to participate in it.

Of course, it's not just the Make America Great Again crowd that's willing to pay attention to anyone willing to provide them with ammunition in the culture wars. The tally may be lopsided, but both sides have their free agents. In part because if the offshore voices were all MAGA, that would have been suspicious, but even in a culture war, there's work for mercenaries on all sides of the conflict.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I expect that a number of accounts will either suddenly shift to the United States, or disappear, some to quickly reappear with new, "onshore" identities. Those operators who can't afford a VPN that will allow them to pretend to be in the United States will simply go away, as the proof of their locations renders them useless as culture war combatants. So I suspect that the rollout of account locations on X will benefit the formal influence campaigns at the expense of the free agents. Either way, the rage-baiting will continue; there will still be money in it.

Wishcraft

A question, that I wonder about sometimes. 

Given the degree to which the public in much of the developed world (and especially the United States) seems willing to support policies that are based on little more than wishful thinking, why would anyone expect that politicians drawn from said populations to be exclusively the people who don't?

While the Trump Administration is often a fairly clear example of governance by wishful thinking, the main difference between the current President and his predecessors is really simply a matter of how often his preferred outcomes seem to be completely at odds with the facts on the ground. Because honestly, President Biden wasn't anywhere near above wishful thinking, either.

But there's a constant undercurrent, at least in the media, that people should (and often do) vote for people who approach the world clear-eyed and rationally, rather than with the same emotional attachments that the voters themselves have. Even when it seems pretty clear that policy matters are being decided on emotional considerations, the idea that the people calling the shots somehow know better is always in the background.

It's true that not everyone thinks of the world in terms of "this is what I want, so there must be a low or no-cost way of bringing it about." But I don't know that it's reasonable to presume that no one in the political class would be drawn from that group. Especially when it's connecting with people, rather than a firm grasp on the likely outcomes of policies, that tend to drive people's voting patters; especially the marginally-attached "swing" voters whose choice to show up or not on Election Day tends to drive the outcomes.

President Trump is unusual in the sense that he's often very public with his apparent belief that things his voter base think are easy actually are easy. He's aided in this by the devotion of said voter base; this allows him to scapegoat the Democrats, the "deep state" or what -have-you whenever things actually turn out to be difficult. So he doesn't have to fall back on "things are complicated" when policies don't produce the claimed results. But he's not unique in thinking that policies that could come across as obviously flawed were going to be winners.

After all, he's a member of a public that tends to see the world this way, and likes to see their worldview mirrored back to them by their elected officials. 

Survey Service

I’m tired of feeling baited-and-switched by companies that ask customers to “rate their experiences,” when they’re actually being requested to rate the individual employee(s) they were interacting with. I understand that companies don’t really want feedback from the public; a lot of it is negative, some of it is completely unreasonable and just about all of it is geared towards customer priorities, rather than business (or shareholder, if we’re being honest) priorities. No business wants to hear that their processes are clunky or their inventory selection is lacking. And when they’re the ones writing the surveys, they don’t have to. I get it.

But an interaction with an individual employee (or three) is not the same as an interaction with the company as a whole, or even some function or division of the company. A customer support representative can be perfectly charming and willing to help, but be stymied by disempowering policies or simply a lack of the resources needed to serve the customer. And that leaves aside all of the various touchpoints that come into play both before and after the interaction.

And for any rating system that works on a scale of 1 to X, so long as X is greater than 2, a score of X-1 shouldn’t be considered a black mark. The expectation that people are going to do absolutely amazing work, and blow people away with every interaction is unrealistic. If give someone four stars out of five, I shouldn’t have a supervisor contacting me to offer up their head on a plate. Five out of five is not my base level of expectation; leaving some room at the top of the scale for truly exceptional service should be an option.

In the end, it dissuades me from engaging with these surveys and ratings systems. Service jobs can be hard enough as it is, people don’t need the added stress of me being supposedly the one person on Earth who still sees a difference between “did the thing I asked of them,” and “completely blew me away.” Especially when the responses are not anonymous.

Okay, rant over. At least until I can corner someone a little higher up the food chain in one of these companies. Then, I’m going to give them a talking-to.

Blanketed

A single data point in a massive problem.

The Seattle area has, all things considered, fairly pleasant weather. While there are exceptions (the heat dome a few years back being one), the summer and the winter don't come across as homicidal, the way they do in some other places that I've lived in or visited.

Be that as it may, being homeless still sucks; especially now that the rainy season is settling in. This can make it difficult to be homeless, simply due to the difficulty in staying dry. A moving pad may be better than nothing, but it's not a proper blanket (let alone a sleeping bag), which, as it turns out, can be hard to find in this particular area of the Seattle suburbs. The drug store the man was resting near didn't have any, neither did the pet store nearby. The grocery store a bit down the block was a longshot that didn't pay off, either. One thing that I've noticed recently is that buildings being remodeled are losing there awnings and overhangs. I'd like to think that it's not for the express purpose of making those locations less useful for the homeless, but I'm too cynical to actually believe it.

I don't know if there are any shelters nearby, but knowing how the stereotypical suburbanite tends too regard the homeless, I would have been very surprised to learn their was. So I settled for checking to make sure that the man was okay, and giving him a bit of cash with which to buy some food, and going on my way. I don't know if that actually did anything for him... I can't image what.

And maybe that's the problem with homelessness. Even when the problem is as small as the one person looking to sleep on the sidewalk, it can come across as insurmountable in the moment.
 

Paper Chase

I was listening to a Wired podcast in the car today, and the subject of the Chicago Police Department sharing data on certain people with the Federal Department of Homeland Security. The two journalists hosting the podcast kept referring to this information sharing as a "data breach."

And this is why I dislike listening to many news-related podcasts; journalists can be as partisan as anyone else, and that partisanship tends to manifest itself in, let's call it a certain sloppiness with terminology. The sort of intentional sharing of information that the CPD had engaged in was not a data breach. DHS did not break into the CPDs systems and exfiltrate the data without authorization. The collection and sharing of the data may have been inappropriate, even illegal, and it certainly ran afoul of the host's sensibilities, but there was no intrusion or compromise of systems involved. Proper or not, the data was formally requested, and given over.

There is a lot of data floating around out there that many younger people have come to regard as some sort of state secret, when this simply isn't the case. Law enforcement agencies routinely share data. There is nothing out of the ordinary here. Referring to the sharing as a breach is to imply that the Chicago Police Department had an affirmative duty to keep the information in strict confidence and that it failed to do so due to a failure of data security procedures. But that isn't what happened. Rather, the CPD was keeping an internal database on people, and sharing that with DHS. Casting this as a breach casts the issue as a problem without actually needing to delve deeper into whether compliance lapses actually posed a data breach, where people who were unauthorized to access and view the data actually did so.

While mishandling of data can lead to data being breached, mishandling is not, in and of itself, a breach. Wired never explained who viewed or used the data who was not supposed to be, only that the data was not deleted in accordance with instructions to do so in a timely manner.

To be sure, I don't expect all journalists to be certified information privacy professionals. But they should be conversing with people who have that sort of background before publicly calling out incidents; if only to ensure that they have their terminology straight. 

Mischaracterized

It's not hard to come across a lot of people writing about character; about how "character is what people do when they believe no one is watching," or how "when everything else fades, character is what remains." Perhaps this is just the cynic in me, but I think that most people's discussions of character leave out what may be its most important trait: that it's built on trust.

People speak of character as if its rules are expressions of high virtue, rather than simply an imposition of authenticity. Because for many people, their "character" comes out when they aren't afraid of being judged for what they do... or who they are. At the root of a number of dissertations on character is the simple idea, as Professor of Business Psychology Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic noted in an article on leadership, that there is an "obligation to others overrides the right to just be ourselves."

And I suspect this is why when so many people name names when it comes to those they find to be of bad character, the people they call out are those who have come into a position where they no longer need to have obligations to others. They can indulge their authentic selves because the society around them isn't in a position to punish them for it. And so character stops being an expression of principles; rather it's a recognition of one's interests.

Because the demands of character aren't simply those of the law; they are also those of propriety. It's about people "adjusting [their] behavior to meet situational demands and gratify others." And there is nothing wrong with conforming one's actions and demeanor to those of the people around them. When in Rome, doing as the Romans do, is not a crime. But I find the lack of willingness to speak about the demands that it makes on people to be insidious.

Sure, there is an assumption of moral realism built in to the concept of character; the idea that the norms one ascribes to the concept are genuine facts about the universe, and not mere conventions born of the arbitrary nature of society. But I think that there's also a level of fear there, a worry that those who understand that they need not follow the rules (those who are unafraid of others) will be unconstrained in a way that places one at risk. It's a fear that's overblown, I think, born of a tendency to worry about those who don't worry about what one thinks of them. In that sense, letting go of a focus on character may be a worthwhile step in seeing, and accepting, people for who they really are, rather than who one may want, or need, them to be.

Penniless

One of the strange things about the Trump Administration is its uncanny ability to enact a policy that people want, but to do so in a way that make people wish they hadn't. Case in point, the end of the penny.

“We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go,” said Jeff Lenard with the National Association of Convenience Stores.

[...]

“We don’t want the penny back. We just want some sort of clarity from the federal government on what to do, as this issue is only going to get worse,” the NACS’ Lenard said.

Most, although not all, Congressional Republicans seem to be of the opinion that, in the eyes of their voters, President Trump can do no wrong. This has eliminated any incentive they may have had to push back against the Administration when it's going to implement policy chaotically and haphazardly, because they believe that voters are going to hold them accountable for holding the Administration accountable. (I also suspect that they believe that once the President is out of office, they'll be able to wash their hands of Trump Administration policies that turn out to be highly unpopular.)

I am reminded of a saying that I heard once: There's no such thing as managing expectations; you either meet them, or you don't. Big picture, I think that the federal government has been failing to meet people's expectations of it for some time now. And given an explanation for that failure which claims the root cause are federal workers and elected officeholders who are actively hostile to the well-being of the public, and the Trump Administration has a convenient scapegoat for breaking things: that the process was sabotaged by Democrats and/or "the Deep State."

President Trump is often derided as a buffoon, and I can understand why... he certainly doesn't have a problem with playing one on television. But he isn't stupid; he really does understand, and channel, the anger, bitterness and frustration of any number of Americans for whom things have simply Stopped Working. And he understands what feels like creating solutions to them. There have been some missteps (there's a reason why immigration enforcement is focused almost exclusively on Blue states now), but the Trump Administration understands how their voters want to feel, and have pushed policy in that direction.

Hence the chaos and confusion around the sunsetting of the penny. The goal wasn't to solve a business problem, such as the National Association of Convenience Stores might outline. It was to be able to hold up the $56 million that the Treasury is no longer spending to mint the coins, and imply that that money is part of a bigger package of lower expenditures which would justify tax cuts. And that job has been done. But the Administration's exclusive focus on those people it perceives as loyal voters has, time and again, cost them the ability to make inroads with the rest of the public. As Mr. Lenard points out, there has been a constituency for doing away with the penny for decades. A gracefully-managed wind-down of the coin would certainly have earned points with people. But that isn't a draw for an Administration that's bent on demonstrating that the minority of the public that actively supports it is all that they need.

Bubbly

This is, according to the parking lot attendant, an "indoor amusement park" named Bubble Planet. It's what's taken over what used to be Toys'R'Us in Bellevue. From what I've gathered, the place seems to be a bunch of different ball pits, but I didn't go inside, so I don't know for sure. (They also seem to have a side hustle in parking... it's not free to use the lot.)

What's interesting about this place is that it appears to be the first permanent resident of the building since Toys'R'Us folded back in 2018, I wouldn't have thought that the place would have remained vacant (other than Spirit Halloween showing up for a few months a year) for so long. Although maybe it's a sign of the times... there aren't much in the way of large retail tenants that could use so large a space.

Given that they've painted the building's facade, I presume that Bubble Planet is intending to be around for quite some time. We'll see... I haven't seen much in the way of indoor amusement parks; maybe they're on to something that will blow up. 

 

Big Ten-Four

Target is introducing a new in-store initiative aimed at improving customer interactions and reversing a sales slump.

The “10-4” program, confirmed by Bloomberg News, directs employees to smile, make eye contact, and greet or wave at shoppers within 10 feet. When a customer comes within four feet, staff are encouraged to ask if they need assistance or how their day is going.

Target launches '10-4' program; employees must smile, greet shoppers within 10 feet

I'm curious how this initiative came about. I don't shop that often at Target, but that's mostly because the stores nearest to me are often unkempt and messy; a side-effect of price-sensitive shoppers opening packages to closely examine things or people being in too much of a rush to put things back on shelves. (I contrast this with the Target stores I was in when I visited New York a few years ago, which were clean and neatly kept up.) That, and their selection of a lot of the basics relies heavily on store brands, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but tend to think of store brands as being "value-priced," which often means that they're low-cost, but also of substandard quality.

The "10-4 program" doesn't really speak to any of that. Instead, it feels like asking Target's floor staff to fix a problem where the solution rests with the management of the business. When I go to certain stores, it's kind of the same: I receive a survey asking me how my interaction with this or that individual employee went, but never anything asking me about how my interaction with the business went.

I don't shop at Target because I'm not confident that I can find what I need in good (new in box) condition there, not because the employees aren't talkative enough. And Target, like a number of retailers, has come to rely on self-checkout to save money, which often means having to stand in long lines while 75+% of the checkstands are closed, because they're too cheap to pay people to work them. (Whole Foods leans super hard on this, apparently forgetting that a place that people have nicknamed Whole Paycheck shouldn't feel like an Aldi store.)

For me, the problem with Capitalism in the United States isn't that it's rapacious; it's that it's desperate. Target is trying to serve its shareholders first, and do just enough for customers that said shareholders won't complain that their rightful returns are being spend to fulfill what should be the core function of the business. Shopping at Target, at least the ones here in the Seattle suburbs, sucks because it's a poor experience. Whether that's because Target management thinks that the physical stores should simply be gigantic kiosks for an online business, or they simply aren't making enough money to adequately staff their locations, I'm unsure of. But I know that I don't like going there, and the times when I do remind me of why. Enforcing chattiness via policy isn't going to change that.

Unconcerned

I found this to be an interesting question/statement:

I wonder if you have an Ultimate Concern–or, I guess more to the point, if you’re conscious of what your ultimate concern is, and how beliefs and practices in your life tend to that ultimate concern.

That pivot, from being curious about a person to questioning how they live their lives, strikes me as more commonplace than I'd given it credit for. Author John Green made the statement above at the end first episode of Crash Course Religion: "Is Yoga a Religion?" And it served to, effectively, define everyone as having a religion. Mr. Green had noted theologian Paul Tillich's definition of religion, which is “the state of  being grasped by an ultimate concern.” So, if everyone has an ultimate concern, then everyone has a religion; they just may not know it.

(Interestingly, when I dropped Mr. Green's quote into Google, so that I could determine which episode of Crash Course Religion he'd said it, Google responded: "As an AI, Google Search does not have personal beliefs, consciousness, or an ultimate concern in the human sense; it operates based on its programming and the data it was trained on." Search is going to become much more interesting if all questions are considered to be addressed to the search engine itself.)

While Mr. Tillich structured his ultimate concern in such a way that everyone had one, I don't know that everyone else should do the same. For starters, at least as far as I'm concerned, it renders the both term itself and considerations of religion somewhere between meaningless and tautological. Why bother to define "religion" at all, if everyone has one, and that religion is defined by something else? But more importantly, it gets in the way of genuine curiosity about other people. Were I to encounter Mr. Green, he would have no reason to be curious about whether I had an ultimate concern; he could simply presume that I did, and any protestation to the contrary on my part was simply the result of ignorance.

And this habit, of making presumptions about people, and then treating those presumptions as inerrant regardless of what the people in question have to say about it, tends to create barriers between people. And I'm not sure that it offers anything generally useful in return. Sure, one or all parties to a conversation can simply decide they know certain facts about the others and be done with it, but that tends to obviate the need for conversation in the first place.

Because why bother asking the question: "What is religion?" is there's already an answer, and one that simply decrees that everyone has one? Why not start with the idea of an ultimate concern, and go from there? It would have been more open, and more useful, to the audience. And it could have answered the question that was the episode's title... determine if the practice of Yoga tends to the specific ultimate concerns of its practitioners, and there's the answer, packaged neatly into a box.

In the end, I think, that's part of the point. Totalizing assumptions about people assist in determining which predetermined category they belong in, and that helps people feel that they understand, without having to undertake the messy project or getting to know them well, the other people they interact with. The fact that this may do them a disservice is left aside.

Digital Letter 23

Remember Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs for short? They were a part of the big cryptocurrency boom that Bitcoin started, but they never really went anywhere, and wound up with a reputation for being mostly a vehicle for various frauds (a number of which were really just poor business decisions). The big problem with NFTs was the lack of a compelling use case. While some ideas have been floated, none of them really solved an identified problem better than what was currently available. And that, for the most part hasn't changed.

But it might. I was listen to a recent episode of the Decoder podcast, where host Nilay Patel was speaking with Lyft CEO David Risher. One of the things that they talked about was what Lyft was doing, and could do, for drivers, and Mr. Risher floated the idea of Lyft giving out what would basically be letters of recommendation. The letters would generally outline why Lyft felt they were an excellent driver, and recommend them for other service roles. They would also be created by generative automation.

And that's where NFT technology might prove useful. With a standard reference letter, it's always possible to contact the person who wrote it, and authenticate it that way. If a computer has written the letter, that method doesn't work. It's possible to keep a database of all of the letters, but then the database would need to have enough information to positively identify the recipient; one doesn't want all the John Smiths to be able to claim the achievements of one. And that would make the database a target for information thieves.

Given that an NFT is basically just a digital file of some sort with a blockchain-enabled certificate of authenticity attached to it, it could solve the problem. Whomever the driver shares the letter with can verify that it was actually issued by Lyft, without exposing some sort of database of personal information.

To be sure, I'm not into the technology of cryptocurrencies, and so this may be over-engineering something that has a much simpler solution. But it strikes me, at least at first thought, as being a potential use case for a technology that's been searching for one for some time now. 

Post-it Pessimism

Back in August, NPR asked the under-40 set some questions:

If you're under 40, how have concerns about affordability shaped your life? Have they changed how you typically vote? Delayed a big life decision?

The whole exercise seemed calculated to bring out the gloom in people, and judging from the responses, it did.

The answers are short; they're presented as if typed onto Post-it Notes, and all of the responses printed in the story fit on to one or two of them. And because it was simply an open call for responses, they are, as NPR points out, not a representative sample.

But what readers shared helps highlight a steep challenge facing Democrats and Republicans alike as they work to win over these voters, who are collectively expected to make up more than half the electorate in 2028.

I'm not so sure about that. Mainly because while it's clear that the respondents aren't a representative sample of the American public, it's also likely true that they aren't a representative sample of NPRs under-40 audience. Remember the questions were asking about how financial concerns were shaping people's lives and politics. Audience members whose response was "I've got this," or "I think I'm managing," wouldn't have written in... there would have been no reason to.

Not that there's nothing there. American economic policy has been something of a train wreck for some time now. But that's because, as I remember George Will putting it once, American society doesn't really take steps to avoid problems; it allows them to happen, and then cleans up the mess. And there are plenty of recent examples of that tendency. It's also worth noting that the American political system apparently thrives on pessimism, stoking it at every turn to raise the stakes of elections. Once the message from any given candidate is that a win by the other will be the end of the world as we know it, it is any wonder that people's views of the current state of the world are more easily predicted by their partisan identities than the actual fundamentals?

And the media isn't blameless here, either. We all know that "if it bleeds, it leads" is a common journalistic outlook, but there's also the habit of talking about issues in terms of "how worried people should be" in order to convey a sense of seriousness to the audience. It might be good for that, but it also conveys the sense that anxiety is, in and of itself, as appropriate response to the broader world, even though there's nothing about change that requires anxiety. In fact, anxiety tends to push back against the idea that change is possible.

It's this passivity that eventually becomes the problem. The collective we, as in American society as a whole, and I count myself in that number, have made a myriad of individual and group (if not collective) choices that have brought us to this place. And to the degree our choices have brought us here, they can take us somewhere else. It's going to be slow, and it's likely going to be expensive and/or painful. And I think that's what's really in play here... the "young" people who responded to NPR's call for input are seeing that the pain that other people are working to avoid is going to be visited upon them later. And they're understandably pessimistic about that. But I'm not sure of the utility of constantly reminding people of that, or of presenting it as the outlook of entire age cohorts, rather than just a self-selected sampling.

Dreamed Up

The state Republican Party in California has apparently given up on attempting to support Red states in their efforts maintain/expand their majority in the House of Representatives, and are walking away from their opposition to Proposition 50, which would suspend the bipartisan commission in charge of drawing the state's Congressional districts.

California is a Blue state, a Republican message that effectively comes down to, "Yes, hold on your ideals while our compatriots in the rest of the nation use them against you," was doomed from the start. Why anyone bothered with opposing Proposition 50 in the first place is beyond me; it was clearly going to win, especially given that President Trump has been going from one Red state to another, demanding that legislatures alter their district boundaries to shore up Republican chances of retaining control of the House of Representatives. And Republicans as a whole are no better than anyone else about holding onto ideals once they become even slightly expensive; see how their commitments to state's rights have evaporated. What message they were going to use to appear to the political middle was never clear.

The problem of gerrymandering, however, isn't one that lies with politicians; it's one that lies with the public, and it always has. The term "gerrymander," after all, dates back to 1812. Which means for nearly the entire history of the United States, politicians have realized that there were people whose votes they could count on, and who wouldn't protest the efforts that they would undertake to make those votes more important than others. As long as there's no wrong way to get to the right outcome, this is going to be what happens.

And it's worth pointing out that there's little that anyone could have done to prevent this current race to the bottom. Even if Congress had, at some point in the past, passed anti-Gerrymandering legislation at the Federal level, it's unlikely that the the current Republican-controlled Congress would have resisted calls from the President to repeal, or at least suspend it. There's no viable way to protect legislation from legislators, and there never will be.

President Trump's political instincts demand that he always insert himself into conflicts, and as Blue and Red America become more hostile to one another, the President is just as much beholden to that conflict as he's an instigator of it. Whether it was due to his own temperament or the wishes of his voter base, President Trump seems to have gone out of his way to implement policies that would divide the nation into "for" and "against" camps. It's possible that he feels a need to implement the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 in the most divisive way possible. It's clear that he understands that it's alienating people; otherwise, there would be no need for this gerrymandering project in the first place. The California GOP pretending that the state's Democratic voters are unaware that the President plans to use a Congressional majority to punish them was never going to work.

Over Muddied Waters

Last week, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon - who remains a vocal supporter - claimed there was a "plan" to secure a third term for Trump.

"Trump is going to be president in '28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that," Bannon told The Economist. "At the appropriate time, we'll lay out what the plan is."
Trump does not rule out seeking third term - but says he will not use VP loophole

Part of the problem with the Democrats still not having their act together in terms of advancing strong contenders for the Presidency in 2028 is that it leaves room for garbage like this. While it's possible that the "plan" could simply be whining to the Supreme Court that President Trump is entitled to a do-over of some sort, and hoping that the Republican-appointed justices are partisan enough to pretend whatever arguments put forth should matter to anyone, the most likely way that Donald Trump remains President is that the administration declares some sort of bogus "emergency," Congressional Republicans still feel beholden enough to him to go along with it, and they count on the fact that the Judiciary has no way of enforcing whatever adverse rulings it hands down.

But Joe Biden made his disingenuous "bridge President" statements years ago, and the Democratic Party still doesn't seem to have started the work of coming up with who their next candidate is going to be. California Governor Gavin Newsom seems to be looking at the job, but that's really about it. And sure, this upcoming Presidential election cycle wouldn't be the first one where someone previously unknown jumps out of the field to run away with the primary election, but there isn't a field at this point. Absolutely no one seems interested in getting the first mover advantage here. So I'm curious what everyone is waiting for. (It's possible that people are still convinced that if they simply stay out of the way, the Republicans will self-destruct, but one would think that this tactic has been demonstrated to be a bad one by this point.)

The thing is, this doesn't strike me as the sort of situation in which anyone who puts their head above the parapet risks being sniped. Sure, the Trump Administration is going to go after anyone they think might be gaining some level of name recognition, but in an environment as partisan as the current one, that seems more like an advantage than a problem.

It's possible the issue is that the Centrist vs. Progressive divide is hard at work, and some number of people are waiting (hoping) for the midterms to choose a (temporary) victor in that conflict before they make a move. It makes an amount of sense to me, but I'm not a political scientist... when I found out that there were going to be five papers due in the first semester of PolySci 101, I promptly changed majors. So I suspect that my guess isn't any better than the bottom 15th percentile. But it's clear that something's going on. I think that the Democrats need resolve it prior to Steve Bannon telling a media outlet that, at the appropriate time, they'll lay out their plan to have Donald Trump anointed the messiah. Even if only to see who he can get a rise out of.

P.S.: By the way, I don't buy for a moment that President Trump would be above running for Vice President, with the expectation being that whomever was supposedly running to be President resigning as soon as the election results are in. If he actually thinks it will work (a.k.a., that SCOTUS would play along), it's absolutely on the table. 

Clean Living

Even before the final bankruptcy of Rite-Aid, which resulted in the closure of all of the Rite-Aid and Bartell's Drugs locations that weren't converted into CVS pharmacies, there were neighborhoods in the Seattle area where drugstores were thin on the ground.

Like here, for instance.

The Northwest Kidney Centers is in a former Rite Aid location that shut down some years ago. After that, a Walgreens moved into the now-empty store seen the right, just beyond the Taco Bell. (That side of the intersection is Seattle proper.) The Walgreens was there for a few years before it too closed, perhaps a year or two ago. Where people in this area go for their prescriptions now, I don't know. There had been a Fred Meyer store a few blocks further south into Seattle that people could have used, but it's also closed. I think that there is a shopping center with a supermarket, and perhaps a pharmacy to the west of this location, but it's a mile or two down the road.

There are still a few independent drugstores here and there, but CVS and Walgreens have most of the local market that isn't served by supermarket pharmacies. CVS didn't keep all of the Rite-Aid and Bartell's locations open, and, as seen here, Walgreens has also had some contraction in the local area. We'll see if the new acquisition stabilizes things, and people who need medications continue to have nearby places to get them. 

Decorated

A Halloween skull decoration, tucked into a bush.
 

Open-Door Policy

Being opposed to ICE and the President's initiatives on H1B visas give the impression that the Democrats are in favor of completely open borders, or a nationwide variation on the former "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy; anyone who can get into the country prior to being caught is granted indefinite leave to stay, regardless of whether their entry was legal or not. In a nutshell, Democratic contrarianism towards President Trump is pushing them to do things that imply policy positions that they may not actually hold.

If you ask many Democrats if they actually support unlimited, unrestricted immigration to the United States, the answer will be "no." But if you ask them to define the limits, many are hard-pressed to block anyone other than obviously dangerous criminals from entering.

Precisely who the constituency for expansive immigration policy is tends to be unclear... recent immigrants tend to have no problem with people having to follow the rules. Sure, there are plenty of people who would like to see the United States have no rules for who can enter, but many of those sorts are willing to enter regardless of what rules are in place; and because they're not here legally, they can't vote. There's a lot to said for compassion on poor people in other countries who would be faced with a years-long wait, if they were ever granted legal entry at all, but again, those people don't comprise a voting block. And part of the reason why Donald Trump is President again is that many people who do vote felt that not enough was being done to manage (or control, if you will) the inflow of people to the country.

This creates a de facto Democratic policy of treating ignoring entry requirements as perhaps an aggravating factor in other offenses, but as something that it can be ignored in and of itself. And that is a fairly unpopular policy. The Democratic party line can be that any willingness to enforce immigration law is simply thinly veiled racism, but again, that's not going to put another Democrat in the White House, or more of them into Congress.

While it may look as if President Trump and the current Republican Representatives and Senators are going to finally drop the straw that breaks the camel's back onto the beast any moment now, it's looked like that for quite some time, and the animal is still holding up admirably. I don't think the camel has even broken a sweat thus far. And that means that the Democrats are going to have to get out their with affirmative policy proposals that are something other than "The opposite of whatever President Trump has done this week." And that's likely going to mean telling the activist class to cool it for a while, or at least agitate for things that have some broader level of public support.

Metal Heads

LinkedIn has a newsfeed, which, I suspect, is mainly there to drive "engagement." Mainly because it feels less informative that rage-baiting. News that would help the LinkedIn community navigate the current business environment tends to take a very distant back seat to the sorts of splashy stories that people are likely to respond to... and have those responses responded to.

So this morning on LinkedIn News was this: Amazon sees robots eliminating need for 600,000 future jobs. Which, to be sure, overstates things a bit. The Verge has a headline that I think is a bit more in line with the aspirational nature of the supposed goal: Amazon hopes to replace 600,000 US workers with robots, according to leaked documents.

In any event, the response on LinkedIn was about what one would expect. The "Top Perspectives" they selected to present to people were more pessimistic than optimistic about what this change would mean with a few posts simply breaking the story down for the benefit of those who lacked a subscription to The New York Times.

One "Top Perspective," however, stood out to me for its use of illustration... namely this one:

Not only does it treat Amazon's goal for automation as a foregone conclusion, it's just pretty poor-quality generative system artwork. "We want are taking our jobs?" Really? Guy couldn't spend three minutes to put better text on the signs? It's ironic in that this really illustrates the threat that automation will likely pose to a lot of people: As long as something is fast and cheap, low levels of quality are acceptable. So there's no incentive to turn to people for better outputs.

I understand the need to turn a picture around quickly in order to be one of the first responses to a breaking story; LinkedIn often selects its "Top Perspectives" from commentary that was on the site prior to a story actually showing up in the newsfeed. But this tends to become a case of raindrops blaming the downpour for the flood; if society at large, out of a sense of its own poverty, tends to begrudge people their salaries. Take this story from LinkedIn News, about the rise of job seekers turning to generative automation to create high-quality headshots. Okay, so "a photographer may charge hundreds of dollars for a photoshoot and digital prints" (as an aside, that "may" is doing some Olympic-level lifting here). A lot of people charge hundreds of dollars for specialist work... it's how they support themselves. Price-sensitivity on the part of Americans is creating a situation in which people are looking to automate away other people's livelihoods while hoping that their own will be spared.

That's unlikely to work out in the way people hope it might. According to the piece in The Verge, Amazon hopes to use automation to cut hiring by 160,000 people by 2027. Which would save about 30¢ per item sold. For Amazon, that adds up to a lot: $12.6 billion. But here's the rub... in order to realize those savings (which Amazon's shareholders are going want paid out them in some form or another), they can't pass them on to customers in the form of lower prices. So 160,000 are left looking for another way to support themselves, and the only people likely to see any tangible benefit are big investors. And the job market always rots from the tail... the people who are being paid handsome salaries to make the important decisions aren't going to willingly greenlight technology that would render them unemployed.

The thing about a race to the bottom is that the only prize is being the first one to hit bottom. Still, sometimes even stupid prizes are better than losing, and the costs that come with that. As people feel more and more precarious in their economic lives, doing unto others before it is done unto them starts to feel like a form of security. But there's never any real security once things get to everyone for themselves. Being faster to turn to automation in an attempt to preserve what one has becomes simply a trigger for the Paradox of Thrift. It's a game where the only winning move is for everyone not to play. But a crappy computer-generate picture is seen as better than paying someone for a quality one, while people wonder why no-one seems to value anyone else.

If You Insist

For now, most are willing to take a government check, said John Hansen, the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union. That’s “better than losing the farm.”
Can Trump deliver a farmer bailout in time?

There's government spending, as the saying goes, and then there's our government spending. But that's not to say that everyone tends to like money being given to them, while begrudging it to others, for the same reasons. The American Left, with its bipartite view of the world, tends to be upset when money is given to "élites;" mainly because they so-called élite already have money. (For a lot of people, it's having money that makes one a member of the {as always, poorly-defined} élite in the first place.)

The American Right, on the other hand, tends to have moral reasons against giving money to "the undeserving other," one of two groups of bad people in its tripartite worldview. But that reasoning tends to be that people who work hard and apply themselves can be successful without needing to rely on either and handout, or a hand up, from anyone else. Unless, that is, they're the one's who are hurting... then there seem to be plenty of reasons why simply doing things correctly doesn't lead directly to success in life, and redistribution is justified. (As usual, the political class plays a part in this, as when Conservative politicians telling their rural constituencies that they're overtaxed to pay for urban layabouts.)

And I think that this is the thing that tends to bother Liberals about the Conservative attitude towards the Welfare State; that it smacks of "Welfare for me, but not for thee." Of course, it isn't that simple (most instances of perceived hypocrisy aren't), but without falling back on racial stereotypes, Conservatives tend to have a hard time explaining the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving outside of people they like versus those they dislike. And this feeds a general idea that Conservative talk of "small government" is really just a smokescreen, deployed in the service of what's really a plan to hoard scarce resources for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, self-image is wrapped up in a lot of this. A person's understanding of themselves colors the way they understand many other things in their lives. And many people's perceptions of themselves as good, and others as bad, tends to be much more durable than anything in the real world.

Conversant

So I went down to se No Kings: The Sequel yesterday, mainly to take some pictures. It was your typical suburban crowd, mostly older people (I think that many of the 20-somethings went to the downtown Seattle protest, instead). It was a typical protest with a bunch of signs, and people would honk their horns in support as they drove through.

Except for this guy:

He lay on his horn as he drove through the intersection in his giant "I'm compensating for something" pickup truck (it was way too clean to be a working vehicle) and lowered his driver's side window just enough to hold his hand out and give the protestors the middle finger.

The protestors, at least the ones on the corner where I was, jeered in response. Partisan signalling from both sides.

When I talk with people on either side of the political divide, I'm struck by the degree to which they understand their own viewpoint to be apparently self-evident, and how that then justifies confusion, and sometimes anger, about what the other side is up to. But there's also a certain pride in not understanding opposing partisans, and that's something that I suspect is more corrosive than it's given credit for. Because once people are in the mode of "to understand all is to forgive all," that presupposes that they see holding a different viewpoint from themselves as something that requires forgiveness.

And as more Americans start to see one another as deliberately perverse, dialog becomes less acceptable. Because not only are people less likely to reach out to "the other side," but such outreach becomes a form of treachery to others on one's "own side."