Hidden City

 

I know Seattle was around here, somewhere...

The final sunrise of 2025 never materialized, as a pretty thick morning fog had settled over the area. The annoying thing about these is that they're never consistent... within a half-mile it could seem completely clear.

Which Economy

It's a simple enough question:

I mean, have you SEEN the economy these new adults have graduated into?

And I understand the reason for asking it. It's a plea for understanding and grace to be extended to young people, who, having put in the time and effort to undertake a college education, now find themselves in a situation in which jobs, especially entry-level jobs, have become scarce. And I understand the invocations of "the economy" or "this economy," as way of explaining it. It's a simple shorthand for the position that the United States finds itself in now, with depressed demand for labor.

But hasn't this been the goal of "the economy" all along? The modern United States is very good, and has been for some time, at creating all of the goods and services that people are ready, willing and able to pay for without need of the entirety of its labor force. And while many people seem to value their own vocations quite highly, it doesn't take much to reveal that any number of them begrudge others theirs; if putting some number of people out of work is what it takes to feel wealthier, then so be it. Couple this with the understanding, expressed to me by a small number of people I know, that the demand for labor moves, but never really goes away, and one can see the dilemma that many people over the years have found themselves in; the fact that they can't find work that's valuable enough to support them, in a society that believes that there's enough valuable work for anyone who wants it.

Which leaves out the fact that the government has taken it upon itself to prevent labor from becoming scarce enough that employers are forced to raise wages (and thus, presumably, prices). And that means that somewhere in the area of one in twenty to one in twenty-five people who are actively engaged in looking for work (remember the Unemployment Rate is dependent on the Participation Rate).

For people in that 4 or 5 percent (which can be a few million people or so). every economy is a bad economy, simply due to the perception that government interventions or none, there's enough work out there for everyone who wants it. And this leaves people wondering both what's wrong with them, and what they need to in order to fix it.

And that leaves aside the efficiency gains that businesses chase as a matter of daily operations. Because every dollar paid to an employee is a dollar that isn't going to shareholders, some of whom can become quite upset about that fact.

So there are always going to be new adults who graduate into a world that's actively hostile to them making enough money in for the formal employment sector to support themselves, even in the "good" times. It's the nature of the beast. It's receiving a lot of attention right now, because the overall consume outlook doesn't seem rosy for anyone. But maybe the problem is that it's seen as actively bad for it to be rosy for everyone.

Virtual Camera

Racist AI fakes are now a business — and a political tool. You don't say...

At the end of the article, Axios quotes organizational psychologist Janice Gassam Asare as saying: "I would just encourage people to be a little bit more cautious when they see something on social media, and ask yourself, 'how do I know that this is actually real?'"

I felt that it was missing the "pretty please with sugar on top." This is, after all, an article that notes: "One user ID'd a video they shared as fake, but still encouraged others to share it because it justified their viewpoints about alleged SNAP fraud." If people care more about whether information validates their worldview than whether it's real, what good does it do to "encourage people to be a little bit more cautious?" That lack of "caution" is getting them precisely what they're looking for.

I wonder if Axios had informed Ms. Asare, when they asked her for her comments, that they already believed that people were deliberately sharing fictitious video narratives. Maybe they did, and maybe it wouldn't (or didn't) make any difference, but the general tenor of her comments, and the article as a whole, put the cart in front of the horse, as I see it.

Because the thing about "framing a guilty person," as the saying goes, is that it presupposes that the person is guilty. The only point behind framing them is that there otherwise isn't enough evidence to connect them to the crimes one believes that they're guilty of. When someone fakes and shares a "video [that] shows multiple Black women screaming and pounding on a door with the caption 'store under attack'," they're not doing so out a desire to tar innocent people; they're engaging in using fiction to tell what they understand is a truth, and the people they're likely to share it with already agree with their viewpoint. Because to do otherwise would be to invite pushback.

Racism is a fairly popular pastime in the United States, because at the base of it is a hierarchy of deserving. That existed long before generative automation. Faked video may facilitate its spread, but it was spreading just fine previously.

Riches for All

It is certainly a nice gesture of the Dells, but there will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money. 

There will be universal high income.
Elon Musk

A bit of proof (if any were needed) that having a high net worth doesn't mean that someone understands how money works. Because the United States already has universal high income... it's all a matter of when one sets the baseline; even poor people can have pretty significant incomes by the standards of 1825, 1925 or even 1975.

But poverty isn't simply about one's access to money.

Whether Elon Musk is sincerely being utopian to the point of inanity is left as an exercise for the reader, but it's worth pointing out that he's not the only person who appears to have difficulty understanding how money operates in practice; I've come to the conclusion that the biggest obstacle that many people have to understanding Economics is a general inability to understand the role of money in the big picture. Part of this is simply that people just don't think about it all that often... it's not something that comes up regularly enough that most people really need to understand it. But I also think that the way money is dealt with in both news and entertainment media is also at work; mainly, I would guess, because it's easier to explain things in terms of dollars and cents.

Unreturned

I was listening to the Altruism After USAID episode of Slate Magazine's Money Talks podcast a few days ago, and the guest, NPR's Mary Childs made the point that in the wake of USAID halting disbursements to non-governmental organizations and the like, that the money being withheld couldn't be replaced by philanthropic organizations.

My first thought that this was a matter of will. After all, if the United States government was no longer paying to fight malaria, and instead giving the public tax cuts, nothing stops that selfsame public from deciding to donate the savings to charities and keep the programs funded. The Trump Administration and Elon Musk's DOGE operation targeted USAID because they understood that many Americans feel poor enough that they resent the government giving money to ameliorate the problems of people far away.

But a moment's further thought put that idea to bed. After all, the federal budget isn't balanced; it's propped up by some pretty serious borrowing from global capital markets. Of course, people expect that the United States is good for it, which is why the government can borrow at favorable rates, but it's debt all the same.

And that's really the part that private philanthropy cannot replace. No rational lender is going to loan a charity several millions (or perhaps even tens of thousands) of dollars to save lives in third-world countries. Because there's no profit in it. Not even China, which makes a big deal out of its investments in poor nations, is doing so out of generosity; they expect a positive return, and when nations start defaulting on payments, China is going to start claiming assets as collateral. Charities, more or less by definition, don't impose repayment terms that entail seizing what few assets poor nations still have.

Given the fact that the United States borrows simply to keep the lights on and doors open towards the end of the fiscal year, some amount of the funding that USAID was providing was in the form of money borrowed from elsewhere. Specifically because poor countries tend to be bad investments, for any number of reasons.

Perhaps it's time that this was more openly acknowledged. There's nothing wrong with the understanding that, as a wealthy nation, the United States has an obligation to alleviate poverty in other parts of the world. And it's true that many Americans overestimate (sometimes wildly) the amount of money that goes into such philanthropy, as a proportion of their annual taxes. Still, this is part of what representative government is all about; having to make the case to the people who will be, ultimately, footing the bill.

And Then, There Was One

So this was an interesting LinkedIn post:

My AI vendor upgraded the terms of service.

For 12% more cost per month, I will get only 60% of the monthly credits for my use. Less for more. Sounds like a great upgrade... for them.

Time to drop my provider, I guess.

Are the costs finally reaching the consumers now? Have the AI vendors run out of free money they can use to keep costs artificially low?

The last sentence stood out for me in in the context of the third line; this person believes the time has come to drop their generative automation provider, because that provider can, apparently, no longer afford to keep compute prices artificially low. This is the genesis of the the process that Cory Doctorow terms "enshittification." As companies find themselves in the position of needing to show a profit, they are forced to raise their prices. The resulting flight of their customer base hobbles them, they enter a death spiral, and are either forced to exit the market or are acquired by another player. The number of providers shrinks until the overall market is highly consolidated, and then prices start rising to repay investors for the subsidized costs that have lured in customers all this time. And because all of the remaining players are raising their prices (or there are no other remaining players), customers have nowhere else to go, even if lock-in effects aren't present.

And since all of the market players are now very large, new entrants to the market are at a sizable disadvantage... in order to compete, they'd need to have unbeatably low prices, which would require a large amount of up-front investment... which would need to come from people and organizations that aren't bought in to the current market principals. So there's nowhere to keep moving to for investor-subsidized services forever. And. of course, investors realize this; the whole reason they're subsidizing costs for customers at this point is the expectation that once the market consolidates, they'll make all of it back, and more.

One commenter noted that State of the Art (SOTA) models based in China have very low costs, but without insight into their economics, there's no way of knowing whether those prices are artificially low, themselves. Nothing prevents the government of China from attempting to ensure the Last Provider Standing, and thus the one that benefits from being able to squeeze customers, is a Chinese company. But even if they aren't, if they can force other nations to take over the role of subsidy provider, that's still a benefit to them.

Either way, this mindset of "not artificially low is too high" is being penny-wise but pound-foolish. The unwillingness to pay what one believes that things actually cost out of a pervasive sense of one's own poverty has never ended well. And while this time might be the first, I don't see much investor money backing that position.

Questioning

I was listening to a podcast today, and the host brought up the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis. Listening to him, it struck me that what may actually have been at work was an answer to a mystery that exists mainly in people's imaginations.

The general gist of the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis is that the constants of nature, including the fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, et cetera, have to be within very narrow parameters for "life as we know it" to exist, and this isn't something that can be easily (if at all) explained by the Anthropic Principle. For instance, if the strong nuclear force were the slightly-to-somewhat stronger nuclear force, and everything else were unchanged, fusion would work differently than it does in our current universe and so stars would operate differently.

The idea that the constants of nature being their current values purely by chance is highly unlikely gives rise to the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis being part of an argument for Intelligent Design; something had to set the constants to their current values, and that something is an immensely powerful deity.

Fair enough, I suppose, but... how, exactly, do we know that there are lots of different possible values that these constants could have? After all, we have a sample size of precisely 1. And, given that the whole of the Universe and the Observable Universe are not the same thing, potentially less than that.

And in this sense, the Fine-Tuned Universe hypothesis seems to be the answer to a question that there isn't actually enough information to ask. Rather, it's a solution to a question that comes into existence if certain assumptions that have been made about the nature of the physical laws of the Universe turn out to be correct... and even that assumes that scientists will be able to test them at some point.

Granted, I'm neither a scientist or a theologian, but I'm at a place in life where I'm okay with not knowing, and the very distinct possibility that no-one will ever know. It's a mystery to which I don't need a solution. The question is only as interesting as the answers that people produce to it. In part, because there are other, closer questions; ones that it does make sense that we may be able to answer, and those seem to be much more fruitful places in which to invest attention.

Accusatory

Using generative automation for things is quickly becoming a cardinal sin, and this is leading to an interesting social media phenomenon; calling people out for using generative "A.I." as a means of leveling a criticism without actually engaging with whatever it is that's being presented. It is, in effect, a form of ad hominem.

I suspect that it's a form of the Liar's Dividend, although not in a manner that I saw coming. While it does seek to sow distrust of others, it's not about the quality of the information itself, as had usually been noted. Here, it's a form of moral accusation, one the serves to disqualify the writer from further consideration of their ideas. I'm curious to see how long it lasts: Is this something that the Millennials and the cohorts that follow them will carry with them as a generational habit, or is it simply a fad that will fade away as the technology does whatever damage it will do, and then simply becomes part of the background noise?

I think, at least for now, it will be the latter. Most people today don't strike me as being committed Luddites (in the original sense of the term); they're not likely to give up things they want, or give up some portion of an attainable standard living, simply out of opposition to the technology that enables it. Once whatever is going to happen happens, there will be no profit in standing athwart history shouting "Stop!" Even in a race to the bottom, no one wants to be the last one to cross the finish line, and while generative automation may be worth complaining about, if younger people were any more likely than Generation X or the Baby Boomers to pay more money that necessary simply to support their ideas of the way the world should be; well, the world would look very different now. 

Bedrock

It's a simple enough sentiment: "The foundations of trust are reliability and integrity."

But, I would hasten to add, the foundation of reliability and integrity is trust. I first encountered it as a bit of snark, but "he who never wins and never quits is an idiot" is more true than I think many people are willing to give it credit for. Keeping one's word and keeping one's commitments are both predicated on the idea that there will be a payoff in the future.

And I think the problem is that the people who preach things like reliability, integrity and grit are so accustomed to the payoff happening that they don't realize that for many, if not most people in the world, it's not a given. If reliability and integrity are simply avenues to being taken advantage of, people aren't going to display them. Not out of a disdain for virtue, but out of a belief that virtue is an expensive path to receiving nothing in return.

Work To Do

I was listening to the most recent episode of Malwarebytes' Lock and Code podcast, this one on the topic of "pig butchering." I find the topic of online scams and frauds interesting, but perhaps just as importantly, being in the know can be prophylactic; a lot of what makes people vulnerable to being defrauded is not knowing the red flags that the person they're communicating with isn't who they claim to be, has ulterior motives or both.

But Lock and Code tends to repeat a mantra that I'm not 100% on board with; the idea that "anybody can be scammed." This isn't something that I find to be untrue, but I think the phrasing of it can give people the wrong idea. A lot of pig butchering schemes have a distinct romantic angle, the mark believes that they've encountered someone who genuinely cares for them, and is attempting to help them out; someone who could be a life partner as well as an investment partner.

But that's not a vector that everyone is susceptible to. Some people are going to reject the idea of an attractive stranger suddenly seeming to want a relationship, and others are going to look askance at the "investment opportunity" being offered. That doesn't make such people impervious to all fraud schemes, but it does inoculate them against this one.

I think a better way of putting it is that for any given individual, there is some amount of work that would fool them. And what protects most people is that for these schemes to operate at scale, the amount of work on any initial approach tends to be fairly low. But for more targeted schemes, a fraudster may be willing to put in quite a bit more effort.

This, for me, is the value of podcasts like Lock and Code; the knowledge shared makes low-effort frauds less effective. Because the biggest risk factor for being drawn in by a supposedly misdirected text message from a random stranger is not realizing that this is a common lead-in for all sorts of schemes. Knowing may have been half the battle on the old G.I. Joe cartoons, but when it comes to online fraud schemes, 85 or 90% may be a better number.

Sure, random podcasts, blog posts and news articles are never going to make anyone absolutely impervious to trickery; anyone willing to put in the work may find a way to get to their target. But these resources increase the amount of work that needs to be done, and given the number of schemes where the initial amount of effort is really minimal, that can save a lot of people a lot of grief. 

Petitioning

Conservative Political Action Committee "Let's Go Washington" is attempting to get a pair of initiatives on the ballot that I suspect that many people would describe as anti-transgender. So today, they were at my usual grocery store (which doesn't allow for initiative petitions on the premises) looking for signers. Apparently, they'd telegraphed this move (or word simply got out), as "Washington Families for Freedom" (which sounds like a Conservative group itself) was there urging people to "Decline to Sign."

If I were a betting man, my money would be on WFF to win this one, either now, or once the initiatives make it to the ballot. Washington state is pretty Blue, and Trumpist candidates don't do well in statewide elections. Granted, Let's Go Washington is a PAC, and not a person, but something tells me that they're Trump-aligned enough that it's going to take more than ignoring the wishes of property owners for them to pull this one off.

Yo Ho Ho

The United States has apparently seized a tanker ship carrying oil from Venezuela to Cuba. The stated rationale for this is that the ship has been sanctioned for, at some point in the past, carrying oil from Iran, when that nation was barred from exporting.

I hadn't realized that vehicles could be sanctioned this way. Until now, I'd been under the impression that sanctioned were always leveled against individuals and organizations, whether those were businesses, governments or other entities. I looked at a United Nations page on sanctioned vessels, and it seems the main penalty there is that such ships are to be barred from ports. Which, honestly, seems kind of toothless to me. After all, if someone is sending goods into North Korea, it makes sense that they would simply use ships that had the range to make it all the way there without needing to make any stops along the way.

So in this sense, the Trump Administration seizing the ship makes a certain amount of sense. What I'm a bit dubious about is the fate of the cargo.

Asked what would happen with the oil, Trump said: "We keep it, I guess."

US seizes sanctioned oil tanker off coast of Venezuela, Trump says

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like it's making the United States Coast Guard into commerce raiders at best, and privateers at worse. But maybe there's some rule that says that people ship things on sanctioned vessels at their own risk.

Still, it creates a perverse incentive for President Trump, at least, to wait for sanctioned vessels to load up on cargoes and then seize them, if the cargo is then free for the taking. This is an act that I can see other nations getting in on. Although President Trump does seem to have a real soft spot for anything having to do with petroleum.

But I wonder about the real goal here. It seems fairly clear that this is a means of putting pressure on the Maduro Administration, although knowing President Trump, I'm doubtful that much thought has gone into what happens if it works. There may be an attempt to set up a pro-Washington client government in Caracas, but I'd be willing to bet that any such effort would be doomed to failure, especially if it seemed that the United States was hoping to set up the sort of cheap resource hub that the Bush Administration supposedly had in mind for Iraq. I suspect that Russia and China already have accounts set up to bankroll and anti-American insurgency if President Maduro loses his grip on power.

The United States playing pirate as a way of throwing its weight around will, of course, have consequences. But not for the President or Congressional Republicans. The rest of us will have to wait and see what this most recent act of international bullying costs us. This could be a very expensive tanker's worth of crude, when it's all said and done. 

Crackers

I somewhat understand the drive for "representation" in holiday nutcrackers. Black people are going to walk past the display, and they're going to want to see themselves shown there. But for me, what this really demonstrates is a lack of basically Black stories. And so the Black community winds up having to attach itself to other people's stories.

And I understand that this, in part, is what Kwanzaa is for. It's a Winter Solstice-adjacent holiday for Black people. But I don't know that it really does the job. It has a Hallmark Holiday feel to it, and I've never met a Black person who actually celebrates it. In my own family, it never rated a mention.

And maybe that's the real problem. There isn't a push for something genuinely Black (whatever that would end up meaning) to mark this time of the year. 

Watching

Data Protection Commission Ireland has posted a video online, titled "Pause Before You Post." This was brought to my attention on LinkedIn, which noted its use of AI. The implication was that "Pause Before You Post" was created entirely with AI, but I'm not sure.

In any event, "Pause Before You Post" is a stereotypical "stranger danger" public service announcement. It show a young girl, Ava, and her parents in a shopping mall, while random adults make comments that demonstrate they understand some of the details of Ava's life. The soundtrack could have come from a slasher movie, and Ava spends most of the video looking suitably frightened of the people who address her. And, of course, it's hinted that one of those adults might be a pedophile.

The root cause, of course, is shown to be the parents' social media posts. They've been sharing random details online, and creepy strangers have been reading them. And since these strangers are creepy, they've been speaking to Ava with a familiarity reserved for friends and family members.

I get it, but I wonder if there wasn't a better way to go about it. "Pause before you post" is sound advice, but the underlying message seems to be "treat the details of your child's life as state secrets," rather than "understand who you're sharing things with." Of course, almost anything shared online can become public. After all, someone can simply take it and repost it publicly. But while public posting may be the default, for many platforms, it's not a requirement. If a parent wants to share a self-deprecating post about being late to pick their daughter up from soccer practice, they can simply choose to only share it with online "friends"/contacts. But it's easier to get a message that everyone one doesn't know might be dangerous, or have designs on one's children, into a 40-second video spot. Nuance often takes more time than people feel they have to communicate.

As far as the "AI-ness" of it all, the only thing that really stood out for me was the fact that Ava was the only visible child in the spot. Maybe it's just how modern malls are, but the place seemed really sparsely populated in general. There's nothing odd about that, in and of itself; extras can be expensive, too, and the idea that Ava and her parents are alone in this situation adds to the overall sense of creepiness, but it was something of a reminder that generative automation isn't ready to replace people wholesale yet.

I rate it a "C," for being an effective vehicle for a too-simplistic message. I have a dislike for scare tactics, especially when there are better means of reaching the same goals, but perhaps this is why I'm not in advertising.

Believing is Seeing

I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight. The first strike, the second strike, and the third and fourth strike on September 2 were entirely lawful and needful and they were exactly what we would expect our military commanders to do.
Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)
Pentagon leaders brief lawmakers on U.S. boat strikes, fueling debate over legality

I understand Senator Cotton's viewpoint on this. The Trump Administration has to be in the right, and so his perception of events has to align with that, even if, to an observer, it doesn't seem to make much sense. The original video of the September 2nd strike against an alleged group of drug smugglers shows a small boat, but still fairly large for two people in the water to manage, that doesn't have any obvious weapons on it. What fight were they attempting to stay in? One with a naval force that could strike them at will and that was invulnerable to anything they may have done in reprisal?

This is part of the problem with modern politics. Senator Cotton's statements seem more driven by partisanship and/or loyalty to the President than anything else.

In what seems like yet another in a long series of misguided efforts to prosecute the War on Drugs by going after the supply of narcotics, the Trump Administration has declared open season on boats that it determines have drugs aboard. Why anyone things that a tactic that has failed time and again will suddenly start working now is beyond me. But a lot of the reaction to it is necessarily partisan. Republicans have to line up behind the policy and Democrats have to be vocal in their opposition to it, independently of its merits. And this means the "debate" over the legality of what certainly carries at least the appearance of extrajudicial murder, is really just another political shouting match, the outcome of which is more closely tied to the President's approval ratings than to the actual events that are supposedly under consideration.

And at the bottom of it all is the public, and its various factions.

As long as the Trumpist corps of voters understand the drug trade to be a hateful scheme to victimize them, being perpetrated by South Americans who unjustly resent them, they're likely to be more or less in favor of the strikes. And the members of Congress who rely on their votes, like Senator Cotton, are going to have to mirror their viewpoint back to them, or be replaced by someone who will. Likewise, as long as Democratic voters understand this to be a racist persecution of poor people in Latin America, their members on Congress are going to have to speak out against it. And as long as each faction views the other's viewpoint as proof of their wrong thinking, the conflict will persist.

Unquiet

 <rant>

And here I thought the quiet part was that companies openly discriminate in their recruiting based on factors completely unrelated to job performance.

One can blame this on some sort of biological imperative to discount that which is more easily available (unless, it seems that money is involved; people always seemingly grab the easy bucks), but maybe what it's really about is feeling justified in one's prejudices, and the willingness of, well, many of us, to bow to that.

Being Black, I've been told to not have a profile picture on LinkedIn. Being a Gen Xer, I've been told to expunge my early work history from my profile and résumé. I know people who profiles photos are black-and-white so that they appear to be fair-haired, rather than gray. People use different names in in order to seem more employable. And now there's an endless line of people telling us that the green "Open to Work" banner is really an enormous red flag.

Not because these things are somehow disqualifying; none of them are supposed to matter once one makes it to an interview. But because the gatekeepers of the employment world are supposedly graded (by themselves or others) on how well they make the process of recruiting new employees into a status game.

Prospective employees are treated like Labubus, Stanley tumblers or the Power Nine. If they don't lend the company an air of exclusivity, or make it feel somehow special, the fact that they can do the work, and do it well, doesn't matter. But when was the last time you saw a company crowing about how awesome and unique their new Product Manager was? When was the last time anyone made a purchasing decision based on how much work the seller's Talent Acquisition people needed to do to hire a middle manager from another company?

This would make sense if it showed up in the bottom line, or in stock prices. But literally no-one cares if someone builds a team by hiring a dozen long-term unemployed people. There's absolutely zero riding on this.

But we play the game anyway. Well, I do, at least. There are jobs that I've done, and done well, but there are no traces of in my professional history, because I'm supposed to be pretending that I'm younger than I am until I get in front of someone who can afford not to care.

It's a strange game, because no-one receives anything for winning. It's a pretense that often simply adds work to the process for everyone involved, supposedly because the appearance of doing more work is the valuable part.

</rant>