The Hard Way

A new White House video features mothers whose children's deaths were linked to undocumented immigrants rebuking actress Selena Gomez for her Instagram post in which she cried over President Trump's plans for mass deportations.
Scoop: New White House video has "Angel Moms" blasting Selena Gomez on immigration

Why not have Americans taking aim at one another over dueling visions of immigration? It's not like the United States has any other problems that need solving. But as President Trump pointed out (once he'd safely won the election) solving problems like uncomfortably high prices for everyday goods will be hard. Lining up people to be in culture war videos, on the other hand, is easy.

I'm curious to see how all of this plays out. I'm very curious about how President Trump thinks that all of this is going to play out. After all, his so-called "Angel Moms" aren't really talking to anyone who isn't already in the Trumpist camp. I don't see how bashing Selena Gomez is going to win converts to the cause. And if Trump's 2025 term is anything like his 2017 time in the Oval Office, he's going to see the size of his coalition shrink during that time due to poor handling of things that people actually care about. No one's going to attempt to persuade members of Congress in safe Democratic seats that a Constitutional amendment to allow Donald Trump to run again is a good idea because they watched a video of someone complaining to an actress.

As I noted, it turns out, 8 years ago (nearly to the day):

Jonah Goldberg noted that Donald Trump is the third consecutive President to promise to unite the country, and that he's going to be the third consecutive President to fail. And I think that this is because he's not going to be able to direct Republican energy away from consolidating Culture War "victory" at the expense of more Liberal/Progressive elements of society in the same way that President Obama was unable to direct Democratic energy.

The real difference now is that I don't believe that President Trump has any intention of trying to redirect that revanchist energy. I suspect that he thinks that he's special enough to be the one person who wins people over with open Culture War combat or that this time, it will motivate the Republican base to stick with him. The problem with "owning the Libs" is that it presumes that one will never need those "Libs" or the people who care about them, to support anything one does. Now that there's a split between the Left-leaning part of the nation and the Right-leaning part of it, the idea that those two groups never need to cooperate on anything has to be true, or problems arise.

It's one thing to have an understanding that nothing lasts forever and the world as one knows it is going to undergo significant change. It's quite another to realize that some notable part of that change could very well be the dissolution of the nation in which one lives. I think the Democrats have put off learning the lesson that they need a Populist cult of personality of their own, if they're going to stay relevant, but I don't think they'll be able to avoid it for much longer. (I both do and don't want to know who their supposed savior will turn out to be.) And I think that once both sides appear to have internalized the idea that the best way to look like they're doing something useful is to pick a fight across party lines, everything else starts to slowly grind to a halt, and those people who aren't true believers start to drift away, if for no other reason than they still need to eat.

Nation-states aren't constrained by the "third-generation curse." They can persist much longer before the dominant priority becomes enjoying wealth, as opposed to growing or maintaining it. But we may be watching this catch up to the United States. Regardless of what one thinks of Selena Gomez' tearful video lamenting the changes in the nation's formal treatment of migrants, there are better ways to spend public resources than getting people together to complain at her. (Especially for an administration that's intent on carving trillions from the annual budget.) Sure, it's a small thing overall, but that's kind of the point; the habit of carving out small exceptions to plans when the opportunity to kick the other side presents itself rarely stays small. And the more it grows, the more it becomes central to everything. Because the hard work of solving bigger problems than hurt partisan feelings stays hard.

Joe Average

There's been a lot made of the fact that the most people believe that they are "above average" drivers. Depending on whom one asks, the number ranges from 80 to 92% of people surveyed. It's become something of a joke at the public's expense. When it came up in conversation, a few days ago, there was an attempt to demonstrate the effect by asking everyone if they felt that they were an above average driver. People's discomfort was palpable; people didn't want to be the sort of overestimate their own abilities, yet they didn't want to admit to poor driving skills, either.

When the instigator of all this asked me, if I was an above average driver, something occurred to me, and I said: "I hope not."

The problem with the average in the United States is that it's consistently viewed as mediocre, at best. Given this, the average drive is presumed to be a rolling public safety crisis. But if that were true, automobile accidents would a lot more common than they are. On average, people tend to rack up one collision claim every 17 years or so. Which is a pretty good amount of time. But it's worth pointing out that this doesn't mean they were driving poorly, or driving at all, at the time. My old station wagon was in two collisions in the 19 years that I owned it. The first was when the person behind me took their foot off the brake at a stop light and ran into the rear of my car, and the second was a person who struck my car in a parking lot, then fled the scene (but, it turns out, not before bystanders took down his license plate). So that's two for me, but neither of them point to my being at fault. In fact, I managed to put more than 250,000 miles on my car, without ever being in a serious accident. So, I reasoned, if most drivers were better at it than I was, that likely meant that the roads were pretty safe. And what could be wrong with that?

And I started to think, more broadly, that the social tendency to not only see oneself as exceptional, but that being exceptional was a minimal standard to be considered worth anything, isn't helpful. It casts the average person as being objectively poor at nearly everything. They're "weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid," and incompetent on top of it. And not casting oneself as exceptional is buying into that characterization of oneself. But if one views oneself as a constant, and says: You know, I'm not half bad at this," then the average can be better. It still might not be something to aspire to, in the grand scheme of things, but it's not an admission of mediocrity. Maybe the world would be a somewhat better place if people thought better of one another in this way.

No Worries

We're choosing to spend more and more time with ourselves, more and more time, year after year, without feeling that special, important biological cue to be around other people. And that, I think, is something to be quite worried about.
Derek Thompson

I would like to think that this is the evolution of language in action. That "worry" is gradually shifting from, as Merriam-Webster puts it "to feel or experience concern or anxiety" to "work to make a change in a situation." Because worry, in and of itself, doesn't help anything. Taking action does. But maybe we aren't. Perhaps when journalists ask if people should be worried, and someone says "yes," everyone involved thinks that they're doing people a favor by adding just that much more concern or anxiety to the world.

If that's the case, it would be a shame. In Mr. Thompson's case, choosing to spend more time with other people, and less in solitary pursuits, is not particularly difficult to accomplish. It's uncomfortable for some, but most Americans could likely get away with it. It might even lead to some larger, and welcome, changes in the society at large. So why not just say "do it?"

To be sure, I have no idea. Maybe Mr. Thompson doesn't consider himself qualified to tell other people what to do. (Although I suspect that this isn't the case, from what I've heard of his podcast, Plain English.) Perhaps it's more likely that he understands that, isolating or not, people enjoy what they're currently doing. But that's simply speculation on my part, given that I'm not a mind reader. In any event, I do expect that a more active way of speaking about perceived problems would help. Sometimes, there aren't ready solutions to things. (Not that worry helps in those cases, either.) But when there are, having people go for it seems a better course of action than counseling concern.

Scrubbing

File Under: He didn't think that anyone would notice?

President Trump has come up with a novel plan to deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Ethnic cleansing.

I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.
Trump suggests his plan for Gaza Strip is to ‘clean out the whole thing’

I suspect that the biggest problem with this whole scheme is the fact that it immediately creates the suspicion that President Trump is attempting to help out the Israeli far right, given that, on his first day in office, he lifted sanctions against Israeli settlers deemed responsible for the murders of Palestinians in the West Bank. The United States' pretense of being an honest broker in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had worn thin a lot time ago; so while it's somewhat refreshing that President Trump doesn't bother attempting to maintain it, that doesn't give him any more credibility with the Palestinians or their Arab supporters in the region. While he stopped short of calling for the permanent removal of the Palestinians from Gaza, using the words "temporary or long-term" instead, I can't imagine that anyone believes that the Israeli settler movement wouldn't be on the ground the day after the last Gazan left. Or that they wouldn't be prepared to use force to keep them from ever returning.

This is a part of the President's well-known M.O., find a conflict, and then ally himself with one side, and champion their issues. And, hear me out here, it might be for the best. I'm one of those people who thinks that the United States really doesn't have any more of a role to play in this whole thing. As I've said before, no-one honestly views the United States as a disinterested third party whose primary motivation is peacemaking. Alleged support for a "two-state solution" notwithstanding, pretty much everyone understands that the United States is backing Israel. And maybe Donald Trump, his administration and his family will be so open about it that it puts and end to the entire charade, and the Palestinians and their backers simply refuse to come to the table when the United States is present. It's not a state of affairs that could possibly make anything worse.

Indications

I was out shopping, and came across this billboard:

Still preaching to the choir, I see...

So far, so normal. I've been seeing the Christian Aid Ministries billboards in and around the Seattle area for years. They wander like lost souls, looking for people to lead to someone's most recent attempt to plant a megachurch in the area. While the "Unchurched Belt" has shifted, Washington State is still a part of it (even if it perhaps rightly belongs in New England), and so given Christian Aid Ministries' tactic of placing "billboards around a number of highly populated cities in the U.S. and Canada. Anywhere [...] where people seem to be 'walking away from God and truth'," it makes sense that they'd still be trying to put butts in pews.

But what I started to notice is that there were a lot more of the billboards then was usual. As I noted, previously, they tended to wander around the area; appearing to do slow circuits of a given set of billboards around a given locale. Recently, however, it seemed that they, and the Pro-Life Across America billboards, were showing up in all of their usual places at once.

Again, I really didn't think much of it. After all, Donald Trump is starting a new term as President, and Evangelicals appear to see him as some sort of positive influence on the country; and so maybe this was what was afoot... A hope that an apparent shift towards the Republican Party (even though it didn't manifest around here) would result in more receptiveness to Christian messaging. Not what I would have recommended, but then, I'm not in advertising, so what do I know?

But then I cam across another billboard. This one, unfortunately, in a bad place for me to photograph it. It was advertising billboard space. And then another, and another. And it clicked. Perhaps what this was really about was a slump in outdoor print advertising, which allowed organizations like Christian Aid Ministries and Pro-Life Across America to buy up more than their usual number of billboards cheaply. Maybe I wasn't the only person who tended to pay little attention to billboards. I think the most common subject for billboards are the local Native American-run casinos, and I've been hearing recently (via Michael Lewis' "Against the Rules" podcast) that the rise of legalized sports gambling has been damaging their revenues. Sports betting is legal in Washington State, and so this may be playing into things.

It may, however, be the case that there is a more prosaic explanation... the technology economy hasn't been doing very well recently, and so potential advertisers are pulling back as their overall revenues shrink. Advertising dollars for billboards are, accordingly, drying up, and this is allowing less well-funded operations like religious groups to inhabit more of the space. If so, it would be just a another example of an economic indicator that's unintuitive on its face, but that points to useful information.

I don't have access to the numbers that would help substantiate that theory. So it could simply be a wild, and inaccurate, guess. But I will have to pay more attention to the billboards in the coming months, and see if it's borne out.

And Again

Back in 2004, the BBC had a call for photographs of what was going on in people's local areas. I don't remember if it was a general thing, or a contest, but either way, I grabbed my camera and headed out. There was a small recurring demonstration not very far from where I lived, and that seemed like the sort of thing that would make for interesting pictures.

November, 2004

I was driving by today, and they were still at it. And since I had my camera with me, I stopped and took some more pictures.

January, 2025

I admire the commitment of the regulars. They've been at this for more than 20 years now, rain or shine. Even though, as one of them said to me, they haven't saved the world yet.

I drop by every so often, when I think to, or when I'm driving by and see them. They recognize me now; the days when their response would be "Who are you working for?" and "Why are you taking pictures?" are long gone. Now it's: "Hey, good to see you!" and "It's been a while!"

The core group is about 9 or 10 people, but the size of the gatherings ebb and flow with events. When people are really worked up, there might be twenty or thirty people out there. When it's business as usual, attendance can drop to as low as six.

Despite the idea that protest is for the young, most of the people there are older than I am. That's also lead to some attrition in their numbers as people have grown sick or disabled, or simply died. Younger people don't seem to be interested in joining them.

I expect them to keep at it until the last of them has become too infirm to attend. And I'll keep dropping in from time to time, if for no other reason than to let them know that someone is still interested.

Unsociable

I was in college when I met my first Socialists, and they struck me as hostile. Angry, really. Angry at systems that allowed for inequality and the accumulation of wealth, angry at society for aiding and abetting such systems. And angry at me, for being unwilling to join their cause as a matter of faith. My preference for waiting to see how a Socialist government in the United States would operate in practice, I was told, had earned me a spot up against the wall when the Revolution came. One was either With them or Against them, and the choice needed to be made then.

I didn't care for being threatened, and so I decided that I didn't care for Socialism.

In the intervening years, I've mellowed, and so, it seems has the general strain of Socialism that I encounter. Rather than taking its cues from Marxist rage, much of the socialism I encounter today looks to the Nordic countries for its model, promising a society of mutual care where people aren't left behind by those seeking profits instead of the general welfare.

It's kinder and gentler, to be sure, but I'm not convinced that its any more workable. I am of the opinion that Scandinavians do not care for one another because they are Socialist, but their state Socialism comes out of a preexisting care for one another.

And that's an important distinction. Capitalism, or what many people call capitalism (I suspect that "corporatism" might be a better name), is not what drives the United States to feel like a place where people simply don't care about one another. The fact that many Americans tend to feel that caring for others leaves them exposed and vulnerable is a much better explanation. A change in economic system is not going to change that, especially not quickly. It's going to take a much broader societal shift, and one that I haven't seen any viable plans for thus far.

Arm, Presented

There have been a lot of pictures of Elon Musk and his stiff-armed salute at the inauguration floating around. Like this one that I encountered on LinkedIn:

What I would like to know, to be honest, is what's up with that face he's making?

Each photograph, it seems come with a different take on whether or not Mr. Musk was or was not making the Nazi salute (I find the idea that he was making a supposedly Roman-inspired Fascist salute to not be much better), or if Mr. Musk is or is not a (wannabe) Nazi.

And I think that is, basically the point. The ambiguity of the Musk salute is a feature, not a bug. It allows him to speak to two different groups of people, who may not themselves get along, and each can see in his actions what, and who, they want to.

For starters, let's face it, there are still Segregationists and other forms of White Supremacists in the United States today. There were a good number of them when the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s were passed, not all of them have died and some of them have passed their beliefs on to their children and/or other people younger (Or maybe older, who knows?) than themselves. And it's a safe bet that some percentage of these people would happily, if privately, call themselves Nazis, neo-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. Just because a movement winds up being history's villains doesn't mean that everyone thinks that they were wrong. And regardless of what one thinks of such people, their votes still count as much as everyone else's, and accordingly, they can still swing elections. And this means that people, like Donald Trump, will court them. And when Elon Musk gives what can be plausibly described as a Nazi (or even a Fascist) salute, they feel valued. And may even feel buoyed that Mr. Musk is owning some Libs and/or Jews.

As an aside, while this is what's sometimes referred to as a "dog whistle," that's a misnomer, because, as seen in the photographs, it's being done out in the open. Dog whistles, more properly, are almost a form of Cant, where "if you know, you know," and if one doesn't know, one doesn't suspect. A genuine dog whistle is insider-speak that comes across as innocuous to the uninitiated.

But there are also people who want and/or need something from the Trump Administration and Mr. Musk, who would really rather not be associated with anything Nazi. (The Nazis are, after all, some of history's biggest villains.) For them, the ambiguity of the situation allows them to keep their hands clean. They're not supporting a Nazi, because Mr. Must isn't a Nazi. He even said so. It was just some ancient Roman thing... everyone's blowing this all out of proportion. So they can continue to support the cause, without having to admit that they're backing the Bad Guys.

This works because the United States has an aspect of what one might call Confessional Culture to it, where things become "real" only when they are admitted to. So as long as Mr. Musk doesn't confess to being a would-be Nazi, he isn't. Now there might come a time when the label is forced in him whether he wants it or not, but that time hasn't come yet.

And a good portion of American politics works on just this sort of ambiguity. It's part of the reason why social trust is so low, especially between different political groups; hiding dishonesty in ambiguity is such a commonplace activity that most people simple assume that anyone they don't like who does anything slightly unclear is up to something malign.

Objection. Unresponsive.

I was listening to a recent installment of Freakonomics Radio; this one about Realtors. One of the people that Stephen Dubner spoke to was the National Association of Realtors' chief economist, Lawrence Yun. It was a fairly on-sided conversation. Mr. Dubner would ask a question, and Mr. Yun would respond with a barely-related (if that) talking point. It wasn't long before I started questioning is Mr. Yun had even heard, let alone understood, the questions.

If I ever have the chance to talk to a journalist who has interviewed people in government or industry, especially about a topic that may make the organization in question look bad, I'd like to ask them what goes through their minds during such circumstances.

The (perhaps perverse) incentives on the "broadcast" side are clear enough, I suppose. For people like Mr. Dubner, getting people to come on the show to speak about some or another topic is important; episodes can't all be him simply explaining things to an audience. For people like Mr. Yun, there is an obligation to the organization; he can't say anything that would validate any public dissatisfaction with Realtors or their role in the home buying/selling process. And it's likely that he was well-prepped by the NAR's legal department with exactly what he should say, and what topics to avoid or redirect.

So, I suppose what I don't understand is what's in it for the listeners. Although maybe I am the only person who finds a continual string of non-answers to simple questions annoying. Mr. Dubner was asking interesting and pertinent questions, and it seemed that he was being stonewalled at every turn, all so that the NAR could portray themselves as being unfairly put-upon. It was ironic that Mr. Yun implied that greedy lawyers had snowed people to obtain an adverse verdict.

A couple of lawyers were able to find two, three unhappy owners and make a lawsuit. And you have 9, 11 jury members, so you can count the number of people involved in the lawsuit.

Something tells me the number of people involved was somewhat larger than Mr. Yun lets on. I understand why Mr. Dubner didn't challenge him on this; after all, his producers have to keep booking people for the show. And that, perhaps, is where the problem lies. Mr. Dubner needs his guests more than they need him. If the NAR were the ones having to do the asking, Mr, Dubner could have been harder on them. But I suspect that, despite complaints in the comments section, that most people listening to the podcast were okay with the NAR representative's talking points and insinuations, believing them better than them not having been given a chance to speak for themselves.

I'm not of the opinion that anyone who didn't already support the NAR came away with a positive impression of the organization. And maybe that's part of the point, although it seems that the NAR would have wanted to show itself in a better light.

In the end, I'm starting to think that maybe the Freakonomics Radio audience, and I include myself in this, simply doesn't have high enough expectations of anyone involved. Or maybe there's just a lack of a good means to enforce those expectations; it's not as if tuning the podcast out would make guests any more forthcoming. And few people who think they need a Realtor are going to pass just because the NAR's president and chief economist come across as sleazy. Something tells me that people are getting what they're willing to pay for, and that everyone involved understands just how much that is.

Sculpted

"The Eagle" and the Space Needle

I went down to Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park this morning, with my camera, to take in some of the artworks.
 

Driving Crime

So it goes, basically, like this:

A small group of young men, two to four usually, steal two cars. They use the first stolen car to force their way into a retail establishment, using it as a battering ram to break through the doors and security gates at the entrance. They then take advantage of the breach they've created to loot the place of (and I'm not kidding) Pokémon cards, Gundam models or camera-equipped drones. Or whatever else the store sells that can be resold to people looking for lower than retail prices who won't ask questions. The thieves then pile the stuff into the second stolen car and make their getaway. The store owner(s), on the other hand, are left to clean up, file insurance claims, and have the entryway to their business replaced.

It turns out that the bollards in front of the store to prevent just this sort of thing were just a bit too widely spaced, and with the right angling...

The owner of the first car finds out that their vehicle is a) wrecked and b) evidence. The owner of the second car may be luckier, it may simply be found abandoned somewhere. Emphasis on the "may."

It's becoming a more and more common modus operandi in the greater Puget Sound area, because, for all its destructiveness, it's a con-violent crime; it happens in the middle of the night, when the stores are empty. And the value of the thefts tend the kept low by the fact that the thieves seem to have specific products in mind, and they leave the rest (which can often be much more valuable).

Still, it's a problem that's going to have to be dealt with. While none of the employees of the businesses hit that spoke with could be remotely described as "Trumpists," they were all frustrated at what they saw as lenient responses to the problem. One went so far as to describe being caught as "an invitation to a free dinner." Punishments tend to last only as long as it takes to cut off an ankle monitor and join up with the gang again.

For my more overtly Progressive acquaintances, this is simply another circumstance in which the middle class is too busy "being distracted" by "punching down" to see the "real problem," which is, of course, "billionaires." One need not be a Reactionary to roll one's eyes at the idea that the "99%" (Remember them?) realizing that they have common cause against everyone wealthier than themselves and forcibly redistributing the United States' wealth and resources will fix things. Still, there's something to be said for the idea that rising poverty and poor employment prospects for the lower-skilled is driving this, and any proposed solution to crime that relies on (or attempts to force) the destitute simply accepting their lot with equanimity and hope is doomed to fail. The perverse incentives are piling up too quickly.

Were it up to me, I'd start looking into ways to make the American economy less labor efficient. A culture that, generally speaking, leans into "every person for themselves" and therefore tends towards resource hoarding, is never going to get to a point where sharing overall prosperity with people who didn't (or couldn't) directly contribute to bringing it about will meet with broad social acceptance. Likewise, having more people put in less time individually is going to be a hard sell; the old predictions that people would eventually support themselves on 10 or 20 hours of work a week are likely never coming to pass. So breaking large enterprises down into smaller ones, with all of the duplication of efforts (HR departments, suppliers et cetera) that this entails strikes me as the best way to increase the demand for labor. I get that this seems like the fetishization of toil; it's about creating busy work that doesn't need to be done, just so that people can receive grudging paychecks. I also get that it's unlikely to ever happen... people have to share their slice of the pie, and so leans into zero-sum thinking, which is a big part of the problem.

But when a large-scale economic system is both highly-efficient and winner-take-most (of not all), it's going to leave people without the means to support themselves. Starting small businesses is not impossible, but it's a high-risk strategy with a low success rate: "Never bet the rent money" still applies, and so if rent money is all that people have, it's an unwise move. No one raindrop, it's said, ever accepts responsibility for the flood, but the deluge happens nonetheless, so a solution needs to be implemented. One that doesn't impose high costs would be ideal, but rejecting solutions out of a sense of poverty is what brought King County, and the United States more broadly, so this situation in the first place.

Misconceivable

Asking questions of generative automation chatbots may or may not a good way to learn about the world. But it may a useful way to understand the training data that went into the language models on the back end.

It occurred to me to give Perplexity, Chat GPT, Gemini and Copilot a simple prompt: "10 Common misconceptions," and see what came back. After all, there are a lot of different misconceptions floating around out there in the ether, and perhaps I could glean something interesting from the answers. I figured that there would be a decent level of overlap, so out of a possible total of forty, I was expecting maybe thirty unique answers. So I was a bit surprised when I only received a total of twenty-one.

Of the four, Chat GPT produced no unique answers; all of its answers were also on the lists that the other chatbots presented to me. It shared five items with Perplexity, six with Gemini and seven with Copilot. Chat GPT's full list is as follows:

1. Humans only use 10% of their brains
2. Shaving hair makes it grow back thicker
3. Vikings wore horned helmets
4. The Great Wall of China is visible from space
5. Napoleon was extremely short
6. Goldfish have a 3-second memory span
7. Bats are blind
8. Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis
9. Lightning never strikes the same place twice
10. We only have five senses

Items 1 and 2 were on all four lists, which struck me as interesting, given that I was of the impression that #1 had been pretty thoroughly debunked some time ago. After that there was an interesting split. Perplexity and Chat GPT shared items 3 though 5, while sharing 6 through 9 with both Gemini and Copilot and 10 only with Copilot. The high correspondence between Chat GPT and Copilot makes a lot of sense, given that Copilot is a variation on Chat GPT. That may also be true of Gemini, but I'm not as certain about that.

Interestingly, outside of items 1 and 2, Perplexity and Copilot had no overlap, and Perplexity and Gemini had only "Sugar makes children hyperactive" in common.

Of the remaining ten "unique" misconceptions, they were fairly evenly distributed between the non-Chat GPT models.

Perplexity had four:

• Fortune Cookies are Chinese
• The Buddha Was a Fat, Jolly Figure
• Mozart Composed "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" as a Child
• You Lose Most of Your Body Heat Through Your Head

Gemini had three:

• Hair and nails continue to grow after death
• You can catch a cold by being cold
• All birds can fly

"All birds can fly" struck me as strange; I'd never heard that one before. It seemed more like something that a small child might believe, after having been told that just about every flying animal of any size that they've seen was some or another type of bird. But flightless birds aren't exactly rare.

Copilot also had three:

• Dropping a penny from a height can kill someone
• Seasons are caused by Earth's distance from the Sun
• Ostriches bury their heads in sand

One thing that I found interesting was the shifting usage of "Humans," "We" and "You" when the misconceptions were referring to people. And here it's worth noting that the various LLMs didn't always use the exact same verbiage for the same items. While Chat GPT related that "Humans only use 10% of their brains," Perplexity and Gemini favored "We only use 10% of our brain(s)" and Copilot went with: "You only use 10% of your brain."

But getting back to sussing out information about the models from the answers, it seemed fairly clear that a) the information was sourced primarily from English-language texts, and likely a lot of those from the United States, and b) that an effort had been made to avoid anything that might be controversial. I suspect that, at least in the United States, that most lists put together by actual people of "10 common misconceptions" would have at least one item that smacked of either racial stereotyping or conspiracy theories, if not both.

Given that it was something that I did on a whim with a minimalist prompt, however, it was interesting and thought-provoking. Given some of the items on the list, I would have expected more variety, but twenty-one out of a possible forty is a decent enough showing.

Soft Lies

Remote work exacerbated the divide between knowledge workers and management. While high-speed Internet is comparatively pricey in the United States, when compared to other countries, it's still inexpensive enough to be more-or-less ubiquitous, and, as a result, most people who can command a knowledge worker's salary can afford it. And a number of them expect that expenditure to free them from needing to actually commute to their jobs.

Employers, on the other hand, have started requesting, or requiring, people to come back to offices. The reasons for this are many, varied and in the mind of the beholder. Business executives claim to be looking for serendipity and interplay between co-workers to spark creativity and productivity. Distrustful workers claim that it's a cynical ploy to get people to quit; and thus lower headcount without resorting to laying people off. Some business analysts have noted that managing teams for output (as opposed for time and activity) is a skill, and when management doesn't have it, their lives are easier when everyone's in one place. Either way, it's something of a brewing fight, although given today's very soft job market, one where management has the upper hand.

This hasn't prevented people from being upset about it, and when people are upset, one can be sure that social-media types will be quick to step up and tell them "hard truths." Mainly, that they're right, and whomever disagrees with them is wrong, stupid, evil or some combination of the above.

And this is where my own brand of cynicism comes out to play. Because I've seen this movie before. Some time ago, in fact.

94.3 percent of the time [Senator] Obama never really tells the audiences anything uncomfortable though he boasts that he will 100 percent of the time. What he promises them instead is to tell people they don't like (auto executives and Wall Street fat cats) what THOSE GROUPS don't want to hear.
John Dickerson "Obama's Closing Argument" Slate Magazine, 21 April, 2008

And if pretending to tell people "uncomfortable things," "hard truths" or "things they don't want to hear," when one's really doing the opposite is pandering when a candidate for political office does it, it's pandering when some internet rando on LinkedIn or X does it.

People accept being pandered to because it affirms them and their worldviews. People like that. And I don't blame them. I'd probably like it, too, if it didn't immediately make me suspicious. But suspicious I am; along with dubious that people who run multi-million-dollar businesses don't know what they're doing.

But it's also true that I understand who wins when one fights the law, and so I prefer to work within the system. And doing that means understanding why the system (or, more accurately, it's management) does  what it does. And listening to rabble-rousers tends to work against that.

Main Street

Not a lot going on.

This is Main Street of the next suburb over. It's pretty quiet, which it is a lot of the time, unless there's some sort of event going on. The street was closed, and the parking spaces given over to the restaurants, during the SARS-2-CoV outbreak back in 2020, and it's been closed to automotive traffic ever since. The resulting detour is something of a pain, but people are used to it by now. What's interesting is that the closed street makes the place feel sleepier than it actually is. I think the particular mix of businesses is what leads to that, since one can find bustling places less than a block away.

Nested

I'm pretty sure that this is the nest of a bald eagle. They're pretty much the largest birds in this region that nest up high. Either that, or birds have discovered condominiums.

The problem with a photograph like this, of course, is that there's nothing to give it scale... if one doesn't know how big these power line towers are, it's difficult to guess at the size of nest on top of it. So maybe this picture, taken from a slightly different angle, will help with that.

King of Wishful Thinking

Joe Biden says he could have defeated Donald Trump.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence because one can paint it whatever color one wants. President Biden's counterfactual is an example of this. I understand the logic; if one presumes that Vice President Harris lost because she lost a greater vote share than Donald Trump did in the all-important "battleground/swing" states, then it stands to reason that if President Biden had been able to keep all of those votes, he would have won.

Except for the minor fact that there is absolutely no world in which President Biden kept all of his 2020 voter coalition.

For starters, by 2020, there were a lot of people who were fed up with the Trump Administration. By last year, it was the Biden Administration's turn to have worn out its welcome. It's really difficult to look back over his four years in office and imagine the majority of the public saying "yeah, gimme more of that." Not to mention the fact that President Biden had been showing his age during the 2020 campaign season; by last year, he was seeming positively decrepit. There was also the matter of being a "bridge." Candidate Biden had been able to read the room well enough to understand that people did think that he had eight years in the White House in him, but the fact that he never publicly committed to only serving a single term tipped his hand as to his ambitions, and those ambitions prevented him from having the Democratic party put the wheels of succession in motion, which they really needed to be doing. And Mr. Biden's apparent belief that he was owed two terms prevented him from getting down to business from the jump. Case in point; his Executive Order on border security from June of last year. There's no reason that should have waited until 2024, when it could have been just as easily enacted in June of 2021.

The President has run afoul of the same thing that plagued so many Democrats and their supporters, the idea that Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general were so self-evidently loathsome that any viable alternative was a shoe-in. Running a winning campaign takes work, work that Vice President Harris didn't have time to lay the groundwork for, and that President Biden apparently lacked both the energy and the mental sharpness for.

And mistaking loyalty to the President for loyalty to the nation, or even to the party, the Democrats as a whole waited until it was evident to anyone paying attention that President Biden was in serious trouble before acknowledging that he hadn't managed to keep the voters that had elevated him to the White House satisfied, let alone enthusiastic. And he certainly hadn't made inroads into the rest of the electorate. Not that the President himself would have confessed to that, having a million and one reasons for his low approval ratings, except for understanding that he wasn't getting things done in a way that resonated with the public. At least President Biden has creeping (or maybe sprinting, take your pick) senility to blame. Democrats in general should have known better.

Production

In this LinkedIn post, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's founder, mentions "productivity" twice in making the case that technology won't cost people their livelihoods. But he never mentions "demand." It's wonderful to presume that new automation tools will do the drudge work, thus empowering people to be "better humans," "unlock new skills and deepen natural talents." But if (and it's still an "if") this does, in fact, happen, what goods and services are going to be produced that will either allow people to support themselves, or free them from the need to work for other people, in order to sustain their standards of living?

I've asked people this question, and I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. A lot of people have turned to something along the lines of, "it's coming, so there's nothing to worry about." My response to that tends to be this: "I don't worry about it, because anxiety helps nothing. But hope is not a strategy." I understand, at least to a degree, the potential and promise of the current crop of generative automation systems, and, if it's ever a reality, artificial general intelligence. But potential and promise don't pay people's bills.

Mr. Hoffman says: "Ultimately, the surge in productivity will guide business leaders to a realization: the right move isn’t to do the same work with fewer people but to create even greater value by leveraging more employees with new AI-driven superpowers." And I understand that, but "value" is not objective; it depends on other people to realize it; and they tend to want a return on their investments. And producing "value" in the form of goods and services that people don't have the resources to pay for is unsustainable... if it weren't, there would never be a reason for layoffs.

Demand is not infinite, especially when it's being driven by people who are uncertain about their economic prospects. And right now, generative automation is fueling uncertainty about those prospects. And people like Mr. Hoffman are focused on the supply side of the equation. (I would point out that there's a reason why Ronald Reagan's Supply Side orthodoxy earned the nickname "Voodoo Economics" in the 1980 presidential campaign.)

 Cars, for example, are valuable. But I already have one; the fact that someone with an AI-driven superpower has designed a new one doesn't automatically mean that I'm going to spend the money to upgrade. And if enough cars are sitting on lots, history tells us that business leaders will determine that the right move is to have fewer people create fewer of them.

This is why the exclusive focus on productivity seems misplaced. It appears to presume that whatever is produced will drive enough demand for itself to keep employment high. But the problems of "business leaders" are not identical to the problems of the public at large. In a society where well-paying employment for everyone who wants it would mean that businesses are less efficient, the interests of the public and the interests of investors will be at cross purposes. And business leaders are not equally beholden to both groups of stakeholders.

No-Account

On a recent episode of The Rest Is Politics, Rory Stewart related the story of a Roman general who had given his army explicit orders not to engage with the enemy. The general's son accepted a challenge to single combat with an opposing champion, with the stakes being the field of battle. The son wins the single combat, and so the Romans win the day without needing to fight a pitched battle. The general executes his son on the spot for defying his order not to engage. Mr. Stewart told this story in the context of President Biden's pardoning of his son Hunter, in the service of making the point that the President should have held his son to a higher standard that he holds others to, even in the face of the understanding that Republicans were going to attempt to use Hunter as a way of attacking him personally.

All fine and good, but what's in that for the President? Mr. Stewart clearly respected the Roman general from his story, but of what use to President Biden would Mr. Stewart's respect be? Mr. Stewart is British, he can't vote Democratic.

And this raises one of the problems that one often sees in modern society: acting to appease one's critics rarely works, and it tends to do little to bolster one's allies. In the news recently has been the debate among the Make America Great Again/America First movement over the use of H1B visas to bring highly-skilled foreign workers to the United States and the accusations that the PayPal Honey browser extension has been stealing affiliate commissions. My initial response to these things was my usual one: If people feel that programs like the H1B visas or economic systems like capitalism are in place, deliberately or organically, as weapons against them, they aren't going to support them, and so the people who support these institutions have a responsibility to ensure that they're accountable to the rules. Sound familiar?

After a bit of thought it did to me, too. And I realized that I was holding on to an idea that I flatly believed didn't work. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have nothing to gain by aggressively policing the H1B visa program for fraud, or making sure that it hasn't become a way to justify neglect of the American educational system. Likewise, Mr. Musk and other staunch defenders of free-market capitalism have no incentive to come down like a ton of bricks on PayPal (which was presumably aware of Honey's business model when they acquired them) or Amazon (which likely inked a custom agreement with Honey, allowing them to act in contravention of their blanked affiliate program rules). Their supporters are simply going to resent the increased scrutiny and their critics are going to see their actions as further proof of their criticisms and demands for change.

The incentive structures involved tend to lead to an impasse, where the most rational action for a person to take tends to be whichever one they understand to be in their personal interests, regardless of their stated principles. In stories from ancient history, principles can always win out, and killing one's son when he asks for forgiveness instead of permission is the best course of action, because they're morality plays. If the morale of the Roman army immediately plunged, and it took a few decimations to get them to fight well again, that can be conveniently left out of the narrative, and the fact that the modern world has never been shown to work this way can be cast as a problem with modernity, rather than with the stories themselves.

But the fact that holding the things one supports to a higher standard of behavior, of evidence or whatever than other things is simply not a successful strategy on a day-to-day basis is a problem. It reveals the incentive structure that pushes people to adopt partisan viewpoints that don't allow for any internal criticism. Dirty laundry must always be kept hidden; because admitting to its existence is nothing more than a form of self-incrimination. Even if this removes the need to ever actually wash it clean.

Either Or

In Defining Deviancy Down, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the following observation while referencing Wayward Puritans, a 1965 book by one Kai T. Erikson:

Despite occasional crime waves, as when itinerant Quakers refused to take off their hats in the presence of magistrates, the amount of deviance in this corner of seventeenth-century New England fitted nicely with the supply of stocks and whipping posts.

While the point of Defining Deviancy Down was to decry a greater acceptance of behavior that Senator Moynihan considered deviant, there is something to be said for this idea that he touches on in the beginning of his essay. Consider this excerpt from a recent article in The Week:

Part of the reason estrangement has become more common is the "changing notions of what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing or neglectful behavior," said Joshua Coleman, a clinical psychologist and the author of "Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict," in his book. Coleman cited research that showed how the definition of trauma has expanded in the past three decades to include experiences once considered harmless. "The bar for qualifying as a trauma today is much lower," he said.
'No contact': Family estrangement on the rise for young people choosing peace

While there has been a significant amount of inter-generational warfare over whether Generation X was more resilient than Generation Z, or simply more likely to sweep genuine trauma under the rug, to go back to Mr. Erikson's thesis, there's a non-zero chance that a greater number of therapists, counselors and other mental-health professionals (and amateurs) has something to do with it. When I was in my mid-twenties, it simply wasn't as workable to be traumatized in the way that many younger people think of it. Accordingly, social structures were set up to support and encourage, working through things in a way that's considered to be self-harmful today. Likewise, the more modern push towards therapy, and the use of "therapy-speak" in everyday language would have struck my peers and myself as overly medicalized, and possibly even fraudulent. And there's a degree to which both of these attitudes are linked to the perception of the amount of competent assistance available. Back in the day, a low bar for trauma would have resulted in large numbers of people in seek of assistance from too few resources, while today, a high bar means that people would refrain from seeking out resources that are ready and waiting to assist them.

And both of these viewpoints clash with the idea that "what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing or neglectful behavior" is objective, such that two notions that don't meet in the middle, such as Generation X's and Generation Z's, can't both be correct, even when viewed in relation to their own time periods. And this is what leads to the inter generational warfare, as my age cohort and my niece's each seek to claim the virtuous high ground for themselves.

Personally, I like to think of them as simply different. Yes, I think of myself as more resilient, and less likely to seek out resources than younger people. That adapted me to the world I was in, but I'm fortunate in the sense that it's not actively maladaptive for the world that I currently am in. I don't envy people who may have the misfortune to live in a time when the pendulum swings back in the other direction. After all, it's better to have resource and not need them, than to need resources and not have them. But for right now, perhaps everyone is okay. And that's good enough.

Distracted

There was a post on LinkedIn this morning, claiming that when wealthy people complain about wokeness (the fight over which is pretty much over, I think) and gender issues, they're attempting to "distract" people from "something." (As an aside, one would expect that people would be clear on just what they thought this "something" was.)

What I find to be interesting about this is that no-one ever says that they didn't deal with what they understood to be the real problems in their lives because they were "distracted" by what other people were telling them were their problems. I've certainly never been in a situation where I didn't understand that something was a problem for me, because I was too busy being upset over something someone else told me to be upset about. Unless, of course, you ask the person who was telling me what they thought I should be upset over... They tended to be absolutely convinced that I didn't understand my own problems.

Part of the situation, I think, stems from the fact that there are certainly a lot of people out there who do better when certain very wealthy people do better. And if they understand that what bathrooms people use mean that the values of their stock portfolios are going to drop, they might feel they have an interest in making sure that people use the correct bathrooms. I don't know anyone like that, but I presume that they could be out there. Stranger things have happened, after all.

But I think what's really going on is a combination of confirmation bias, and appeal to authority, which has become mixed in with people's self images. For a person who understands that wokeness is simply an inversion of historical forms of prejudice and discrimination, "the first shall be last," so to speak, it's not surprising that they see that as a threat to their interests, especially people who see the economy as a zero-sum game. Lydon Johnson may have said(https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/commencement-address-howard-university-fulfill-these-rights): "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair," but for many people in the United States, programs like Affirmative Action felt like punishments directed at them, and they didn't see themselves as the guilty parties of past injustices. And so when a person who has "made it" comes out and says "woke ideology" is an obstacle to success, that feels like validation from someone who should know.

Opportunities often come at a cost to someone. And for most of American history, the opportunities afforded to straight, white men, came at a cost to gays, non-whites and women. mainly because of the perception that heads of mainstream households were both more in need and deserving of them, and the fact that in times of scarcity, the people in charge of doling out resources tend to end up with the most of them. As long as terms like wokeness and diversity, equity and inclusion come across as simply coded terms for "payback," as in making the mainstream bear the costs of opportunities for others, they're going to frighten people. And fear has a way of commanding people's attention.

Hey. Listen.

"This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives," Livelsberger wrote in a letter found by authorities who released only excerpts of it.

[...]

A law enforcement official said investigators learned through interviews that he may have gotten into a fight with his wife about relationship issues shortly before he rented the Tesla on Saturday and bought the guns. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
The soldier who died in Cybertruck explosion wrote it was intended as a 'wakeup call'

If anyone at the Associated Press, or NPR, noted the irony, it didn't make it into the article. But news sources know where their clicks come from... offering random, and sometimes completely irrelevant, details about events to the public. And so they're willing to print information from someone that they directly say shouldn't be giving that information to them in the first place. Just to pad out a story a bit more before the broader public loses interest.

I could go back and rehash what I was saying a week and a half ago about there being more interest in the murder of a child beauty-pageant contestant from nearly three decades ago than there is in say, fiscal policy, but even dead horses deserve a break now and again.

So instead, I'll see if I can make a coherent point about all of this using former President Jimmy Carter. President Carter was, in my estimation, the last, and perhaps the only, scrupulously honest man to have lived in the White House. What this meant in practice was that he didn't sugar-coat things. And while he may have had other shortcomings as the Chief Executive of the United States, I think that one of the lessons that politicians learned from his example was never to follow it.

While I'm pretty sure that the United States, as a nation, is not unique in this, it's fairly obvious what messages the population, as a whole, want to hear. Donald Trump rode his willingness to convey those messages back to the White House, even when it's pretty clear that he couldn't have been sincere about all of them, and some of them practically require rewriting the laws of economics as we currently understand them. But they lined up with what enough people understood to be true, and want the future to look like, that it lead to electoral success. President Biden did the same thing before him, and we can go on and on. And it's the same with Congress. The body as a whole has a poor approval rating, but people tend to think their own Representative and Senators are doing a pretty good job (as long as they're of the correct party, anyway).

Master Sergeant Livelsberger was attempting to foment a Republican revolution within the United States, calling on "Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans" to "be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary." It's a stereotypically simplistic answer for things, but the underlying sentiment, that there are serious problems with the United States that are being ignored and that the public is somewhere between complacent and complicit, is perhaps more common than it's being given credit for.

President Carter made the point that the United States had serious problems, and look where it got him. Not because of the message itself; there's no shortage of people who are willing to say there are problems. But because of the implication that the solutions wouldn't be easy or inexpensive. The letters that the Las Vegas police have released seem to point to the solution being as simple as chasing Democrats out of national government and going back to the 1950s. Nothing more than several days of inconvenience and ignoring several decades of social change. But no real mention of the blood, sweat and tears that would be required. The things that people seem to shy away from when there's anything else on offer.

Because, I suspect, they feel they've earned their leisure. And they'll turn a deaf ear to anyone who says otherwise. And I'm not going to exempt myself from this. I'm not exactly a fan of the higher tax rates (and accompanying lower standards of living) that would be required to sort out the nation's finances. I'm simply resigned to the fact that it's something that must be done, and soon. But I'm not dumb enough to think that it's an attractive way of looking at the world.

And Around

Another New Year's Day in Seattle.