Think What You Will

In the aftermath of the blowup between President Trump and President Zelensky (I never know if it should be one "y" or two) the competing partisan narratives are lining up to do battle. Pointlessly, in my opinion, as no matter what happens, few, if any, minds will be changed.

People believe the things they do because those beliefs work for them. Those beliefs don't have to work for, or even be intelligible to, anyone else. If someone's understanding of what went down today is directly a function of whether their preferred party is in charge, it's not that they succumbed to willful delusion, it's that it helps make the world an understandable place, where the effects that they're interested in directly flow from the causes they pay attention to. But more importantly, it's not any different for the person who follows the fundamentals and sees the cause and effect that way.

About the only thing that a genuine understanding of causes and effects brings is an ability to predict the future with reasonable accuracy when given enough information. And most people don't do that. And they don't care that they can't. Because so few other people care. If people can make one inaccurate prediction after another, yet still show up on the news because they're good for a catchy soundbite, people are going to understand that there aren't really any consequences for getting things wrong. And so they believe those things that bring them comfort, or pleasure, or whatever other feelings they're chasing at the moment.

I tend to be of the opinion that there's nothing wrong with that, but, well, that's because it works for me... I don't see most people's beliefs as being relevant to my day-to-day life, and that gives me a certain amount of leeway to allow people to believe whatever they want to. After all, I might have problems in life, but the various things that people believe that I find to be bizarre are not among them. I've learned that I don't have to care, and that gives me the freedom to allow people to think as they will.

But I understand that this is only a contingent fact, it could have been different, and at some point in the future it might well be. But for now, it's a certain level of freedom from anxiety about what people think. So I'm going to enjoy it, while it lasts.

Or Not to Know

Our Representative held a telephone town hall recently, and in attendance was one of the area's Trump supporters. When she was given the microphone, she claimed the problem with the mostly Democratic crowd was that they weren't clued in to Donald Trump's "plan." She was convinced there was a plan, and she told everyone that she trusted the plan, even though she didn't know enough about it to explain it to everyone. The next day, social media was having a field day with her, at least locally, with all of the standard name-calling and casting aspersions on her intelligence for believing in such a risible idea as Donald Trump actually knowing what he was doing. Clearly, several people proclaimed, she'd fallen for misinformation.

Which makes her, as near as I can tell, a lot like many other people one can think of. The modern information environment is full of things that are a) completely false, and knowingly concocted by people who intentionally lied and b) utterly inconsequential to the lives of the people who believe them.

For all that people felt that believing in a Trump "plan" was a bad idea, the fact that it wouldn't end well for the believers was, effectively a matter of faith. And as far as I'm concerned, it's a misplaced faith. Sure, every so often there's someone who does something, stupid, illegal and/or otherwise self-injurious because they place their faith in the wrong person, but the reason why "misinformation" persists as well as it does is because it only rarely exacts a price from the believers.

Big picture, believing in a candidate for President is small potatoes. There are much bigger things that people believe in, such as the Earth is flat, or that an international "Élite" cabal is after their children, that strike many nonbelievers as outright lunacy. But outside of damaging the odd personal relationship, people's live continue as normal. For all that people may see many of the misconceptions that people have about the world as actively dangerous, for the people who believe them, unneeded stress may be the only real downside. Q-Anon, for instance, doesn't electrocute people who turn out to be wrong about what they think they know. Home wiring, on the other hand, does.

And this might be part of why the "misinformed" carry such worry for those people around them. People believing in Donald Trump's plan back in November have enabled very real consequences for any number of people, whether they are immigrants who now live in fear of a raid that will result in their being imprisoned and deported, or government workers who face being tossed out of the jobs into an employment market that shows a depressed demand for labor. And sure, some of these policies will come back to bite some Trump voters, in the same way that Helen Beristain learned the hard way back in his first term in office, that when the President said that he'd deport people in the country illegally, he wasn't going to make exceptions for the families of people who voted for him.

But for the most part, political miscalculation is free. And when something is free, there tends to be a lot of it.

Doing the Job

I was thinking about the Yale article that I wrote about last week, the one that was titled "Study: Americans prize party loyalty over democratic principles." There's a short description that follows the title: "Given the choice between preserving democratic norms and achieving their ideal policy goals, many Americans would opt for the latter, new research suggests."

It occurs to me that one can rewrite that into a more general principle, namely: "Given the choice between privileging a specific tool and accomplishing the task they set out to complete, many Americans would opt for the latter, new research suggests." Framed that way, it's remarkable that anyone, let alone some 3.5% of respondents, prefer the former.

My general listening habits when it comes to political podcasts leans left of center. Five Thirty Eight Politics is in regular rotation, and I listen to The Rest is Politics from time to time. Not because I'm really that much of a lefty (Alistair Campbell drives me up the wall), but because I like learning about politics (and polling) and right-leaning media tends to lean very hard into Culture War issues that I have zero interest in. National Public Radio podcasts are much less into that sort of thing and even they tend to spend more time on them than I have time for. In any event, one thing that I've noticed (especially from the aforementioned Mr. Campbell) is the tendency to reject the idea that liberal democracy is a means to an end. When it is treated as such, it's often described as a wonder tool that will magically solve everyone's (legitimate) problems. But more usually, it's treated a something along the lines of either an end in itself, or a moral imperative.

And maybe that's the problem that "democracy" has. I've noted a couple of times now that Rory Stewart from the The Rest is Politics has pointed out that if people are becoming wealthier under an authoritarian regime, they tend not to bemoan the lack of democratic institutions, and that such institutions had lost their association with prosperity. But it doesn't make sense to hand someone who wants to cut a board a hammer, and expect them to whack away out of loyalty to the item at hand.

Among the Democrats I know, there's something of a tendency to chalk former Vice President Kamala Harris' loss in November to factor like racism and sexism. But I never really felt that she was offering solutions to people's problems, unless their problem was specifically the idea that Donald Trump would return to the White House.

I understand the media types who understand liberal democratic norms to be of the utmost importance to them. But, Thomas Nagel aside, most people don't see the needs of others as binding  moral imperatives on themselves. Even if they see their own needs as requiring that others alter their lives.

For democracy to be people's number one choice, it has to deliver what they want. 96.5% of people would rather achieve their ideal policy goals than simply have a specific type of government. So rather than wringing their hands at people's pragmatism, the proponents of liberal democracy have to start ensuring that it delivers the goods.

Two Plus Two

I was browsing LinkedIn and came across the following set of headlines in the "LinkedIn News" feature.

It's an interesting disconnect. The point of the Trump Administration sending Elon Musk into aggressively (indiscriminately?) cut headcount and expenses in the Federal government is, supposedly, that overly high spending on wasteful, fraudulent and/or abusive line items is a drag on the broader economy. The Federal workforce is supposedly so bloated and inefficient that one can simply fire large numbers of people, and not really impact the functioning of the place in any way. Now, we know that last bit is somewhat off, since there have been at least two agencies where there's now a scramble to undo Mr. Musk's "management by random acts of chainsaw" approach.

But the disconnect between the headlines in red and those in blue is what stood out for me. The central promise of the Trump White House is that all of the things they are doing are going to lead to a greater demand for domestic labor, and accordingly, more and higher-paying jobs. So why aren't we starting to see that happen? It's understood that business and investors are, generally speaking, reactive to changes in government policy that they understand will be beneficial to them. Consider investor's recent moves concerning Mr. Musk's X, which may have managed to increase its valuation by a factor of 5 since the fall:

Investors betting on X are probably making a gamble on its leader, not its business — similar to how Trump’s financially struggling social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group (parent company of Truth Social), has a market value of more than $6 billion, even though its revenue for all of 2024 was just $3.6 million.

In other words, Mr. Musk is close to the President, and investors think that Mr. Musk is going to be able to parlay that into profitability for X that they will be able to share in, even though X's revenues are nowhere near the levels that they were at when Mr. Musk originally purchased Twitter. And investor confidence in Trump Media & Technology Group speaks for itself.

 So if investors are willing to put money in to X and Trump Media & Technology Group based simply on the fact that Donald Trump is President and Elon Musk a "Special Government Employee," why aren't investors expecting that the Trump Administration's actions will buoy and broader economy. I suspect it's because they aren't stupid. They understand the potential downstream benefits of investing in Elon Musk and Donald Trump as people. The companies are merely the vehicles for that.

President Trump's early moves in the White House aren't designed to drive aggregate demand in the economy. And the people who understand that, people for whom acting on faith has higher costs than they're willing to pay because they are judged directly on the financial performance of their investments, are behaving accordingly. President Trump and Elon Musk may promise viable returns; but they're not setting the United States up to follow in that.

Deliverance

So according to FedEx, I have a package coming today. I was dubious about that from the start, but sometimes, people surprise you.

A little while ago, I went to the FedEx website, and dropped in the tracking number, and the site once again confidently told me that I should expect my package by end of day. Which is remarkable, considering that it doesn't show as being out for delivery yet. The last time the package was scanned was four days ago in Maple Grove Minnesota. Now, this isn't a problem, it's nothing that I need to have today, and not having show up until Monday, or later during the working week, means that I'm more likely to be here at the house when it arrives.

But it's curious that FedEx systems seem unable to adjust to this new reality. If this goes anything like past packages I've received, the website will insist that the package actually is due to arrive today, until "end of day" comes and goes without the box having actually been placed on my doorstep. Then, and only then, will there be a recalibration. The delivery date will be in Limbo for a while, since the package won't have been scanned into a local facility. In fact, according to the tracking site, it doesn't even show as having left Maple Grove. It could be sitting forgotten in a corner, for all the site shows.

Granted, I'm not a software developer with a background in logistical systems, but it seems to me that it wouldn't be difficult to program a system to look for discrepancies like, say, a package that supposedly due to be in the suburbs of Seattle at the end of day, but was last scanned some sixteen hundred miles away. It shouldn't take an advanced generative automation system, running on top-of-the-line GPUs, to determine that maybe the package isn't where it needs to be, and that something may have gone wrong.

While the ethos of technology innovation has often been summed up with Mark Zuckerberg's admonition to "move fast and break things," it seems that's what's often in play is "move fast and skip the boring stuff." Which I get; keeping the lights on and doors open is the uninteresting part of business. Why lock down the basics when there are profits to be chased on the cutting edge? But the public doesn't see the innovations until they're released; the clunky public-facing systems are people's everyday reality, and an untrustworthy website doesn't do much to inspire confidence in the broader service. Big players in an industry seldom concern themselves with making the small parts of the day-to-day operations look good. Because it's never seen to matter. That is, until it suddenly becomes important. At which point, it's often too late to fix it.

I Might Think That

When I noted, over the weekend, that the American public likely wasn't ready to sacrifice its interests and needs in the name of political accountability, it was mainly intuition speaking. It just seemed like a fairly safe observation to make, as someone who pays moderate attention to politics.

So I was somewhat surprised to learn that Yale University had done a study on the topic, back in 2020. They describe their findings as: "Americans prize party loyalty over democratic principles," and the key finding that it seemed captured people's imaginations at the time is as follows:

When the researchers focused on choices respondents were more likely to encounter in the real world because the candidates adopted conventional positions for their respective parties, they found that just 3.5% of respondents would vote against their partisan interests to protect democratic principles. This reflects the consequences of political polarization, said the researchers: When party and policy are closely aligned, opposing candidates become increasingly ideologically distinct from each other, raising the price that voters must pay to punish their preferred candidate for undemocratic behavior by voting for the other candidate.

While I'm inclined to agree with the sentiment that saying, on this basis, that only 3.5% of Americans care about democracy wildly overstates things, I can understand the impulse on the part of democracy boosters to see the apparent privileging of outcomes over process to worry about the state of the nation. But I don't know that I sympathize with them.

Consider this snippet of a quote from The Rest Is Politics' Rory Stewart that I shared back in August:

And this is one of the problems, that the link between being a liberal democracy and delivering growth, which, it was this sort of story for 200 years, has been broken. And increasingly from China to Thailand, people are looking at these more authoritarian models and saying, "Well, we don't really mind as long as we're getting wealthier."

Lo and behold, it turns out that only about one in twenty-eight people in the United States mind enough to change their vote over it. And why should that number be any higher? The job of a government, at least in the minds of many people today, is to look out for the interests of its citizens, not to adopt the most virtuous form available to it.

The "anti-Trump wing" of the Republican Party never caught on because Donald Trump was able to maintain the image of the one person who was actually prepared to do the work to look out for the interests of Republican voters, who increasingly felt not only economically left behind, but socially disrespected and dispossessed of the wealth and control that were rightfully theirs.

And, as I've noted previously, I don't think that Democratic voters are really any better; they just lack a charismatic figurehead to place their faith in.

Republicans in Congress are going to wind up squandering the chance to set themselves up for an extended run in power, because President Trump seems unconcerned with actually bringing the material benefits that people wanted from him, and voters are already starting to grumble about the unwillingness of their Congressional delegations to stand up to him. They seem to forget that loosely-attached and low-propensity voters also go to the polls. Or not, as the case may be.

The American political system is breaking down, and rather rapidly, by some measures, because people are fairly fed up with it not living up to their expectations. And it's apparent inability to learn that it needs to.

Wanting to Believe

Trump and Musk appeared on Fox News on Tuesday night to defend the mass cuts they are making across the government, with Musk claiming Doge is just trying to "restore the will of the people through the president".

Apparently, Elon Musk believed that the "will of the people" was more bird flu, as the DOGE knife went after people in US Department of Agriculture. And now, to the surprise of no-one, it turns out that the USDA needs some, if not all, of the Food Safety and Inspection Service personnel who were told to take a hike and is now attempting to rescind their firings/re-hire them.

While President Trump often speaks, like many Presidents do, if a "mandate" to do whatever is they want to do (as opposed to what they campaigned on doing), I think what's really at work here is a certain amount of faith from his voter base that whatever it is the Trump administration does will simply work out in the end, so long as the "deep state" and other bad people can be kept away from the process. And that is something of a blank check to the administration, as it sets them up to take credit for any successes and to shift blame for any failures.

And it's going to increase the pressure for Democratic voters to give the same level of loyalty to their elected officials. Currently, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is deciding whether or not to force New York City Mayor Eric Adams out of office for corruption charges. There are a lot of things to consider, but simple partisanship doesn't appear to be one of them. At this point, I'm curious to see what things would look like if Texas Governor Greg Abbot were looking at needing to take action against Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson (one of a set of once prominent Democrats who have joined the Republican fold). In the modern Republican Party, such a move could be signing one's political death warrant for breaking from the understanding that co-partisans can do no wrong.

In any event, President Trump and his administration are currently able to continue doing things that have resulted in previous administrations being roundly derided as incompetent and/or corrupt. Whether the President makes a misstep that results in his voters deciding that he doesn't actually have their interests at heart is unknown, but I think that it's unlikely. The current Republican brand is much more invested in the person of Donald Trump than it was in the person of George W. Bush; at this point, I can't see Republican voters turning their backs on the 2028 Republican nominee in the same way that Senator John McCain's campaign became hopeless after the Bush Administration's response to the beginning of the Great Recession. That's going to give President Trump a lot more leeway to act than previous Presidents have had. It will be interesting to see if he becomes more adroit at using that leeway. Or if he even needs to.

To Speak the Truth

There's a panhandler's trick in tourist traps that goes something like this: A person approaches a tourist and displays a large number of banknotes from around the world. Conspicuously absent are any notes from places like the European Union, the United States, Great Britain, et cetera (a.k.a., the big drivers of tourism). The person tells the tourist that they're attempting to collect notes from around the world, but are missing some.

Because of course they could find someone from Botswana to pitch in, but the tourist is literally the first person from the First World the panhandler has ever met.

To me, this is clever, if bordering on dishonest, panhandling. But for other people, it's a scam, working under the definition that "Any time someone lies to get money out of you, it's a scam." To me, it overstates the issue, as it means that most people's kids are risking fraud charges on a regular basis, but I get it. And I understand that it's a fairly common viewpoint; many people don't like being lied to and especially dislike parting with money on the basis of a lie.

But now to the point... If dishonesty for money = scam, is withholding the truth out of fear of losing a bonus a form of fraud? I get what this graphic is saying, and what the person whose LinkedIn post I snagged it from was getting at, but I think that this points to one of the problems that runs through life, the Universe and everything... The tendency to seek ways of making broken systems less damaging, rather than less broken.

A sense of powerlessness and being financially straited that makes dishonesty seem like the best choice is corrosive. The original post that I saw was making the case that businesses lose valuable ideas when people fear consequences for stating the facts as they see them. But it also teaches and reinforces the idea that there's no value to being honest about things.

Back in the day, I had a little poster in my office that read: "Tact is the fine art of dealing with people who are too good to hear the truth from you." My boss at the time didn't care for it, but I stood by it, having come to the (somewhat self-serving) realization that once people had power, the truth was what they decided it was. But what I was really calling out, looking back on it, was my own inability to present to things to people in a way that worked for them, rather than just for me. And to be sure, I think I'm still bad at that. And so I indulge in fraud now and again, telling people what I think they want to hear from me, rather than what I actually think the truth of the matter is, because I understand my financial well-being to be tied to their satisfaction, rather than to them having an accurate view of the world around them. Because they, not unlike myself, really, don't need to have a particularly accurate view of most of the world in order to get by. The price of unfailingly accurate information is not one that I have to pay, and so, for the most part, I don't. And so I don't expect anyone else to, either. In that sense, I go through the world, asking people to lie to me, and promising money in return. Am I worse than other people in that regard? I would certainly hope so, but I know that it's not a hope worth holding on to.

Out of Order

The problem with the "Department of Government Efficiency," as summed up in a single headline: US government tries to rehire nuclear staff it fired days ago.

While simply bulldozing a home is one way to "clean up," that's not the same as it being an effective way to do it. Simply going in an firing people whom working-class White people in Red states feel are slackers is not the same as doing the work to streamline an organization; and the people whose opinions really matter, like business executives and investors understand this. The fact that the government of the United States spends more money than it takes in has been on people's radars ever since Ronald Reagan decided that using deficit spending to fund lowering taxes was a good idea. And there's going to be real benefits in fixing that. But it has to be an actual fix, and not simply shutting things off, and then asking what they do.

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose

Threats of what are effectively self-harm can only drive accountability when the party being held accountable extorted is both free and obligated to place one's interests and benefits above their own.

Negative partisanship, at least as the phenomenon is currently experienced in the United States, directly erodes the ability of the citizens to hold office-holders accountable for looking after their citizen's interests. A lot was made, especially during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last year, of the unhappiness of the Arab (and especially Palestinian) American community with the Biden Administration's approach to the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the wake of the October 7th, 2023 attacks on Israel. The requested (demanded?) that a representative of theirs be given a speaking slot at the convention. Convention organizers and the Harris campaign, knowing what would be said, stonewalled them, and in the end, they weren't granted a slot. Feeling disrespected, there were calls within the community to withhold votes from Democrats, the Green vote surged and there were even endorsements of Donald Trump.

That worked out amazingly well for them.

"And they were expecting...?" is the obvious question here. Given that Evangelical Christianity is a large part of the Republican voter base, and for them, the victory of Zionism is effectively a prerequisite for a desired Apocalypse, it seems difficult to imagine that the Trump Administration would be actively pushing Israel to accept something that would be acceptable to the Palestinians. And while voting Green on Jill Stein's promises that she would be in their corner as President, the fact that he candidacy had zero hope of winning made it a poor vehicle for anything of genuine importance.

In a two-party system, voters can be "held hostage" by political parties to the same, or even greater, degree that parties can be beholden to voters. When the only other viable party to vote for is ready, willing and able to completely ignore a community's needs and interests, holding the party one would otherwise support to account necessarily requires a readiness to sacrifice those needs and interests. And I don't believe the American public, is, on the whole, prepared to do that.

Do Not Pass Go

It's almost enough to get me to rethink retiring the "Rampant Idiocy" Label.

An American man is being held in Russia after airport security discovered cannabis-laced sweets in his luggage, according to Russian state media.

US man held in Russia for carrying cannabis sweets - state media

To be sure, I have no idea whether or not this unnamed traveler was actually carrying cannabis edibles with him when he landed at Vnukovo International Airport. If he was, that was unwise... someone should have told him that a note from one's doctor doesn't invalidate other nation's laws. But given that the current government of Russia appears to treat locking up American travelers as it newest hobby, why are people going there in the first place? Are Russian jails the hot new tourist destination? It's on a level with vacationing in Iran, at this point.

I'm dubious enough about Americans whose jobs require them to be in Russia being over there. Every time I see or hear a news report from an American journalist somewhere in Russia, I half expect the story to end in their detention. So I find the idea of traveling there for leisure to be almost completely nonsensical. And taking cannabis along for the trip?

Prisoner exchanges occurred as recently as this week, when a Russian national jailed in the US on money laundering charges was freed in exchange for American Marc Fogel, who was arrested for cannabis possession in 2021.

This whole thing smacks of a strain of "Ugly Americanism" that decides that it's not worth respecting, or even knowing, the laws of other places, even when there are active geopolitical tensions with those places, because those tensions aren't worth taking into account, either. Even if the traveler didn't actually have cannabis on him when he was stopped, the idea that this would somehow protect them seems laughable.

Some parts of the world are, for all intents and purposes, closed to American citizens. Russia is one of them. And while I'm sure that a lot of Americans, for whatever reason, are able to travel there without incident, that's not the same as traveling there without risk. And in this case, the risk is being detained, to be used as a bargaining chip for the return of people the Putin Administration finds valuable to itself. Of course, there are other risks; no journey comes with a guarantee of making it home in one piece, or when one expects to. But I'm not sure that's a good reason to tempt fate, in the face of fate actively demonstrating what it's capable of.

Warm and Fuzzy

Part of the Obama message to America, as interpreted by Seattle cartoonist David Horsey:

As one may have guessed, there was very little uptake. And I think that was, at least in part because nothing was being done to amend the factors that led to people's fear, prejudice, anger and resentment. And people tend to see themselves as justified when they hold these emotions, because they understand them to be valid reactions to what's happening around them.

While I think that many people are willing to own up to fear and anger, especially when faced with loss or the perception of injustice; a willingness to admit to prejudice and resentment directed at others is less common. But when given the opportunity, acting on such feelings is much more common.

The Trump Administration has wasted no time action on the fears, angers, prejudices and resentments (spoken or otherwise) of its voter base, even while it convinces itself that it's acting on behalf of all Americans. And I think that part of what has made Donald Trump so successful as a politician is his ability to get other people to onboard his prejudices and resentment and treat them as their own. It might be easy to find a Democratic-leaning voter who will reflexively be against something, simply because President Trump is for it, but the President has convinced a substantial number of people that the difference between being qualified for government and not is whether someone is willing to sign on to whatever particular grievances he holds; in many cases, regardless of the consequences.

Barack Obama may have actually acknowledged people's feelings in a way that prior administrations had not, but he failed, for whatever reason, to really address them. Or at least, people felt that their feelings went unaddressed. (This is a strength of the conservative anti-government message; one can sabotage efforts to get things done, secure in the knowledge that claims of nefarious intent on the part of the actors will be believed.) And part of that is simply human nature.

Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.
Thomas Jefferson "Notes on the State of Virginia" 1785

I've  had people say nasty things about Thomas Jefferson when I trot this out, but only a few people have been willing to straightforwardly say that he's wrong. It's possible though to divorce this observation from race and simply attach it to politics. While, as I noted before, people are often loath to admit to deep rooted prejudices, they'll rattle off ten thousand recollections of injuries they feel they've sustained at the hands of other parties, and point out the new provocations those parties are yet engaged in. And so they retreat into their own parties, where the echo chamber tends to push them into believing untruths about the inhabitants of other echo chambers.

Politics and government, I suspect were never going to be able to solve the public's fears and anger, and so allow their prejudices and resentments to fade away. That's a job that the public needs to do for itself, and it's complicated by the fact that being the first to forgive a grievance is seen as weakness. Which may be why Barack Obama never really found the same traction with his message that Donald Trump found with his. Not in the sense of voters, necessarily, given that President Obama won a greater percentage of the popular vote and more electoral votes than President Trump had. But in the sense that Barack Obama was never able to use the loyalty of voters to himself, personally, as a tool to compel the obedience (or even servility) of his party.

Donald Trump doesn't ask that his supporters give up their security blankets. He helps the feel more secure when wrapped within them. I can understand the power of that.

Playing For a Living

A busker in Seattle, playing, at least for a time, for an audience of one. I liked his music, even though it seemed that no other people had time for it. I've come across a lot of buskers in my time, and I envy none of them the poor return on investment their work generates.
 

Dance-Off

Lion and Dragon Dancers outside of a restaurant in Seattle's Chinatown/International District. Today, I learned that there are dancers for hire who can be engaged for special occasions. I presume that this their busy season, but I will admit that I don't know enough about the job to have an informed opinion.
 

Room For One More

Some job market clichés:

“Just work at Starbucks.”
“McDonald’s is always hiring.”
“You can always get a job at Walmart.”

These come around a lot during difficult economic times, mainly because they are lobbed by the securely employed at those people unfortunate enough to be in need (sometimes dire) of work. I tend have a question for people who make these statements, that I ask with the false innocence of someone who understands that they're being provocative.

"Just what business are Starbucks, McDonald's or Wal-mart in that they have an infinite need for labor?"

Because that's really the implication of these statements, when made to job seekers. That these low-wage service roles need literally any and everyone with a pulse that they can get their hands on. Along with the bottomless revenue needed to pay a salary to literally anyone who walks in the door wanting one.

There has not been a business yet, of any size, that has mastered the fine art of taking human labor and unerringly converting it into profits. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as an unemployment rate, because everyone who wanted a workable job would have one. It's something of a truism, but labor does not, in and of itself, produce demand for the output of that labor. It is a side effect of efficiency. A lot has been said recently about the "Jevons Paradox," which posits that gains in efficiency don't always reduce the overall demand for a resource. But it's important to note that in order for the paradox to kick in, demand has to rise. And the more efficient use of labor hasn't always created greater demand for labor.

And so, there isn't an infinite demand for baristas or shelf stockers that would make coffee houses and national retail chains sure-fire employers of last resort. And that allows, or maybe even requires them to be more selective than casual advice would indicate. A McDonald's manager has an idea of what a good hire or a bad hire looks like; and they're often inclined to see displaced technology, or other high-skill, workers as bad hires. In part because people who do hiring for fast-food restaurants understand (and maybe even share) the impression that these jobs are low-status. And they definitely understand that the jobs are considered low-skill; there's a reason why they tend to be effectively reserved for the less-educated. They're unlikely to be convinced that someone who, some months before, was pulling down a salary decently into the six figures, is going to stay in a (near) minimum wage role a moment longer than they have to. And the world might not take much time to learn, but training new people is still a task that makes the work less efficient than it already is, and so is to be avoided.

But I think that most people understand that. I know in my own experience, I have yet to meet anyone who said the unemployed could always find low-wage retail work who had actually every taken such work as a survival job. Like a lot of platitudes, "Just work at Starbucks" is a way of believing that the individual is in control of everything around them. The things that people say to comfort themselves need not be true as stated.

Woe Is Us

In posts on social media media, Trump accused South Africa of embarking on "land grabs" against "certain classes of people." And he told reporters that the government was "confiscating land" and "doing things that are perhaps far worse than that."
South Africa's land reform is rousing right-wing ire

One of the common critiques of the American Right is that it is, basically, a bastion for modern American racism. And one of the common critiques of Donald Trump, which is not starting to attach itself to Elon Musk (himself a child of apartheid South Africa), is that he enables that racism. Which, honestly, makes sense. The American ideal of "one person, one vote" may have, for a long time, excluded women and minorities, but bigotry was never disqualifying, and people like Marko Elez have the franchise, too. And in a nation that's edging ever closer to a permanent split between two broad political coalitions, neither side can afford to throw even otherwise loathsome people overboard.

And that means buying into the American Right's narrative that casts Europeans (Conservative European Christians, more specifically) as an oppressed minority, assailed on all sides by the unworthy people whose lands, resources, freedoms and/or lives had been taken from them during the age of colonial expansion. Seeing Africans, Latin Americans and other non-White people as unjustly bitter and vengeful for not agreeing to a (awfully convenient) offer to simply allow bygones to be bygones stems from what I suspect is a widespread human desire to be seen neither as one of history's villains nor the direct beneficiaries of historical injustice. And so there's a mindset that decides that the end of Apartheid, Jim Crow or forced relocations to reservations wiped all slates clean and everyone became equal again. So there is no such thing as redress for past wrongdoing; there is only present wrongdoing.

Part of the politics of grievance is the idea that only the in-group's grievances are legitimate. This has played itself out in American race relations for as long as I've been aware of the concept. Black and White people alike having fallen into seeing the others (real or perceived) resentment of them as both unjust and a legitimizer of their own resentments. When, during the campaign, President Trump accused migrants of taking "African-American jobs" and "Hispanic jobs" and then Vice-President Kamala Harris of claiming to be Black as a cynical means of appealing to Black voters, he was encouraging people to take on the Right's grievances as their own, rather than telling them he would advance their interests. Because the in-group's grievances always come first, as I'm sure some of the Arab-American population in and around Dearborn, Michigan are finding out.

I have to admit that I wasn't expecting President Trump to lean so far into the Right's many disputes with the rest of the world (not to mention America) so completely this early in his tenure. Although it makes sense... he has to keep appealing to his base of voters, because otherwise he becomes a lame duck fairly quickly. Perhaps the goal here is to avoid losing seats in next year's (sigh) midterm elections. And casting the Ramaphosa Administration in South Africa as anti-White racists is par for that particular course.

It remains to be seen what the effects will be if Secretary of State Marco Rubio (whose posts on X seem to have been written by President Trump these days) makes good on his promise to not attend the upcoming G20 Summit in Johannesburg at the end of the year. (Of course, given that it's more than 9 months out, Secretary Rubio will have more than enough time to change course.) It could be a good opening for the Chinese, presuming that they can overcome the impression (and reality) that their offers of help come with more strings attached than a kite festival. It's part of a broader push to portray the United States as the only important nation in the world, and one that everyone else needs, which is again a play to a base resentful of what they perceive as other nations benefiting at the United States' direct expense.

Prior to Donald Trump, the Republican party had been coming to terms with the idea that it needed a broader message than right-wing anger at the world in order to be successful. Donald Trump (with, it seems, an assist from the Democratic Party) had upended that consensus. But it remains to be seen if this is a strategy that can be maintained for longer than the President can remain in office. At present, I'm not betting on it. I don't think that the Black and Hispanic voters who backed Donald Trump last year will come to regard him as someone who is willing to do anything for them, specifically, or come to believe that they're benefiting equally from what he does for conservative Whites. The American Right, I suspect, regards them more as useful patsies than valued allies, and won't balk at demanding more for itself at their expense.

If, even in spite of that, it can, that's likely not a good sign. I suspect that the Democrats will wind up having little choice but to turn to their own brand of grievance politics to remain relevant (let alone competitive) in that political landscape. It will be instructive to see who their voters are able to push the federal government into placing on its enemies lists, and which grievances it pursues on their behalf.

All Togther

An old quote that I came across again recently...

“The left has lost its fucking mind, and you can quote me on that,” [Joseph] Uscinski[, a political science professor at the University of Miami and the co-author of the book American Conspiracy Theories] said. “They spent the last eight years chastising Republicans about being a bunch of conspiracy kooks, and they have become exactly what they swore they were not. The hypocrisy is thick and it’s disgusting.”

Ummm... did I miss the part where literally the whole of the American Left got up and said that, to a person, they didn't believe in conspiracies? Personally, I'm of the opinion that anyone who claimed that no self-identified Leftists in the United States believe in conspiracies is an idiot, not a hypocrite. Of course, I understand that what's really being alleged here is institutional hypocrisy, but give me any group of people larger than a beach volleyball team and I'll be able to find something that one of them says that doesn't comport with what another of them does. Someone pointing out that members of another group engage in bad behavior (or dubious thought) when members of their own group do the same is not hypocritical in and of itself.

And it's also the invocation of the mysterious "they." That nameless, faceless group of people who become stand-ins for entire demographics. Which is what makes them useful. Professor Uscinski doesn't have to point any specific individuals or even groups of people who have gone from chastising Republicans for their conspiracies to harboring their own - he simply has to claim that "they" are hypocrites, and QED.

Faced Down

There is a phenomenon known as "YouTube face." Put simply, it's when a video maker places a picture of themselves with an exaggerated facial expression into the thumbnail for their YouTube video (although I suppose it could be for any similar service). The idea is that people are more likely to click on a video where someone's making a weird face, even when the facial expression seems completely divorced from the content.

Some fairly mild examples of the phenomenon.

It occurred to me while reading an online comment thread that was something of a debate over whether or not the average member of the public had any real agency. On one side was a set of people who were basically saying "rather than complain, do something," and the other side responded with "we have no power, and can't change anything."

And that's when YouTube face popped into my head. Because this phenomenon isn't something that was dictated to people... there wasn't a YouTube executive who announced one day that everyone had to do this. In an article on the trend from 2018, when it was already well entrenched, Joe Veix noted:

At some point, a user discovered that a catchy preview image tended to trigger potential viewers’ curiosity enough that they clicked through more frequently.

That anonymous user started a trend that has persisted for years. Sure, the YouTube algorithms have something to do with it. But so do video makers and their audiences. One person started something that changed much of the face of video. And enough people followed them that the change persists. Sure, it doesn't work for everyone. I've seen people try it for a time, and then give up. But they tried it. Because they understood its potential.

I've chatted with a few people about this, and they tend to downplay it, in the big picture. And the reason for that, I think, is that it's not predictable. The person who first tried it didn't know that it was going to be huge. (Otherwise, I suspect they would have gone after a trademark on it.) But I think that a lot of things work this way... it's just that the failures fade into obscurity. Survivorship bias in action.

But there are a lot of trends that work this way. Take short-form video content, which is (was?) TikTok's stock in trade. There's nothing magical about videos under a minute long. People tried it, and other people liked it, so it worked.

Serendipity, however, is different from intent. And I think that people don't really believe in the idea of a deliberate bottom-up movement genuinely being successful. And sure, nothing would stay bottom-up forever; there are always opportunists who would rush to position themselves as leaders of the parade, and seek to make themselves wealthy (or more wealthy) by attempting to sell access to, or the attention of, the group's members.

That's something that can be dealt with. The bigger problem is one of coordinated collective action, when people actually have expectations of the outcomes of those actions. Occupy Wall Street didn't fail because it couldn't muster people to it's cause. I went down to the Seattle branch of the movement, and there were a lot of people there. Occupy Wall Street fizzled because once the street protests didn't bring about sweeping social change over the span of a few months, everyone just dropped it and went home. But that many people could have moved markets. And once they'd started doing so, the alleged "powers that be" would have been forced to pay attention.

In any event, I'm not sure that I buy into the idea that one person can't change the world. I think that it simply takes a different approach, and a different attitude, than people normally bring to the project.

Penniless

A world in which human wages crash from AI -- logically, necessarily -- is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.

This is the sort of techno-uptopianism that makes people suspicious. Mainly because it seems too far out of touch with reality to be genuine. I get what Mr. Andreessen is attempting to convey here: His belief that the one factor that retards a post-scarcity society is human labor. Have automation take over for people wholesale, to the point where human labor can't command any significant remuneration, and prices suddenly fall so low that people don't need to work to obtain goods and services.

"Realistically," the only way this works in practice is to have access to physical resources and automation tools be ubiquitous throughout the society. If I have access to, say, a robot plumber and materials to make pipes and whatnot, I don't need a plumber, and if the plumber has access to a robot farmer, along with some land, seeds and whatnot, he doesn't need anyone to produce food for him. And so on. But there is a dependency in this chain. For automation to lead to a post-scarcity society, the automated tools themselves cannot be subject to scarcity. Not in the sense that companies like OpenAI and Alphabet make tools free to the public to use, but in the sense that all members of the public have ownership of tools, such that they cannot be realistically taken away. So far, that particular development doesn't appear to be in the cards, even accounting for Chinese companies like DeepSeek. "Less expensive" is not the same as "available to any and everyone for the asking." And that still leaves open the question of inputs. The ability to spin straw into gold still relies on a workable source of straw. And it's unlikely that all of the inputs that people would need to be self-sufficient would grow as easily.

Does Mr. Andreessen actually believe that a revolution in automation will create enduring (or even brief) post-scarcity? I have no idea. It would not surprise me either way. But few other people see things playing out in the way he does, and I think that's why pretty much all of the reactions that I have heard to his X post have been openly incredulous. And while some people are quick to write him off as "out of touch," there's also the opinion that there's something malicious about all of this; that it's some sort of hateful trick to be perpetrated on the public. But either way, when this prediction fails to come through, it won't be Mr. Andreessen who suffers for it. And that, I think, is the reason why so few people appear to trust him on this.

Rough Waters

 A sailboat anchored near the north end of Lake Washington, east of Seattle.

Winter has come to Seattle as an occasional mix of rain and snow, along with unusually blustery winds. Not great weather for sailing.