Buying Safety

I saw a LinkedIn post not too long ago, about a guy who offered a referral bonus to help his wife land a job. It's not a new idea, I've tried it a couple of times, but it seems to be making some waves these days; Business Insider had an article recently on two engineers who were each offering a cool $10K for referrals to land them their next job. It turns out that one was contacted by a hiring manager, and the other didn't land a full-time role, but that's beside the point for this post.

It occurred to me that if you could get a dozen or so people together, one might have the funds to start something. I wonder if the current economic situation is pushing people more towards job hunting than entrepreneurship. When people have low confidence in the economy as whole, the added risk that being in business for oneself involves becomes unpalatable. I know that there are other measures of employment risk taking that are taken into account (like the quits rate), but I wonder if there's an eye on the rate of business formation; or where the capital that could start businesses is being funneled, instead.

Headlining

News, due to the fact that it is a business, tends to go where it believes the public's attention is going to be. And that can make looking up the latest headlines into an exercise in understanding where news organizations and aggregators think the most interest will be, as opposed to actually becoming more informed.

Consider these top headlines when I looked up the Technology section of Google News:

It's pointless to ask if the fact that Walmart will have more Switch 2 consoles to sell is genuinely newsworthy, because, in a sense, of course it is, that's why Google is leading with that story. And I think that it's because this is, as the saying goes "News you can use." People who are looking for the new Nintendo system can now plan to go get one, or order it online. The fact that the Switch is back in stock is actionable by people who are interested in it, unlike a lot of news stories today.

Due the short shelf life of the information, it's not the sort of thing that feels particularly informative, big picture. And maybe that's part of the reason why is garners so much attention; it's not just another thing happening somewhere that readers can't do anything to change or improve. It's not the media mining the public's anxieties for clicks. It's "Hey; that thing you wanted? There are more of them now." I can see why that would be appealing to people.
 

Two Minus One

Sometimes, it seems that the lack of understanding between political factions in the United States is intentional. I was listening to "The Opinions" podcast from The New York Times; specifically their episode on "Trump, MAGA and 'toxic empathy'."

One of the points raised is that a lot of things that are not zero-sum are treated as such, and that drives much of the lack of empathy. An example was foreign students attending universities in the United States. The point was made that since these students are paying full tuition, they are subsidizing the education of poorer American students who presumably wouldn't be able to attend.

A fair point, but it misses something important; universities don't increase the number of people they admit just because they have an overseas student paying the full sticker price. 100 foreign students out of 1,000 might make it easier for low-income American students who are admitted to pay for their education, via the subsidy effect, but the top 100 American students who didn't make the cut are still locked out, because there isn't room for them. And that's the zero-sum aspect of this that a lot of people resent.

It seemed like such an obvious thing that it was conspicuous in its absence. Now, I understand that it simply didn't occur to anyone while the conversation was actually happening, but it did illustrate the divide in play... I'm pretty sure that if any of the panelists had asked someone about it, they would have been told why people see foreign students as a problem for their own children's chances. As it is, they demonstrated why so many people feel "the media" is out of touch with their concerns.

Dialed In

After MIT published the draft of Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, there was a lot of talk about the findings. Although for some people, the conclusion was simple:

Who needs nuance when you can go for fear, instead?

The idea that our tools shape us is old, I pointed out as much in my post from earlier this week. And the idea that our tools shape us for the worse is likely even older, with people throughout history lamenting changes in how things were done.

But this new broadside strikes me as being part of the bigger conflict over just what generative automation is going to do to our society. While there are techno-optimists who are apparently convinced that it will usher in a post-scarcity society, many of the loudest voices in that camp are people for whom scarcity is already a thing of the past, and haven't show much inclination to elevate the public in the past. And in a lot of ways, I think that this isn't as much a discussion of the technology as it is the people who are seen to control that technology.

While a lot of public opinion concerning the major names in the technology space maps to political ideology and/or partisanship, this isn't likely to be the case forever, and things will go back to being more about the people themselves and what (or whom) they appear to support or not. And there are people on both the political Left and Right who are manifestly mistrustful of wealthy businesspeople, especially the billionaire CEO class. Their mistrust of technology, and their willingness to boil complex science down into simplistic "be afraid" messages, will only increase as their belief that the leadership of technology companies cannot be trusted grows.

In the meantime, however, I expect to see more messages touting generative automation as the new television. Because everyone needs tech to complain about. 

Past as Prologue

It was a simple enough question, tacked on to the end of a LinkedIn post.

What do you think [about "A.I."]? Tool, teammate… or takeover? (As in "take over the world.")

"Takeover" isn't a noun so I'll substitute in "Tyrant" instead, to retain the alliteration. And for me, the question is a false trinary... because tools can very easily become tyrants. And this is nothing new.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men notes that "commodities," as in the tools and implements that people created to make their lives easier, became "the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their Descendants."

And in Walden, Henry David Thoreau observes: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools." Or, in a more modern wording: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."

Mr. Rousseau believed that the amenities, advancements and conveniences of technological progress "soften body and mind," on their way to becoming "true needs;" things that we can't live without. And he was right; I'd probably be in much better physical shape if I had to walk or ride a horse everywhere I went, and I'm sure my mind would be sharper if I had to commit things to memory as opposed to writing them down (or typing them out). Although, to be sure, technology can become a genuinely true need; many of us alive today wouldn't be were it not for the modern technology that's interwoven into multiple, if not all, facets of our lives. And there's no real reason to presume that generative automation, and genuine artificial intelligence, if it arrives, won't also become something that, either figuratively or literally, people can't live without.

But there's also the fact that in the modern world, we have people pushing to make new technologies indispensable, because that's how they earn their livings. The switch from perpetual licensing to subscriptions in software is an example. It's gone from an innovation to a requirement; investors demand to see that companies have ways of creating recurring, consistent revenue streams. Companies shape their tools, and thereafter their tools shape them, too.

So yes, I expect that, sooner or later, generative automation, or whatever follows it, will become a tyrant. It's in the nature of technology to become so. We are already yoked to a lot of the technology that underlies our society, and it's invisible (and often unappreciated) until it stops working for some or another reason, as Mr. Rousseau said: "these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit, and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet; and people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them." (I've noticed this habit in myself, and now take pains to remind myself to be happy to possess them.) In much the same way that cellular phones had gone from rare markers of status to near-universal ubiquity over the span of a couple of decades, generative automation/A.I. will become something that introduces efficiencies to people's lives such that it will become unimaginable how people ever got by without it.

And at that point, we will be its tool, just as much, if not more, than it is ours. And the transformation to tyrant will be complete.

Make It So

A former Famous Dave's south of Seattle.

While ostensibly due to local issues, like the cost of real estate, the closing of this restaurant seems indicative of what people are starting to expect from the national economy, especially here in Seattle, where the recent rash of layoffs among technology and gaming companies is both putting a significant number of people out of work, and acting as a headwind to those who found themselves unemployed previously.

As the number of available jobs is seen to shrink, the competition for them grows more fierce, and a number of people have simply decided that it's futile to keep looking, and so have retired early, or otherwise exited the workforce.

While out-and-out business closures, like this restaurant in the picture, are somewhat rare, the perception is that more are coming. And if one of the leading indicators of a recession is people's belief that a recession is in the offing, the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy is growing, as the paradox of thrift threatens more and more people's employment, and they respond to the uncertainty by dialing back their spending.

The growth of generative automation in the technology sector isn't helping matters, but I suspect that this is more because people see corporations as hostile to labor, and looking for reasons to downsize, than the actual threat currently posed by the LLMs themselves. 

Murk and Mire

On LinkedIn, Emily Harding, a Director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies lays out her reasons for supporting the Trump Administration's strike on Iran, and what she thinks the next steps should be. Two of those steps are: 

--Make it clear the goal is ending the nuclear program, not toppling the regime. Recognize regime change won’t come from the outside. 
--Open the door wide to negotiations. Invite Iran to seek face-saving measures in exchange for on-the-ground inspections of the damage and verifiable dismantlement of the program.

Which make sense, but they require the administration in Iran to trust what the United States tells them. And when you have a person in the White House who claims to believe in the "madman theory," it's unclear how much trust to put in anything coming out of Washington D. C. if Tehran actually believes that President Trump is irrational and volatile. Of course, on the flip side of this, it's unclear how much face-saving that President Trump would be willing to allow the Iranians, and given his willingness to walk away from agreements made in the past, I suspect that they'd be unwilling to take any assurances that regime change was off the table at face value.

But perhaps a bigger problem is simply the realization that the partisan winds in the United States change. President Trump walked away from the agreement that the Obama Administration made with the government of Iran in the opinion that he could squeeze them for an arrangement more to his liking. What's to say that a future Democratic administration won't do the same? The unilateral way in which the President behaves is going to undermine the idea that the United States can be trusted to honor commitments it makes when those commitments become politically inconvenient. While this is to be expected to a certain degree, the growth in presidential power gives the impression that changes can happen at the whim of one person. And as long as that's the ground truth, making something clear to Iran, or extending an invitation that will be seen as genuine, will be difficult. And this leaves aside the current administration's willingness to resort to hints of regime change as a negotiating tactic.

How About "No?"

From The Week's Saturday Wrap for June 21st, 2025.

It's a common enough question: "Should we be worried?" But I don't understand how it's a useful one. I've seen a lot of media stories about the effects of social media on teenagers, citing studies that seeks to establish a causal relationship between spending time on TikTok or Instagram and increases in anxiety, depression and other markers of poor mental health. A habit of "doomscrolling" is listed as a common culprit, but as the definition suggests, one can doomscroll perfectly well outside of social media.

I'm aware that I've written about this topic previously, and I realize that I'm swimming against a fairly strong tide here; using the formulation "Should we be worried" or something similar as a way of conveying the seriousness of a topic to the audience is as firmly entrenched in style guides as the "get passive." But I'm still of the opinion that this phrasing, especially when there is no pushback against it in the article itself, acts to increase anxiety to no good end.

The roundup from The Week that I'm using as my example here notes that:

Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who refused to sign a non-disparagement agreement when he resigned from the company in April, foresees “something like a 70% chance” that AI will catastrophically harm—or even wipe out—humanity.

I can see that raising some people's blood pressure, and the irrelevant mention of "a non-disparagement agreement" hints that OpenAI thinks of Mr. Kokotailo's foresight as something more than simply one opinion among many.

In the end, I understand the impulse; to prepare people for something that may be coming down the pike, but the journalists doing the writing don't have any concrete ideas for what those people may be able to do to prepare themselves. And so they fall back on "informing" people, and calling it a day. But it's difficult for people to, as Katherine Wu might say: "React wisely and react sensibly and use the tools we have," when there's no indication in a piece as to what a wise or sensible reaction might be and what tools are at the collective disposal. And people are left to wait in fear that they'll eventually get steamrolled by something they can't control and can't accept.

At Odds

In a past life, I worked in an office with an admin whose desired government was open theocracy. Not because stepping on other's freedom of religion was a priority for her, but because her faith led her to believe in a deity who had a hair-trigger wrath, questionable aim and a blatant disregard for collateral damage. Her priority, therefore, was avoiding being in the blast radius of a smiting. And, like most believers, she honestly felt that her religion, even if imposed, was better for people than whatever ungodliness they would get up to when left to their own devices. A tolerant, pluralistic society felt like an active threat to her mortal well-being. An undemocratic society with less sin, however, would have been a dream for her.

I recall her when I'm talking politics with people because I remember the fear and stress that were her constant companions. If something as basic as foul language could prompt an area-of-effect bolt from the blue, many people's everyday behavior was a cause for concern. She was too tactful to ever accuse people of deliberate wrongdoing, but there were times when she didn't need to.

Because she felt that everyone around her would be better served by her understanding of the world, as opposed to their own, she was able to cast something that would directly benefit her as being for the world at large. I suspect that this is a basic tenet of many people's political faith, and this is part of what drives the mutual hostility that partisans have for one another.

I have a conservative acquaintance whom I've known since we were children, and his response to last week's No Kings protests was one of unbridled anger. He too sees politics mainly through the lens of problems that it will fix for him. He tries to make the case for a broader benefit to the nation at large, although his "if you're not with us, you're against us" outlook tends to get in the way of that. Like our old admin, I understand the fear and stress that other people's politics hold for him, even if he's worn away my sympathies with his active bitterness. Still, I see how the politics of years past has failed him, and how a liberal democratic order feels like an active threat to his well-being.

Their situations are not the same, but are similar enough that I can see the parallels. But seeing them has always been the easy part. It's changing the world enough that it works for them without breaking it for everyone else that's the difficult part. 

You Are

Because we can all use a little more affirmation in our lives, sometimes. Not to mention that someone's child really put their heart into this.

I'm old enough that I can't remember ever feeling this way about the world and the people in it anymore. So I'm happy that there are people around to remind me that once upon a time, everyone was their own brand of awesome, and I couldn't wait to find out exactly which one. 

TACO Time

President Donald Trump has directed immigration agents to pause workplace raids at hotels, farms and restaurants, news organizations reported over the weekend. But he said on social media last night he was ordering ICE to "expand efforts to detain and deport" undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and other large cities that "are the core of the Democrat power center."
Trump tells ICE to hit blue cities, spare farms, hotels

This, of course, should surprise no-one. With the rate of immigration to the United States at a low, there simply aren't enough people attempting to cross the border from Mexico to meet the targets that the Trump Administration has set. And that means the show of deportations that was desired can't be produced easily.

And the fact that the Administration wants something show is the important piece here. Because if the goal were simply to have lower numbers of migrants in the country, having ICE agents confront them in hotels, chase them across fields or ambush them at courthouses is woefully inefficient. Ramping up the penalties for employers is a much better plan. After all, the chance to work and make money is what is bringing the migrants, not the opportunity to be a charity case in a "sanctuary city." But that would mean putting pressure on employers, and some very large employers at that. And to the degree that those employers are politically savvy, it's a given that leaning on them would result in them pushing back against the President, which is something he doesn't want. He may be able to strongarm business leaders one at a time, but if he gave them a reason to unify against him, President Trump would have problems.

And so it's back to the culture wars. Red-state voters, who supposedly are the people who most want illegal immigrants gone, are going to keep the ones that they have, mainly because their absence isn't going to prompt anyone to increase wages and benefits to the point where the jobs vacated would be attractive to people born in the United States; including the children of recent immigrants. They don't do everything they can to put their children through college only for those children to be the most educated strawberry pickers one will ever meet. And so the focus will be on migrants living and working in the large Democratically-run cities. Other than looking to bait mayors and governors into fights, I can't imagine why. After all, most recent migrants are fully capable of going to other parts of the country to find work, given that they crossed international borders to get here in the first place. If Utah will be safer than California, expect people to, well, migrate.

Definition of We

Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall called the violence “horrific, and it is not who we are.”
‘Not who we are,’ says Mayor Mendenhall after shooting at SLC No Kings protest

It’s common for politicians to claim, after some or another act of violence that it’s “not who we are.” Given the number of shooting deaths that occur in the United States every year, one could be forgiven for disputing that claim.

But more importantly, maybe it is time for the United States to alter its view of itself so that these sorts of events are indicative of “who we are.” Because embracing that understanding would enable steps to understand why this is “who we are,” and from there, steps could be taken to change it.

The United States often comes across as having a remarkable aversion to self-reflection. The national self-image is determined by decree, and from there becomes a matter of faith, impervious to any evidence to the contrary. This has the effect of making the United States, and a good number of individual Americans, seem insecure. And as I see it, this is in large part due to the fact that the American self image is effectively impossible to live up to; it goes beyond exceptional in a quest for something that approaches perfection. Indeed, I have had conversations where the idea that Americans are simply people like everyone else was treated as something akin to blasphemy.

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with striving for a standard, even one that comes across as completely unobtainable. But when the starting point is that the standard has already been reached, that leaves no room for self-improvement, because acknowledging the desirability of improvement then becomes a criticism.

Threats of violence, and actual violence, are commonplace enough in the United States that “it is not who we are,” often comes across as either insincere, or very naïve (willfully or otherwise). Because in many parts of the nation it is, to all appearances, exactly who we are. Being willing to accept that is necessary to changing it.

No Connection

As is habit for me, I picked up my camera and went down to some of the midday "No Kings" protests that were being held in the local area. They were pretty much like all of the other protests I've been to, with people standing around holding signs, and generally preaching to the choir. There was the occasional person who felt the need to voice their dissent with the crowd, but for the most part it was people proclaiming their message to the like-minded.

A small group of the protestors who showed up for the rally in Kenmore, Washington.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, but people in Blue states putting on street theater for each other is unlikely to solve the problems that they're attempting to solve. Mainly because those problems aren't really about the depths of anyone's feelings or their willingness to spend a couple hours on a Saturday standing on the sidewalk.

Rather, the problem is that the United States is slowly dividing into two mutually hostile camps over the question of what it means to be an American. Donald Trump, whose political instincts lead him to insert himself into conflicts, picked a side, and has started making some of their grievances into policy. People in the northeast suburbs of Seattle understanding their identities as Americans is all fine and good, but it does nothing to bridge the divide, which is essentially faith-based.

Person to Person

Recently, LinkedIn has been alive with sentiments like the following:

• "People will always look for human connections."
• "With AI, automation and robots replacing humans, niches will emerge where human interaction will become the next premium service."
• "Although AI might predict outcomes, only human personalities can genuinely connect on an emotional level, using empathy to navigate life's complexities."
• "In the future, people will pay to simply take a walk with another person."
• "We’re living in an age of automation, acceleration, and endless information. We scroll, we work, we survive. Some of us even thrive. But beneath the surface, there’s a hunger. For presence. For people. For something that can’t be outsourced or automated. Something like real, human connection."

And because for some people, simple aphorisms are always better coming from someone famous, this Mark Cuban quote has been making the rounds:

The AI irony is beautiful: The more artificial our world becomes, the more valuable real human interaction gets.

As with anything, not everyone is on board with this, and there has been a level of pushback to the whole situation. One poster went to far as to call it "a failure of critical thinking."

I'll admit to being something of a skeptic, myself. After all, I have a degree in Psychology, and no-one is breaking down my door to recruit me for a "real human interaction" job. Still, I think that I'd be inclined to be somewhat more charitable (I'm going soft in my old age), and instead of chalking it up to a lack of critical thinking, attribute it to grasping at hope.

A lot of people are (or at least believe they are) staring down the barrel of generative automation reducing their employability (and thus, their incomes) to, if not near (or absolute) zero, well below what they need to sustain themselves. And if artificial "general intelligence" ever comes on line, that will only make matters worse. If all people feel they have to offer others is their "real human interaction," they're going to cling the idea that this will somehow save them from job-market irrelevance, and thus, destitution. (Which I suppose is better than bitterness, guns, antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-trade sentiment.)

Because, as it has proven time and again, the population at large will dispassionately watch people beg in the streets for a 5% reduction in the Consumer Price Index. And if generative automation raises the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment above its current rate of about 4%, the United States government, at least, will dutifully adjust its definition of "full employment," decree that the extra people out of work are necessary to keep inflation under control and turn its attention elsewhere.

For the person whose one remaining viable tool is a hammer, nails are all they have to hold on to. Because it's true that hope is not a strategy; when it's all people have left, it's the strategy.

P.S.: But, for the sake of argument, let's say that Mr. Cuban and company are correct, and "real human interaction" does become more valuable. If it's all that most people can bring to the table, the supply will still far outstrip the demand. Not to mention that fact that taking a walk with another person is unskilled labor.

Stage Rage

I was listening to the most recent episode of the Decoder podcast; host Nilay Patel was interviewing Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela.

As far as I was concerned, Mr. Valenzuela was a poor spokesperson for his company and the broader generative automation industry. When asked whether his company used videos from YouTube to train its model, he stonewalled, and when asked whether a ruling that generative automation violated copyright could kill any hopes of profitability, he simply refused to engage with the question. It was, for me, really illustrative of why so many people mistrust "Big Tech" and the companies making generative automation. But it was also more or less what I expected from the CEO of a generative automation company. I understand what they're being graded on, and who is doing the grading, and leveling with the public tends to result in an "F" on that scale.

For some reason, however, I decided to read the comments; I think to see if anyone else had noticed how unwilling Mr. Valenzuela was to take on the questions that Mr. Patel had asked. And found this:

Something about Mario’s brother.

The reference to Luigi Mangione, and thus the implication, was clear. It also struck me as pointlessly over the top.

There are a lot of theories concerning why online discourse can start spawning death threats (or the wish that someone else would do the killing), veiled or otherwise, even over seeming trivialities. My personal conjecture is that it leads to a sense of power on the part of the self-professed keyboard warriors. If Mr. Valenzuela's security detail is noticeably more alert next week, someone chalks that up as a win.

But I also think that there's an impression that for all of the chatter that things like this generate, no-one really cares. In this case, the poster is a subscriber; I'm pretty sure that a good computer forensics technician could find them and have some people show up at their doorstep looking for an explanation. But that would be a game of whack-a-mole that would take ages to pay off, if it ever did.

The transformation of various sorts of threats and ill wishes into a form of performative outrage has desensitized people to them. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever," is now seen as the most rational response to anything that hasn't escalated to the idea that people may actually be on the move to someone's real-world location. Which I understand, but I think is going to wind up biting us sooner or later.

(As an aside, I wonder what Nintendo thinks about one of their most recognizable characters having become a coded way of talking about killing people.)

Once More, With Feeling

A picture of the L. A. protests that I came across online, uncredited. If I find the credits, I'll update this.

Okay, I'll bite: What makes people expect that photographs of masked protesters standing on burning, grafitti-covered, Waymo taxis while waving Mexican flags in California is going to make people in Texas, Kansas or West Virginia support allowing people who entered (or stayed in) the country illegally to remain? I get that a riot is the last refuge of the unheard, but I'm not at all convinced that this is the sort of thing that one wants to be shouting at people.

Because I don't know about you, but I don't get "Hey, I love this country and want to remain here," from protesting with the flag of another country.

To be sure, I'm dubious about the utility of protests in general. When the support is there to effect change via normal processes, people don't need to go around marching, chanting and waving signs, let alone setting things on fire. And while I can see some point to the civil disobedience side of things, being arrested and dragged off for setting cars on fire doesn't exactly get people to re-think the laws they live under.

The problem here isn't Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's United States immigration law. And that's not something that the Los Angeles City Council or the California legislature could change on their own, even if they were inclined to do so. That's something that has to happen at the national level. Even the decision to effectively look the other way and allow people to go about their business "under the radar," as it were, is made from Washington D. C., not Los Angeles or Sacramento.

And right now, Washington D. C. is run by Donald Trump and the Trump-aligned members of Congress; people who have every incentive to come down on the protests like the proverbial ton of bricks, It's no skin from any of their noses if inserting the National Guard into this situation makes everything go pear-shaped; it's not like they're in dire need of the Los Angelino vote. And so in this sense, the protestors are performing for the wrong audience; the Los Angelinos who are sympathetic to them aren't in a position to change policy on a national level.

And that's where voters in Texas, Kansas, West Virginia et cetera come into the picture, because they are the people whose minds needs to be changed, if policy is going to change. President Trump is sending ICE into New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and so on specifically so he can show those voters that he cares about them (by ejecting from the country people those voters see as a threat to themselves) whole disrupting the urban "élites" that they so dislike. After all, it's understood that Red America has its share of migrant labor that's in the country illegally.

I understand that I'm basically making a case for "respectability politics." I don't contest the charge.  But for me, respectability is what supplicants have; and the migrants are, when its all said and done, supplicants. At a minimum, many of them are asking that the laws pertaining to immigration to the United States not be enforced; at most, they asking for them to be changed. And I said "asking" rather than "demanding;" immigrants to crossed the border for economic opportunities not available to them at home have no standing to claim a right to stay. And if the United States needed the migrants more than the migrants needed the United States, they could simply leave and wait for the Administration to come with a way to regularize them.

Something tells me that what's at work here is a poor grasp of history. The self-serving story that the United States tells itself is that Martin Luther King Jr. and the other Civil Rights leaders simply took to the streets, and while there were some bad actors in government who responded with abuse, the rightness of their cause showed everyone that they should get what they want, and it was all hunky-dory from there. But that wasn't how it worked back then. And it isn't going to be how it works now.

Dash Kindly

The "em-dash" has become the new "kindly."

Generally speaking, Americans do not use "kindly" in professional writing. It is, however, common in parts of the Commonwealth of Nations, especially those parts that many Americans associate with Internet fraud, such as India, Kenya and Nigeria. Accordingly, it's become the one thing that many unsophisticated people look for when attempting to sniff out a bogus investment scheme or employment offer, because it's allegedly a foolproof telltale that allows a correspondence to be immediately written off. Some people are willing to go so far as to claim that the use of "kindly" is a deliberate marker of fraud, and that people who continue to correspond after having seen it are showing themselves to be rubes, ripe for the plucking. This, in turn, has lead to a certain amount to ridicule being directed at anyone who shows uncertainty about a message with the word "kindly" in it.

The "em-dash" has become this marker for spotting "A.I. slop," as the Internet likes to call it. Because, supposedly, "real people" never use the em-dash, so any text in which is features prominently must have been created by generative automation. The fact that this forgets that large language models basically take their training data, chop it up into pieces, figure out the mathematical relationships between various parts and create their outputs based on that is surely of no real importance to the process.

The common thread here is the idea that there is a shortcut to discernment. Be on the lookout for "kindly" and you'll never be tricked by an Internet fraud. Stay alert to the "em-dash" and you'll always be able to tell when a passage was generated by an LLM. Utterly reliable and remarkably easy; who knew that the signs were so obvious?

That there is widespread anxiety about being deceived is understandable, at least in the case of internet frauds. While many schemes may only cost someone a small amount of money, individual losses can easily run into the thousands, or tens to hundreds of thousands. Avoiding that financial hit by spotting a supposedly ubiquitous telltale is clearly attractive. With text generated by LLMs, the case is a little less clear. Okay, so someone generated text with a Copilot or Perplexity prompt rather than writing it all out themselves. As long as it gets the point across, who cares? The intersection between generative automation and internet fraud is a concern, but the "em-dash" isn't something that is apparent in a faked celebrity pitch video for a fraudulent investment scheme.

It seems that a lot of what drives the hype (hysteria?) concerning both "kindly" and the "em-dash" is the need to appear discerning to other people. Despite the fact that there weren't any consistent glaringly obvious tells in GPT-2's text output, the idea that there's a silver bullet to detect generated text from any current LLM is strong and, if the enduring attachment to "kindly" is any indication, not going anywhere anytime soon. It's common for people to seek ways of ranking themselves against one another; it's been postulated that people find meaning in positive self-worth, and one way of attaining that is to seek out ways of showing that one is better than others. But that also means avoiding indicators that one might be worse than others. If one doesn't jump on the "em-dash" or "kindly" bandwagons and is subsequently tricked, the ego-bruising ridicule is likely to follow.

I spend more time than is likely healthy looking at dodgy material in my Junk Mail folder and, quite often, my inbox. And I've done my share of looking at things online. While there are certainly tells for a good amount of internet fraud, most of them come from the fact that the average would be perpetrator of internet fraud isn't targeting specific people, or is clearly attempting to pass themselves off as someone they aren't. An e-mail that claims to have found someone's résumé online but is addressed to "applicant" or the recipient's e-mail alias, or a LinkedIn profile that claims to be for a recruiter working in a hybrid model for a company in Texas but who supposedly lives in Liechtenstein. But these are really markers of poverty and poor education; the things that drive people to internet fraud for a living in the first place. It's how "kindly" first became a marker of fraud; people attempting to pass themselves off as Americans without having any idea of how Americans actually write. Pretty much no-one in the United States feels the need to remind another American that Atlanta is in Georgia, let alone the United States.

The tells from the uneducated are easy to spot, because they tend to recur over and over again. The graduates of "hustle kingdoms" in West Africa, for instance, go on to teach others the same things that they have learned, and this seemingly rote transfer of knowledge results in tells that are decades old still being common. And these are the sorts of fraudsters that the average person is likely to encounter. The truly sophisticated fraud artists aren't randomly e-mailing people, playing a numbers game.

With the "em-dash" the motivation, avoiding looking like a rube, is the same, but this time, it's the reader who is uneducated. Again, LLMs use the "em-dash" because it's common in the training data. To the degree that the "em-dash" is a marker of LLM-generated text, it's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; people are starting to avoid the punctuation mark specifically because Internet paranoids have marked it as a surefire sign of inauthenticity. And because most of the people who have the time to be online a lot are young, and young people are reading less, they're not as exposed to how people older than themselves commonly write. But the makers of LLMs do not limit themselves to the young and online; they're vacuuming up all the data they can get. "Doesn't read like a human" is really "doesn't read like a young and affluent online Westerner."

The idea that there is a quick way to be "smart" about things is an attractive one, and difficult to debunk, so it's going to persist. With any luck, it's not too expensive of an idea to hang on to.

Hat Trick

It seems like a fairly straightforward idea. Wear a hat that says "Make FPS Great Again." FPS, in this context stands for First Person Shooters, the genre of video game pioneered by Wolfenstein 3D back in the day, and is still going fairly strong today, with titles like Halo and Destiny (both created by Bungie) being big players in the space.

I would say that it created controversy, but I'm not sure that such would an accurate way to put it. But there were complaints, which I happened to come across on LinkedIn:

While I've always understood why people who don't identify with the American Left consider it a censorious bunch, this seemed to typify the trend for me.

I don't see anything particularly Trumpist about the hat. A lot of people have used the Make [blank] Great Again formulation for things, like the book Make Healthcare Great Again or the documentary Make Democracy Great Again. And there have been open parodies of President Trump and his supporters using variations on the formulation, such as when Neil DeGrasse Tyson was shown with a series of red hats, one of which read "Make America Smart Again."

From where I sit, the problem with Ian Proulx and his hat is that no-one really knew who he was, outside of the fact that he was a White guy ran a video game studio, and that gap made his politics uncertain. And in that uncertainty grew fear that perhaps his goal was to express support for President Trump to the largest audience for video games in the United States: young White men. It's "if you're not obviously with us, you might be against us." And that sort of binary isn't really useful. Allowing only people whose politics are clearly known to parody, or otherwise play on, political slogans doesn't do anything useful. Mainly because it buys into the idea that unknown qualities are best thought of as threats. And we have enough of that already.

Trumped Up

So Kilmar Garcia, whom the Trump Administration supposedly couldn't get back into the United States, is back in the United States. Because the Trump Administration has charged him with "conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain" and "unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain."

Somehow, I suspect that I'm not the only person who thinks that, in this attempt to make an example of Mr. Garcia, perjury was suborned along the way. Any takers on a bet that the witnesses to Mr. Garcia's involvement all turn out to be people in custody for something or other? Didn't think so.

This may be the evil that Trump supporters are familiar with, but is it really the evil they signed up for? I know that a lot of Trumpists think of Democrats as weak and spineless, but this still strikes me as a dangerous precedent to set, precisely because it probably looks to anyone who isn't deeply supportive of the President like a deliberately bogus prosecution. And, as the saying goes, two can play at that game.

But it's a game we don't really want people playing. While I suspect that President Trump is betting either that Republicans Trumpists will win the next election (or that he's found away around the next election), that comes across as a pretty high-stakes gamble. Which gives me a certain suspicion that all of this might simply be a way to lever Mr. Garcia into agreeing to be deported; it's unlikely his conviction would survive a change of party in the White House, and a Democratic administration would have ways of making El Salvador's President Bukele wish he'd never played ball with President Trump if the current administration suddenly shipped Mr. Garcia back after an electoral loss, hoping to keep him away.

At this point, a lot of President Trump's actions seem geared towards taking, and using, as much power has he can, confident that he has a strong enough base of voters that Congress won't really do anything about it. This next midterm cycle is going to be interesting, to say the least. 

The Better Evil

"It's kind of a two-edged sword," [Ken] Green[, a retired entrepreneur and three-time Trump voter] said. "You either support [President Trump] or you support the other side, and I can't support the other side right now so … it's the evil you know."
Trump voters call president's pardon of corrupt Virginia sheriff 'a terrific mistake'

This, in a nutshell, sums up the brokenness of American politics for me. A strong binary with the understanding that both sides are, in their way, "evil." And so people vote for the evil they know. This viewpoint, that one should vote for the "lesser evil," and "the other side" is necessarily the "greater evil," is not new. But it strikes me as spreading.

This negative partisanship pretty much can't, by definition, lead anywhere good, because it provides and active incentive for people to excuse what they would otherwise consider clear wrongdoing done by their own side; or perhaps more accurately, by people they identify with. The case of Luigi Mangione, facing trial for the ambush murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is illustrative here, with a significant number of people being willing to excuse murder because it aligns with their political outlook.

But I think the bigger problem is the perceived lack of choices. To some extent, that lack of choices is real; there are only two viable nationwide parties in the United States. But nothing other than people's voting habits and fear of "wasting" their votes perpetuates this, because there are a number of nationwide parties for people to chose from; and once people start choosing them, the money will follow. But there's no real first-mover advantage to incentivize people to abandon whichever major party they currently back. And the "third" parties aren't necessarily making it easy; there are several different flavors of Socialist party to chose from, for instance. Were they to come together under one banner, they might appeal to enough of the Democratic Left to actually get somewhere.

Of course, negative partisanship works against these other parties, too, with the idea that their presence merely paves the way for the other side of the ideological divide to dominate politics. The fact that there are people who don't understand how electoral math works (for instance, believing that a third party vote both takes a vote away from one party and gives to the other major party) doesn't help matters.

As long as people are willing to overlook things they understand to be bad acts done by people who share their perceived enemies, the greater the incentive for the other side to do so. Being willing to punish the wrongdoers on one's own side when "the other side" isn't strike many people as little more than a messy form of suicide. But just as bad is the unwillingness to give credit for good things done by opposing partisans, since it actively pushes against the one thing that would be most likely to lower the temperature.

Into the Pool

One concept that I hear a lot is that a 4% unemployment rate is "full employment." And I always wondered why that was, since one person out of every 25 not being able to find a job doesn't quite seem "full" to me. Today I did some digging, and came across the concept of "Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment," or "NAIRU." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "Newer concepts of full employment require some unemployment to temper inflation," and that "some" is represented by the NAIRU, which comes out to be 4%. The logic is simple, once the unemployment rate starts to dip below the magic 4% number, workers start becoming hard enough to come by that employers are forced to increase pay in order to attract and retain workers, and those cost increases are promptly passed on to customers in the form of higher prices.

Straightforward enough. But it raised a question for me: If there must be a certain level of unemployment at all times, where unemployment is defined as people who want work, but can't get it, does this explain why the "safety net" in the United States is generally considered garbage? After all, social programs robust enough to mean that certain people didn't have to work in order to scrape by would mean that people could opt out of particularly nasty job markets, pushing things back towards an older understanding of "full employment," which was basically that the only people who weren't working were in the process of changing jobs.

It also gives a more economically sound (depending on one's understanding of economics) for seeking ways to push people into the labor pool than conceptualizations of "dignity" or concerns about "moral hazard." In situations where labor is scarce, workers have a decent number of options for putting pressure on businesses to shift some of the profitability of the business from shareholders to themselves. It would also, I expect, go some way towards eroding the idea of an "underclass." After all, work that wasn't valuable enough to entice people away from either benefits programs or other jobs would simply cease to exist, as happened here in the Seattle area a few years after I arrived. With technology companies hard up enough for workers that they were willing to train (in order to get around what it called "structural unemployment"), in addition to paying decent salaries, jobs that people took because they needed them tended to lose people. More than a few local restaurants closed because human resources people recruited away the wait staff during lunches. There was a local Burger King that resorted to offering $500 signing bonuses in order to attract applicants, and they likely had to slip some cash to the people they already had while they were at it.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the current unemployment rate is just about 4.2%, there doesn't seem to be much sign that the United States is on the verge of having prices take off in an effort to keep up with worker expectations of more money. Likely because of the fact that nearly a quarter of those people out of work, and looking, have been unemployed for longer than six months. (But it seems that the percentage of long-term unemployed can be inversely correlated with unemployment more generally; the number jumps when unemployment is low and drops like a stone when the broader unemployment rate climbs.) I know people who have been looking for a year and half at this point; mainly because the gaming sector is, as one person I know put it, a landfill fire, and the skillset doesn't exactly transfer over into other industries. I suspect that enough people are in "take what they can get" mode, that pushing up inflation is the last thing on their minds. So perhaps, as people were pointing out before the turn of the century, it's time to adopt a new way of thinking about the issue.