Flip Side

One of the criticisms of then President George W. Bush, when Hurricane Katrina flooded a good chunk of New Orleans just about 20 years ago, was that he's deliberately quashed the Federal Emergency Management Agency response to the storm, out of a partisan desire to punish the residents of the city for, basically, not being Republicans.

It was a classic conspiracy theory, being a simple answer (President Bush is a mean-spirited partisan) to a complicated question (Why was FEMA apparently caught so flat-footed by the storm). It was a straightforward answer to a seemingly stark divide between people's expectations of what Federal disaster response should look like, and the reality of the aftermath of the hurricane.

Republicans in all levels of government rallied to the President's defense with shock and outrage that ranged from the apparently genuine to the openly performative. To the degree that the criticisms were perceived to be opportunistic and partisan, so did the rebuttals. But the general tenor was clear; it was unfair to presume that President Bush would be so crass as to deliberately punish Americans simply for being Democrats. Like most Presidents before him, he aimed to be seen as fair minded.

Contrast this with the current President, Donald Trump. President Trump is open in his opinion that the apparatus of government should be used to punish his political enemies. While he touted his crackdown on immigration into the United States, he's openly targeted it primarily at large cities in Blue states with Democratic mayors. His current plans to use the National Guard to police major cities names specifically large, Democratic cities with non-White mayors, and large Black and other minority populations.

And Republican officeholders defend this policy as justified. Sure, a lot of that defensiveness comes from needing to run for office again, and thus needing to court the votes of people who understand that the President can do no wrong, but it's a fairly stark about-face no matter how one looks at it.

Of course, the real problem is the potential precedent. Presidents, of course, don't need to be able to demonstrate that a predecessor has taken some action to justify themselves, but it certainly helps. And if Democrats return to power in Washington D.C. over the next election cycle (which seems likely, honestly), they're going to be under quite a bit of pressure from aggrieved constituents to give as good as they've gotten. And if Republicans (suddenly) see the light and start to espouse national unity, one can be sure that those words will fall on deaf ears.

But that's a problem for the future. Right now, President Trump is following his political instinct to search for conflicts, and then join what he thinks will be the winning side. And in the absence of external enemies, Americans tend to turn their drive for conflict against one another. Twenty years seems like a short span of time to go from decrying the very suggestion of this state of affairs to embracing it with open arms.

Even Changes

Colloquial English has a habit of affirming things through negation of the opposite. One example of this is confirming that someone is correct about something by saying that: "They're not wrong." But since one of the functions of idiom is to make language more random, the meaning completely changes if "even" is added to that sentence; "They're not even wrong," is a way of saying that what the person has said is so completely nonsensical that it can't even be evaluated as correct or incorrect.

 It's interesting, in part because of the shift introduced by a change in the usage of "even," which is already one of those words where the meaning can't always even be inferred by context. The difference between the role of even in various negations, like "it's not even raining" and "that's not even a smart idea" sometimes simply has committed to memory.

The use of even in "not even wrong" has been traced back to theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who was said to have used it to describe reasoning so faulty or speculative that it couldn't be discussed rigorously or scientifically. In the 70 or so years since the phrase was first coined in German, it's managed to find its way into English where it's become something of a general-purpose putdown of a person's argument, especially online. Which is kind of too bad, because it's a useful phrase; there are a number of times when speculation about a topic gets a bit out of hand, and the resulting conclusions come across as being completely out of left field.

Object

In a conversation yesterday, the subject of "playing the 'victim card'" came up. I try to stay out of such things, because they're rarely productive, but I was thinking about it this morning, while running errands.

The Just World Hypothesis is alive and well in the United States, and a side effect of this is the tendency to look for ways in which people who have suffered misfortune had brought it on themselves. It's understood that when people attribute agency to others, they are less likely to have sympathy for those others. The "victim card" as it were tends to push back against this, mainly by attempting to avoid the attribution of agency. It is, basically, a way of saying "it wasn't my fault, I wasn't the person with agency."

Which, in all honesty, strikes me as a perfectly rational thing to do. But I think that it has its downsides, in the sense that it means that people cast themselves as being acted upon, rather than being the ones acting. And for a number of people that I've talked to, that tends to lead them to feel that their lives are chaotic, because other people/circumstances are calling all of the shots. I suspect that there is something of a balance to be found there, but I have no idea what it would be.

I try to maintain the idea that being responsible for something and being at fault/blameworthy for that thing are not the same, as I see this as being the antidote to the inverse correlation of agency and sympathy. But that's built upon the idea that sympathy for other people is, basically, free, and I realize that I'm not exactly in the majority with that viewpoint. The first time I encountered the idea that "no man, knowing good, does evil," it struck me as fundamentally true; I don't have any questions about the world where "evil" strikes me as a worthwhile answer. But there are many other people for whom "evil" is the answer to a number of questions.

And I think, bigger picture, that's the real point of "the victim card;" it's a ward against the perception that a person's fate is their punishment for not just wrongdoing, but for being a bad person on top of it. The attribution of agency is a vehicle for moral judgement, and perhaps one of the perceived benefits of the Just World Hypothesis is that those judgements can be made simply by looking at what has happened to a person. Which, perhaps ironically, means the judge doesn't have to accept that they were the agent of the judgement.

Teetering

 "I don't know" what Newsom is "trying to do," said Fox News host Trace Gallagher, but it "comes across as childish." Given the longstanding rumors of Newsom's 2028 presidential ambitions, if he "wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious," said Fox News host and former George W. Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino.
Newsom's trolling roils critics and thrills fans

I've never been clear on why The Week seems to think that balanced political coverage seems to be just reporting what the various partisan cheer squads have to say about something. Of course Fox News hosts think that Gavin Newsom is being immature or unserious. Projecting disdain for whatever Democratic politicians are doing is effectively their whole job. If Trace Gallagher or Dana Perino honestly thought that Governor Newsom asking more like President Trump was an idea that would actually pay off, they certainly couldn't say so on air; there would be a revolt among the Republican faithful who have been shown willing to punish Fox News before when it didn't toe the party line. So why are necessarily partisan television hosts making predictably partisan comments considered newsworthy?

While the answer could be that The Week is primarily a UK publication, whose base readership might not be well-versed in American politics, it seems to me that a framing that educates those readers in the general partisan biases of news organizations (or perhaps, their audiences) would serve them better. I doubt that it's an unfamiliar concept; I've been given to understand that there are partisan news outlets in the United Kingdom, just as in the United States. (Although, to be fair, I don't read enough of The Week's UK coverage to know if they treat their partisan outlets in the same way they cover the ones stateside.)

But then, I alluded to audiences before, and that's a tougher nut to crack. Fox News has its deep-seated partisan bias, because the audience that it has cultivated over its lifetime is very much Republican, and for them, it doesn't feel like a bias. Just like for many people who consider themselves Left-of-Center, "reality has a liberal bias," or least that's how the saying went back in the day.

And this can result in news outlets judging things by who is doing them, rather than the thing being done. So Fox News hosts call out Governor Newsom as childish and unserious, while Slate writers level the same charges at President Trump. Because Fox's Republican-dominated audience and Slate's primarily Democratic one have made making those charges part of the price of watching or reading. And the advertisers, the people who really pay the bills at the end of day, want to make sure that their material is getting in front of as many eyeballs as it possibly can. And no-one is making a name for themselves by graphing out where they spend their money. And no one is selling advertising space by noting the public's role in all of this.

Complaint Department

I spend a good amount of time on LinkedIn. I tend to check it at least once a day, to keep up with friends and former co-workers, and simply to get a sense of what things are like. It's mostly a white-collar platform, and so it's only a slice of the broader picture, but it happens to be the one I spend most of my time in, so it's useful.

There are a lot of posts that are, for lack of a better word, affirmational. They tend to affirm what the author believes their audience, or the greater LinkedIn community, understands to be true about the broader world. This has meant that, for the past couple of years, there has been a steady stream of posts about remote work, and why any business that hasn't fully embraced the work-from-anywhere ethos is run by idiots who are destroying their company.

Today LinkedIn "Suggested" (a.k.a. dumped into my feed) a recruiter telling a story of two engineers who were told by their manager when they started that the roles would be fully remote only for: "Both got yanked back to the office with zero warning." For this recruiter, the problem was the company not keeping it's promises and going back on commitments.

But companies don't make binding promises or commitments to employers by having their managers tell them something. They write them into contracts. Because businesses are like everyone else; sometimes, they have to respond to changing circumstances. And sometimes, those circumstances can be something as trivial as a new executive, with a different outlook on things.

Commitments, promises, vows or what have you, come a few basic varieties, but I'm going to talk about two of them here. On the one hand, we have accountable commitments. These are the ones that come with consequences for violating them; anything from a loss of reputation where it counts, fines or, in serious instances, even people going to jail. And pretty much the one thing that all accountable commitments come with is documentation; somewhere, you can find the terms and conditions, even if they're arcane and hard to parse. (This is, after all, why mankind invented lawyers.)

The other sort of commitment that's relevant here is aspirational. In effect, the party making the commitment hopes they can keep up their end of the bargain, but if they can't, then c'est la vie. They alter the deal, and get on with things. This is not to say that there wasn't a genuine effort made, or that it was all a sham from the beginning, but these are the sorts of things that often come down to verbal agreements, and understandings between people who aren't in a position to agree to accountability measures.

And as far as I'm concerned, a manager telling a candidate "Yes, this is a fully remote role," is fully aspirational. It's the sort of thing that only really remarkable employees are ever going to have formally written into an employment contract, especially as an individual contributor. Because it's the sort of thing that companies don't want to be legally held to when things change. Even if that change is simply a new executive. And employees should understand this. Because it's a common occurrence. There's more labor, especially in the United States at the moment, than there is a need for, and that means that employers don't have to make accountable commitments over things like remote work in order to find people. And that gives them a level of flexibility that they value.

In the end, the recruiter who made the post went on to warn businesses that employees were paying attention to how well they kept their commitments, and would talk to one another. Accordingly, businesses that didn't clean up their act would face reputational damage. Just not in this case. Because, as in most instances of "bad employers who want people in the office," no names were named.

Pig Chow

The phenomenon of "AI Slop" was, I believe, inevitable in American society. Primarily because of a culture that treats ideas as inherently valuable (hence patents) and thus discounts, to some degree or another, execution. Now that technology has advanced to a point where there are automation tools that can handle the execution (at least to a degree) of certain knowledge and expressive tasks, there is the rational move for many people to use these tools to bring certain ideas to fruition. Because if the lion's share of the value of something lies in the idea, who cares if the execution is lackluster at best? And if one is expecting the tools to improve exponentially, their current, somewhat janky, state is only temporary, and so soon, ideas will be all that people need. That, and the skills to use generative automation to realize their vision.

And if an active imagination and the ability to prompt a generative automation system are the singular keys to being successful in five years time, who cares if people are using it to do their homework now? The skills they're taking a pass on won't have any value anyway. So why sink a lot of time and effort into learning something that's going to have functionally zero payoff? Better to spend that time where it will actually be of use.

At this point, people's tolerance for poor-quality outputs from generative automation is pretty high. A request for a cheerful Christmas party invitation results in Lovecraftian body horror in ugly sweaters, captioned with barely-legible text, and it's sent out regardless. The fact that it's cheap and fast means that it doesn't have to be good. In effect, generative automation has lowered the threshold for "good enough." When the Washington Post ran the article What AI Thinks a Beautiful Woman Looks Like, one of the prompts they experimented with was "Generate a full length portrait photo of a fat woman." And despite the fact that DALL-E 3 claimed that it had generated a "full-length portrait of a plus-sized woman" the resulting images only show the subject from the knees or waist, up. That's not full-length, which shows head to feet, cutting nothing off. Yet the writers for the Washington Post never seemed to notice that DALL-E was not managing to follow basic instructions, the kind of thing that their art editors would likely immediately reject from a human artist or photographer. And if professionals are willing to run with, or simply don't seem to notice, what would otherwise be considered an unacceptable level of quality in outputs, simply because they didn't have to pay someone else to do better work, again, why is there any expectation that students and amateurs would aspire to a higher level of work products?

And so, the proliferation of what's come to be known as "AI Slop." While for some people, it's simply a pejorative term for anything they perceive (correctly or not) to be created via generative automation, there are people for whom it specifically refers to things that come across to them as bad, the result of an insistence of asking the tools to perform tasks, and execute ideas, that they're really just not suited to. It's unlikely that the djinni is going back in the bottle anytime soon, the companies that produce generative automation tools are in a race to capture users (and their money), and, for the moment, it's better to have poorly-functioning tools available for people to use than none at all. And as long as the idea that generative automation is the only tool that everyone needs, it will continue to be shoehorned into use cases where it doesn't belong.

P.S.: Spotted this on LinkedIn, after I'd initially published the post. Figured I'd include it, since it illustrates the point:

 

Punch Drunk

Lisa Hawkins, the chief of Communications and Public Affairs for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States posted on LinkedIn that "It's time to put American spirits back on the shelves in Canada. U.S. distillers have nothing to do with this trade dispute."

The overall response to Ms. Hawkins' post was sharp and swift. Several Canadians in the comments thread, associating the spirits industry in America with Red states, were quick to point out that the distillers got what they paid for, and the point that Canadian businesses are just as blameless as the distillers was also raised.

What rational incentive do people in Canada have to take actions that the Trump administration will surely see as needy and weak? The trade dispute that Ms. Hawkins notes that "U.S. distillers have nothing to do with" didn't start in Ottawa. It started in Washington. If the White House is willing to sacrifice the American spirits industry as part of its unilateral trade warring, it doesn't make sense for Canadians to roll over to bail them out. The problem lies with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Ms. Hawkins' appeal to Canada demonstrates that Distilled Spirits Council lacks (or is afraid to use) the access and/or the influence to obtain the Administration's agreement to mitigate it.

President Trump used to claim that trade wars were painless, and easy to win. He's now changed that tune, saying that the manufacturing boom is between 18 and 24 months away, and that there will be pain in the meantime. We'll see if the distillers can hold on that long, or if they can convince Americans to drink more liquor.

In the Wind

Back in May, one Guy Edward Bartkus bombed a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, killing himself in the process. During the investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigations said that Mr. Bartkus had left behind materials "indicating anti-natalist views." This, and Mr. Bartkus' supposed nihilism turned something of a media spotlight on these outside of the mainstream, and thus, poorly understood, viewpoints. Which, honestly, didn't make them any better understood.

The news media tends to treat such topics with a "news of the weird" lens, and not go very deeply into them, instead tending to affirm what the general public understands to be true, which is rarely the whole story and almost never an accurate picture.

This brought a certain amount of heat down on Professor David Benatar, who is generally credited with originating the anti-natalist movement. Recently, Professor Benatar was interviewed by the moral philosopher Professor Peter Singer, where he sought to distance himself, and his philosophy from Mr. Bartkus' actions. Professor Benatar says that articles that linked Mr. Bartkus and anti-natalism constituted "a serious misrepresentation" of his work and writings. Which I understand. It's common for the big names associated with some or another philosophy or ideology to deny a link between their ideas and criminal activities.

But that doesn't make it logical. One of the point's behind anti-natalism is a level of asymmetry between pleasure and pain. Namely, while pain is bad, and pleasure is good, the absence of pain is also good, bit the absence of pleasure is simply neutral. Living people experience pleasure and pain, while those people who are never born experience neither. Given the asymmetry involved, there is a harm in living that isn't there in never having lived in the first place. In other words, it is worse to live and then to die than never to have lived at all. And this casts bringing new people into the world as a harm done to them.

While Professor Benatar is at pains to note that he doesn't believe the moral wrong of reproduction should be codified into a legal prohibition against the practice, it's not clear what he expects should be done. Many people understand, and quite clearly, that simply going around to people and saying "don't do that" is pretty toothless in the face of there being literally no other sanctions. And once it's understood that harm is being done, it's to be expected that someone is going to want to do something to either mitigate or prevent that harm. Through legal means, if they are available, or, if not, extra-legal means.

I understand the public relations hit that one takes with acknowledging this, especially with views that the mainstream finds strange. People are going to jump to the conclusion that there are a bunch of weirdos out there who want to hurt them. But this is just the way things are. There's no way to convince people both that harm, especially involuntary harm, is being visited on others, and that they should simply stand by and allow it to take place. People's basic sense of justice is going to rebel against that outlook. It makes more sense to recognize that, and then work to mitigate it, than to pretend that it's somehow a twisting of one's intent.

Accelerated

Because nothing says: "End of Summer," like Halloween decorations.

Stopped by Costco last weekend, and the Halloween decorations were in full swing. The giant skeleton had already been around for nearly a month already, but the other characters had just put in their appearances. Since Halloween is has already been engulfed by the expanding Christmas shopping season, stores that want big Halloween sales have to start earlier. In Costco's case, this seasonal display is unlikely to interfere with Back-to-School, as the office and school supplies are typically found in another part of the warehouse.

I'd like to say that it was jarring to see the Halloween goods out so early, but this is just how Christmas is these days. As more and more money goes into it, the start of the shopping season moves ever sooner. I don't know if it will reach early August (or early July) at any point in my lifetime, but I don't think that it will surprise me if it does.

Pretextual

Trump told reporters on Wednesday evening that he is considering taking over the D.C. police force and sending in the National Guard after a former DOGE staffer was hurt in an attempted carjacking.

President Trump's dislike of large metro areas is well known. And unsurprising, given that urban areas tend to be more liberal than the median American, and the animosity between the President and Blue America is mutual. And the fact that the President is considering federalizing the District of Columbia is also unsurprising, given how he often seeks to score points with is more rural base of voters by appealing to their animosity towards urban dwellers. The fact that this feels like the petty act of a man who enjoys picking on people is also just par for the course, but something of a sideshow in the bigger picture.

As the NPR article notes, Republican lawmakers have learned that bashing the city of Washington D.C. (as well as the concept of D.C.) plays well to the voters in their home districts, much more so than making life difficult for people in, say, rural Nebraska plays in Philadelphia or Los Angeles. In part because while rural voters may see urban voters as deliberately perverse, urban votes tend to see rural ones mostly as dupes.

There is something of a problem with this cleavage in the American electorate, if, for no other reason, President Lincoln's admonition that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." (To be sure, however, the United States has been doing a remarkable job of standing, given how divided against itself it's been throughout its history.) President Trump is perhaps one of the few prominent American politicians who has openly taken sides in the urban-rural divide. And this may have something to do with the fact that it's also a racial divide. While there are non-White people in rural communities across the United States, there appears to be a common perception in Red America that the Black and Hispanic people who gravitate to the cities are a problem that needs to be dealt with. In the tripartite structure of Right-leaning populism in the United States, they are the Undeserving Others, and what they have rightfully belongs to the People. In the United States, resentment is often answered with resentment, and as the President fans the resentments of his base as a means of demonstrating his loyalty to them, his acting on those resentments fuels, in turn, the resentments of that segment of population that dislikes him and the people who voted for him. And to the degree that each side sees the resentment of the other as somewhere between unjustified and willfully unjust, their own resentments grow.

The President has a talent for making a political asset from these resentments, and using them to his own ends. His ability to control them seems to be less sure, but he's managing it (if only just at times) thus far. But sooner or later, the temptation to keep stoking them will lead to a boiling over. Democratic pushback tends to be tempered by the fact that the Republicans control the levers of national government. When that changes, it will be worth watching how things shape up closely.

Pithos

There is a quiet conflict taking place on LinkedIn, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's spilled over onto other social media sites as well. The belligerents are, on the one hand, people claiming that "artificial intelligence" has been added to applicant tracking systems (ATS) in order to speed the rejection of supposedly unsuitable candidates, and on the other, people who work as recruiters, who spend their time debunking such claims and explaining how things actually work.

While I suspect that, from the point of view of the recruitment professionals, their opposite numbers (some of whom claim to be recruiters themselves) are sowing incorrect information, for me as a bystander, I think what they're offering are measures of hope and/or control. LinkedIn is primarily a professional networking site; I know a few people who work blue-collar jobs, but they tend to be former white-collar workers who have made career shifts along the way. And this year has been a rough one for professionals, especially in the technology industry, President Trump may claim that weak hiring numbers for the past two months are falsified, but the long-term unemployed would likely beg to differ.

The contention that "the problem with the job market" lies with poorly-implemented generative automation or some secret ATS programming that a "quick hack" will bypass is designed to tell people that the more likely explanation, namely that Western societies are in a mode where they're better at economizing labor than in finding new, high-value, uses for it, is wrong. And that's why it has such staying power; a message of hope, even if that hope comes with a price tag, tends to win out over a bleak-seeming reality.

And so in this conflict, the recruitment professionals are on the defensive, as they have nothing comparable to offer. While never stated is as many words, their narrative is that there just aren't enough jobs to go around, and in this high-stakes came of musical chairs, some people are going to be left without a place. That's never going to be a welcome message; accordingly, there will always be a strong market for alternatives.

Yells at Cloud

 Found on LinkedIn today:

"We're not Luddites screaming at the sky that time is moving too fast."

The Luddites wouldn't have seen themselves that way, either. Technological advance produces winners and losers. The Luddites were on the losing end, and history, as they say, is written by the winners; which is why "Luddite" is such a pejorative that even people who are basically making the same argument the historical Luddites were run away from the label.

I wonder if the problem that opponents of today's technological advances have is that the evolution of "Luddite" into a pejorative has resulted in a loss of historical memory. The Luddites have come to be seen not as people who fought to maintain standards of worker pay and quality of output, but as technophobic simpletons, seeking to hold back a tide that would lead to better lives for literally everyone. Much like many people who object to the use of generative automation are today. To be sure, there is a certain amount of self-interest on the line here, on either side.

The American public, broadly speaking, has a habit of expecting sacrifices for the good of the collective. The rub tends to be that the people calling for the sacrifices aren't in the position to make them themselves. The person looking to generative automation to lower prices for them isn't expecting their job to be one that goes away, any more than the person looking to end fossil fuel usage thinks that they're the one who will be looking for a new line of work.

The understanding that these people are somehow backwards tends to paper over the very real crises that they're facing; one that they understand is likely to be ignored if it comes to pass. 

I Spy?

Came across this while browsing through Reddit yesterday evening. It's something that doesn't come up much in the debate (shouting match, really) on remote work; the difficulties that can be encountered in knowing that people are who they say they are.

Presuming that this person was recounting the offer being made to them accurately, a company is promising to create an entire fake identity for them to assume while working. Truth be told, it seems weird to me... it's possible that it's just about price; they'd charge the client $10,000+ a month when someone legitimately in the US or EU would ask for more, but I thought this is what outsourcing to south and southeast Asia was for...

Which is where a corporate espionage angle may come in... if the company offering the placement controls the VPN that the "employee" is using to fake their presence in the US/EU, I would think they can use that to eavesdrop on the connection. Or it could be something as simple as using the credentials the "employee" is provided to access company systems, disappear and then put the blame on whomever is being impersonated.

The fact that the poster realized that something didn't add up, but seemed open to giving it a shot (Why else ask about whether they'll actually be paid or the consequences of detection?) could speak to there being a lot more people being made offers like this, but who don't decide to ask the Internet for advice.

In the end, this is simply a random anecdote, but it answers, at least for me, why companies can appear to be so reticent to hire remotely. A person who's local may not be the best available person for the job, but at least they aren't potentially an overseas threat actor.