Correction

There is, I am told, a saying in French to the effect of: "Prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai," or "preach the falsehood to know the truth." Here in the United States, it's known as Cunningham's Law: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer." And it's something that I've wondered about: Why are people more likely to ignore requests for information, but rush to correct things they consider wrong. One explanation is that people prefer feeling superior to being helpful. And I wouldn't be surprised to find that it is, at least in part, true.

But I think there is another piece to this particular puzzle. And that is the fact that ignorance lacks the perceived contagion that error carries. When a person who knows a fact encounters someone who doesn't know it, the knower's knowledge is safe; they're highly unlikely to forget what they knew simply from encountering someone who does not know it. Likewise, if a person who doesn't know something encounters someone else who lacks knowledge of the same thing, the status quo reigns. But someone who is wrong (or simply out of step with the mainstream) can convince other people that they are, in fact, correct; and this allows falsehood to displace not only ignorance, but knowledge. And I think that this is part of what motivates people to action when they encounter someone who is "wrong on the Internet;" the perceived threat that the person poses to truth, and perhaps thus to themselves.

Still Going

So I went over to Lake Forest Park this morning, to check in on the protestors. They showed up promptly at 11am and started waving their signs and placards.

The small group of regulars who hang out on this corner every Saturday, rain or shine, for an hour have become something of a fixture, to the point that they're a reliable way of knowing if noon has arrived or not.

One of them told me that last week, with all of the anti-Trump protests, that there were about one hundred people present. Which I'd actually heard about. The whole reason I'd come by today was to see how many of them were going to stick around.

Because your typical lefty protest/drum circle can always drum up a good number of people. Occupy Seattle was proof of that. But what makes this bunch interesting is that they always show up. There's a core of the group who is always there. And it's not the young people who come to the marches and chants. It's the older people who understand what they're actually doing: sharing a message, rather than saving the world.

Mosaic

I was listening to the EconTalk podcast, and host Russ Roberts was interviewing Jonathan Rauch about the ideas in his book, Cross Purposes. Late in the conversation, Mr. Rauch says something interesting. I'm going to quote him at length, to get all of the context, so bear with me:

What changed over time is that, as I got to know people of faith--Jews and Christians, especially Christians--I came to see that it's not that I'm the smart one who doesn't need the crutch of religion to go about my life and be virtuous. It's that I'm the one whose missing out. That they have a dimensionality, a depth to their life. Call it spirituality, call it faith, or call it what to them it is, which is the belief in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and all that flows from that. But, that gives them access to a side of human life and a way of being, and something very deep in ourselves that I don't have access to. I just don't.

So, I feel that I'm in the position of someone who is maybe colorblind. I function perfectly fine. I'm happy being who I am. Please, Christians, don't line up trying to convert me. It won't work. And yet, I am aware that I'm missing out on something. It's like I'm not a parent, same thing. I have a full, and rich, and happy life, and yet I am aware there's a fundamental part of human existence that I don't share.

As someone else who is both not religious and not a parent, I get where Mr. Rauch is coming from, but I don't have the same sense of having missed out on something. Mainly because I understand that being religious, or being a parent, carries opportunity costs, just like anything else, and I spent the time I wasn't worshipping a deity or raising a child to do other things that were important to me.

The thing about passing on activities that a lot of people engage in, like religion, or parenting, is that one can see this really large group of people who are all doing the same thing, and all getting the same thing, and clearly understand what one isn't getting. And I think that this is what leads Mr. Rauch to compare his atheism to colorblindness; he sees it as an uncompensated loss. And I think that a lot of religious people, especially American Christians, feel that this framing is to their direct advantage, and so would make the analogy themselves.

But for me, it's closer to trading the ability to see color for the ability to echolocate. Okay, maybe I can't tell the difference between a blue plate and a green one, but I can locate the couch in pitch darkness, and that's pretty useful in its own way.

Part of the problem may be the Anna Karenina Principle, namely that, as Mr. Tolstoy put it: "Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Applied to religion, it creates large swaths of people who have specific experiences and worldview in common, but a number of people for whom these things are much more unique. To go back to my earlier analogy, if my atheism has given me the ability to echolocate, another person's lack of faith has left them with the ability to see x-rays. And perhaps a third has an unmatched sense of touch. It's more difficult to look at such a diverse group of people and pick out one thing that they all share that can be held up as something that other people lack.

In the end, I don't see myself as having missed out on anything. The potential for human experience is vast; there's no way that any one person can take all of it in within the span of a single lifetime, which is all any of us have. Like Mr. Rauch, I am perfectly happy with the choices I've made and the paths that I've walked. I simply don't feel myself to be somehow less than for not having done as others have.

Un Populi

The latest "unpopular opinion" trend seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of criticizing Blue Origin flight 31 for Likes and other social media attention. Because of course it is. Genuinely unpopular opinions, when expressed on social media, earn crickets at best, and commonly attract reams of negative commentary of their own.

I, for my part, don't really have much of an opinion on space tourism. If Jeff Bezos wants to launch his fiancée and a bevy of celebrity women into sub-orbital space, it's his money. I think that attempting to cast it as a sort of "one giant leap for womankind" was a bad idea; but the online bickering over whether any or all of the women count as "astronauts," if the flight was "inspiring" or the degree to which misogyny is playing a role in the teapot tempest this has stirred up has faded into so much dueling virtue signalling.

And I think that this is where the "unpopular opinion" trend has gone. As noted, in a venue where the goal is to gain social credit, genuinely unpopular opinions have no place; being the odd person out on a topic that people sincerely care about tends to be a one-way ticket to vitriol, if not death threats. Even on a platform like LinkedIn, where most users are commenting under their real names and their profiles include enough information to uniquely identify them, they'll unload, without a second thought, on others who say things they don't appreciate.

Being just another among many to say what others are thinking doesn't carry the same sense of courage and free-thinking that pushing back against an imagined consensus does. But maybe it should. People cast their circles' conventional wisdom as unpopular opinions because jumping on the bandwagon has a negative connotation. But if people clearly appreciate the 50th, or 5,000th, person posting the same thought online, why maintain the pretense that there's something bold and iconoclastic there? Why create the idea that there's a legion of wrong-thinking sheeple that one is rising above, when instead there's an entire audience whose egos are clearly being stroked?

The list of virtues and vices people may have should be allowed to keep up with the times. If conformity to ideological viewpoints is seen as virtuous, then let people be open about the fact that they're publicly conforming, and that they're rewarding people for that conformity. It's the only way for honesty to also be a public virtue.

All The Same

As part of making the case that Kilmar Ábrego García should not be brought back to the United States, the White House held a press briefing with one Patty Morin, who made the case that "We need to protect our families, our borders, our children." Mrs. Morin's daughter was murdered, and a Salvadoran immigrant named Victor Martinez-Hernandez was convicted of the crime.

But what do Messrs. Ábrego García and Martinez-Hernandez have do with one another, other than have come to the United States from El Salvador without authorization? Why should the crimes that Victor Martinez-Hernandez was convicted of have any bearing on whether Kilmar Ábrego García should receive due process prior to being deported?

While critics of President Trump are quick to point to things like this when they call him a racist, whether Donald Trump actually harbors racial animosities is beside the point. When Donald Trump, his father and their management company was sued for racial discrimination in 1973 for refusing to rent to Black people, one of the rationales given was the White tenants that lived in Trump buildings didn't want Black neighbors. And it's much the same today; President Trump doesn't need to be a racist; as long as he understands his primary constituency to be racists, he'll be willing to cater to that.

It's an important distinction, because the Trump Administration's current actions aren't being driven solely by the President; like most performers, he caters to his audience. And to the degree that he understands that people who hold, in this case, anti-Hispanic views are part of the voting electorate and more likely to be Republicans than Democrats, he's willing to take actions that show he's on their side. And it's unlikely that Donald Trump is the only person who is willing to behave in this way.

The United States has never been a genuinely unified nation, and clever politicians have always been able to find ways to capitalize on the fault lines. Blaming them for those fault lines simply obscures the underlying problem, which allows it to persist.

If You Can Keep It

My father was of the opinion that redistributing wealth wouldn't, for the most part, work. The problem, as he saw it, wasn't that most people didn't have money, it's they didn't know how to keep it. And I think that I agree with him on that. Not in the sense that Americans spend too much on random crap, or that they're too easily manipulated into poor financial decisions, but in the sense that many people fail to understand how the broader economy works, and the (admittedly minor) impacts of their choices on it.

A lot has been made of the Trump Administration cutting federal programs that places rely on, but that's also starting to lay bare just how often states and localities have shifted their costs to the federal government, in order to keep their own taxes low. Promising people high-quality services and low tax rates only works for a time, and if the Trump Administration manages to make all of the cuts in funding to things that it wants to, that time is likely up.

At some point, one has to bite the bullet and align what one wants with what one is willing to pay for; and really understand how much things cost. The Trump Administration has been taking heat from commentators who cannot believe that the Administration honestly thinks that a) large-scale manufacturing can be re-shored in anything under a decade or two and b) Americans would be willing to pay what domestic citizen labor would cost, but the Trump Administration doesn't have to believe any of it. The Republican voter base appears to think that it's true, and that is what drives statements from the political class. As long as there are young men out there with high-school diplomas who think that if Apple would only give them a job assembling iPhones that they'd be set for life, Commerce Secretary Lutnick can proclaim that, "Our high school educated Americans- the core to our workforce, is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America," without actually needing to believe a word of it.

If people really wanted to pay more for things, simply because they were made in the United States, they would. But they don't. Because in the end, it's inefficient. To be sure, sometimes, efficiency isn't the best thing, but it can be hard to get people to see the value of resiliency, when it can be a waste until something bad actually happens. And now, one can make the case that something bad is happening.

Fraudspotting

Employment frauds are rife when the number of job seekers is high. The more people need to find work, the more it's possible that they'll take chances on people and companies that they aren't familiar with. And so one sees things like this, where someone has created a profile pretending to be someone else, looking to lure people in. (It's since been taken down.) It's not an exact copy, by any means, but if one hadn't interacted with the real profile, it could be convincing. But, there are some telltales, which I've outlined with a red box. And since knowing what one should be looking for can help combat a more generalized suspicion, consider this a public service announcement.

Name redacted.

When looking at a LinkedIn profile, the number of connections a person has is only a link in two circumstances that I've been able to find. 1) A person is looking at their own profile. 2) A person is looking at a profile of someone who is a) a first-level (or direct) contact of theirs, and b) that person has enabled allowing others to see their direct connections. I'm not directly connected to the real person being impersonated here, so there shouldn't have been a link there.

And note the little box with the diagonal arrow pointing up and away; which indicates that the link goes to an external website... if there is a link for a contact, it will always be an internal LinkedIn link (it's a search that returns that person's direct contacts), so that marker, which is an explicit indicator that following it will take you to a different site, will not be there. Also, as 500 > 1, "connections" should be plural. The singular in the link gives away that something is amiss, along with the fact that while the link claims "500+ connection," the text below it very clearly says: "1 connection."

While the faked profile page is mostly a copy of the real thing, these telltales make it stand out as not genuine. Often the difference between being taken in and not is understanding the little things to look for.

Totes Manipulative

Here's a retail hack that you may not have heard of. It works like this:

1. Find an inexpensive, but useful, item, like the $3.99 Trader Joe's miniature tote bags, that's going viral.

2. Put one (yes, just one, not the set of all four colors) up on an eBay store for $49,890.00.

I can't imagine anyone having that much more money than sense.

3. Wait for the news media to post a link to the listing, as being supposedly indicative of the crazy prices the viral item is going for, despite the fact that no rational person would pay that, given that they can see what other people are actually paying (which is maybe $15 - $20 or so a bag) just below the listing.

4. Profit, apparently.

I get the appeal of a good hype story, but anyone can list something on eBay for literally any amount of money that the site will allow them to. The $1,000.00+ listings seem to be bids to be picked up in the media, who will bite because irrationally high "prices" will drive clicks. And for a few people, they work; the media coverage is, effectively, a free advertisement for their eBay store.

It's the attention economy starting to bite its own tail. Although I wouldn't rule out an attempt to fleece the unwary. It's possible for the inattentive to mistake $49,890.00 for $49.89, although that's still a very high price to pay for one of the bags, given the other eBay listings. But in times of economic uncertainty, people are even more likely to look to take advantage of one another than they are usually.
 

The Wealth of Nations

The United States is, by all accounts, a very wealthy nation; having somewhere in the area of 30% of the world's monetary wealth, while only having somewhat less than 4.5% of the world's population. Of course, that wealth isn't particularly evenly distributed, but such is the way of things. The United States also has a pretty good natural resource base, although certain resources that are starting to become important to the modern economy are situated in other parts of the world.

And another thing that the United States has an abundance of is people. So many people, in fact, that there's no real need for all of them to be particularly productive. And that's starting to become a problem. I've droned on and on about the fact that the United States doesn't do a particularly good job of educating its citizens to take on jobs that require high levels of skill, when compared to other countries. Which is why the president of the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (commonly known simply as the United Auto Workers) is hoping that President Trump's tariff policies will convince (or coerce, as the case may be) automobile manufacturing companies to move production from other nations back to the United States.

But more broadly, the United States sees no real need to have people doing jobs that are highly suited to them, or to see to it that the workforce as a whole is highly skilled. High levels of unemployment are generally seen as bad for the economy as a whole, but companies are often encouraged to shed workers for any reason they can find, and while those workers are often exhorted to gain new skills and compete to re-enter the job market, the idea that the United States would be better off with people being not only gainfully employed by highly employable is less common than I would have thought it.

To the degree that controls on immigration are understood to be beneficial to American workers, they're designed to prevent competition from the poor, primarily from Latin America, for what is often low-skilled, demanding and/or dirty work; jobs that it it doesn't make sense to educate people for 13 years for. (Especially considering that many of the Americans one finds in such jobs dropped {or were taken} out of school long before that.)

I think that part of it is the idea that if people are kept hungry (figuratively or literally), they'll contribute more to society overall; people love to trot out stories of some or another poor person, who, by dint of hard work (and often, very carefully concealed good fortune) made the transition from rags to riches. Of course, survivorship bias is also hard at work here... people don't bother with the stories of those who can't find a way to make it big.

It's not a particularly efficient system; mainly because it doesn't need to be. The United States can afford to write off a pretty good proportion of the population,and has no compunctions about doing so. But ensuing that these people can be productive, and are putting their educations to the best use would do a lot for the country. Not only in terms of making it wealthier, but happier and more secure, too.

Sorrow

"I believe it was one of the former presidents [who] said, I pity the businessman that wants to make a coat so cheap that the person making the coat will starve in the process. I mean, that is sad," Fain said.
UAW President Shawn Fain explains why he supports Trump's tariffs

Here's what President Harrison is actually reputed to have said: "I pity that man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth shall starve in the process." It's not a huge difference, but it is one worth noting. Mr. Fain is arguing that the problem with the American economy is that wealthy business owners are seeking to drive down prices to make higher profits for themselves; while President Harrison was being critical of the public's willingness to beggar their neighbors in the pursuit of better material living standards for themselves.

There's always enough sadness to go around. Anyone who cannot either opt out of the need to sell their labor and/or the products of their labor or set the value of same is always going to be in precarious position in one way or another, because they depend on, but cannot control, the level of demand for the goods and services they provide. And when people have to compete for the opportunity to earn a livelihood, the loser is always likely to starve. Mr. Fain would rather than autoworkers in Mexico or Cambodia starve, because they can't be members of the UAW.

Mr. Fain makes the point that: "And it's infuriating that our livelihoods have been stripped from us for decades and no one's cared." This is about as close as Mr. Fain comes to pointing a finger at the public at large. And I think that he's right, mainly because the United States isn't really a society where people care for one another as much as they're angry about other people not caring about them.

I was chatting with co-workers today, and the fact that I don't have an Amazon Prime subscription came up. The fact of the matter is that I don't order from Amazon often enough for it to be worthwhile; I'd rather go to local businesses to get what I'm looking for, because there are services that I can get from them that I can't get from Amazon, and if the local stores go under, those services simply become unavailable. My coworkers pointed out the convenience of being able to go online and get whatever, but one of the things that Mr. Fain is railing against is that impulse to go for cheap and convenient, without thinking about the broader costs. Simply forcing people to pay more for cars, however, is not going to make American autoworkers more valuable to the rest of the public; they're simply going to lament the increase in prices, which they'll see as wholly unnecessary.

In the end, as I see it, the problem is one of education and perception. It doesn't make sense for a young person in the United States to compete with a young person in Mexico for factory work that either of them could do to a satisfactory level. What you end up with is jingoistic calls for the young Mexican to starve in the name of higher prices. The goal should be for the American to do work that requires the education and other resources that they have here that the young Mexican simply can't access. And that's where we're falling down.

And, while I'm at it, let me throw standards of living into the mix. Americans, like everyone else, I suspect, prefer to feel wealthy. And that means being able to access things at comparatively low prices, which creates pressure to lower labor costs. And businesses respond to that, although it's through greater automation more often than it is through offshoring. And that becomes a ratchet... when workers are scarce, employers will turn to automation, and they don't go back when unemployment rises.

In the end, the problems are things that tariffs cannot fix, because it wasn't a lack of tariffs that created them in the first place.

Cornered

Seen on the street while out doing some shopping. I have to give them credit for trying, even though it's something of a quixotic job, looking to drum up support for Republicans in the fairly Blue suburbs of Seattle. I found the smaller sign, the one titled "Save Washington" to be interesting. It alleges "corruption and bad policies." The second is a given; Democrats run the government at the state level, especially given the Republican drive to rid their party of moderates, and partisanship demands that all policies advanced by the other party be denounced as bad. The corruption charge is more interesting, although just as partisan. It shows how affective polarization is really setting in on the Republican side. To the best of my knowledge, no formal accusations, credible or not, of political corruption at the state level have been made recently. The Washington State Republican Party has made some allegations, but not of anything illegal.

In any event, the fact that it was only three people was somewhat telling, given the numbers at the Hands Off rallies around the area. I'd suggest different tactics, but since it's basically Trump or nothing, I don't think they'd listen to me.

Change of Pace

The most difficult thing about Nobody In Particular recently has been pushing back against my tendency to use the news of the day as my primary inspiration for topics. That was a more or less workable strategy for most of the past 18 years, but now that the news tends to be a breathless recitation of the things that the Trump Administration has done in the past 30 minutes, it's all become rather one-note.

But I think that I'm the odd person out in all of this. News media is a business, after all, and businesses are set up to cater to the desires of their customers. Not that for most news outlets, their audiences are the customers; that title belongs to the advertisers, but the overall effect is the same, everything becoming all Trump, all the time brings in attention, and that attention can hopefully be diverted towards purchasing some or another product (like those weird "Bunby" toys I keep seeing advertised with the generative automation created video loops). For all that it's called "doomscrolling," I think that more people actively like it than are willing to admit to it.

I suspect that part of it is the feeling (if not always the reality) of being informed. And I think that's what's starting to wear at me; I no longer feel that I'm informed. Sure the Trump Administration is doing all kinds of stuff that's going to have repercussions for years, if  not decades to come, but there's not really a whole lot to be done about it, and much of it comes down to small details of how the President is attempting to push the world into something that looks a lot more like what he wants it to look like; basically (as I see it) a slightly updated version of the 1950s, with substantially more of the United States openly forcing other nations to heel than was taking place at the time. While he's doing a bang-up job of shaking up a status quo that a lot of people felt wasn't working for them, and, frankly, was never going to work for them, I suspect that his random way of going about things isn't going to create the rising tide that he (sometimes) claims that it will. But this is the great thing about scapegoats, they mean never having to say that one has screwed up. And besides, the public has a short memory... the trash fire that was Donald Trump's first term was pretty much forgotten by this time last year; Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were doomed by their own aggressively lackluster term in office, where they seemed to decide that doing nothing of importance to the public at large passed for a strategy.

In any event, I'm just going to have to find other things to pay attention to... and it's not like they aren't out there. It's just going to need a bit of looking. Because even though the Trump Administration dominates the domestic news market doesn't mean that they're the only game on Earth. But it may entail dialing back my news consumption for the time being, to focus on other things of interest.

Spring Blossoms

It's springtime, and I'm staying away from the news for a bit, so this evening, you get a flower picture.