Outstanding

I ran into an acquaintance who was having a bout of self-doubt, and during our conversation, something occurred to me, but as is always the way of things, I wasn't really able to sort out my thoughts until after our talk was finished. Still it struck me as useful, and so I'm noting it here, as a way of saving it for later:

The problem, or danger, if you will, with one's Inner Critic aren't the lies it tells about the self, but the lies it tells about others. Imposter Syndrome tells you not only that you're a fraud, but that you're the only fraud; it hides other people's work, efforts and failures from you. And this is endemic to our society; I've lost count of the number of times that someone has publicly remarked that they felt alone in something, only to recall someone else making the same remark a year, a month or a even couple of days previously. It's a negative form of feeling special.

And perhaps that the thing about a need to feel special and unique; it doesn't always matter how one arrives at that status. Being especially bad makes one just as unique as being especially good. Being alone in one's faults sets one apart just as well as being alone in one's strengths.

Lego Lockdown

The Lego section of the Toy department of the local Fred Meyer store.

Locking merchandise cases are popping up more and more often in local stores. Whether they're for liquor, Lego sets, laundry detergent or underwear, the number of local stores that use them to prevent theft is growing.

When, that is, the stores even stay open. The Fred Meyer in Redmond, which I'd visited from time to time, has been closed, ostensibly due to a high level of shoplifting. It's the sort of story I've heard several times in the area... employees are told to not challenge thieves, for fear that they are armed, and so people learned that they could simply walk out with armloads of merchandise, and the store eventually simply closes.

This sort of thing is usually treated as a matter of corporate economics when the news media takes it on, but perhaps it should be covered as a policy story. The northern set of Seattle Eastside suburbs aren't exactly low income; there are enough Microsoft (and other tech company) millionaires in the area for McMansions to be fairly common. While poor people from other parts if the region have cars, too, and can drive to other locations to steal things, I suspect that there are a good number local people with an eye towards what they may be able to get for free. While the President chases supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the economy, and consumer confidence, continue to limp along.

And given the number of technology jobs that have been eliminated, so that Microsoft, Amazon and the like can pay for the massive capitol expenditures needed to fund the construction and operation of massive datacenters to power generative automation, it's likely that many people whose livelihoods were downstream of those tech workers are also suffering.

The Administration may be content to ignore what's going on in Blue states, in order to focus on the President's pet projects, but, sooner or later, something's going to need to be done.
 

Replanted

Does anyone remember Demon Seed? It was a 70's novel, and then a movie, about an artificial intelligence that decides it wants to be human, and that being human means reproducing. I remember staying up late one night when I was in high school to watch the movie on television, and when I was in college I managed to come across a copy of the novel and read it. Like most such things, the novel and the movie are fairly different from one another, and, as usual, the novel was better.

I was thinking about the story recently, because in the novel version, Susan, the primary victim in this techno-horror, basically has a bunch of agents that do things for her, so that she doesn't have to interact with other people, or even leave her home, really. And this is what allows Proteus to trap her in her own home without anyone being any the wiser.

While the old-school version of the story would set off enough trigger warnings to deafen someone, it's a story that is due for an update. While Dean Koontz is 80 years old, he's still writing, and I recall hearing that he'd updated the story in the late 1990s (a version that dials things back, in accordance with changing sensibilities). But there are other writers who could take a stab at updating things to the 2026 state of the art. Between generative automation agents and driverless vehicles, all it needs is some home automation that's not terribly more sophisticated than what we have now. Throw in a couple of Boston Robotics or Tesla Optimus-style humanoid robots and you're golden. Of course, the story would like need to be toned down again, and Susan would have to be a somewhat more active character, but I could see this being the kind of novel that would do well, because many people enjoy being scared, and a novel about an evil machine intelligence would align with many people's views on the topic.

Of course, I could also see this doing well on streaming, given that horror movies tend to do well. And people realizing that the bones of this story date back to the early 70s would likely blow a few minds. But maybe Hollywood is already working on a new treatment of this. They're pretty good at sniffing out ideas that will resonate with the public. And if not, someone should get on that. I smell a blockbuster.

Repetition

 

Just to make sure you understand.

Because anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, apparently.

Destined

Because it's the "in" thing, video game studio Bungie (the creators of the Halo franchise, and, more recently Destiny and the rebooted Marathon) has laid off a significant number of staff. According to a statement published online, part of the reason for the reorganization of the company was that "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years."

I played Destiny and Destiny 2 for quite a long time, even if I wasn't all that great at it. They were fun games, at least for a time. One day, after not having played Destiny 2 for some time, I loaded it up again, and within 30 minutes was having a grand old time, running, jumping around the map and shooting aliens in the face. After a couple of hours, when I logged off, I asked myself, "Why did I stop playing this game?"

The next day there was an update, and a new environment opened up. Being the sort of gamer who loves to explore the environments (especially when they are as well-crafted as Destiny's were), I jumped in, and found myself in a mission to fight my way through some sort of spaceship or orbital station... I don't remember which. It was fine, until my character encountered the final boss. And died. I tried again. And died. Over, and over, and over again, I adjusted my tactics, tinkered with my character's loadout, and tried again. Only to be killed by a powerful, and bullet-spongy final boss. Which reminded me of why I'd stopped playing Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 was a very particular type of game, and one aimed at a very particular type of first-person shooter player. It likely goes without saying that I was not that type of player. And so I eventually found myself pushed out of the game, because I didn't have the inclination, or the time, to mold myself into the sort of player that the game was geared towards, and Bungie wasn't ready and or able to make the game more accommodating of other types of players.

According to the "Bartle taxonomy of player types," first laid out 30 years ago by Richard Bartle, I'm an Explorer. I'm the sort of player who love to have their character wander around in new environments and just check them out. Finding a secret or hidden pathway to something I've never seen before is the highlight of a session for me.

And Destiny 2 wasn't built for that sort of thing. It had a number of really interesting places to explore, but many of them were gated behind difficult fight sequences, or were parts of raids and weren't really designed to just roam around and examine in detail. And so I drifted away.

With new companies, the question they have to be able to answer is: Why should people stop playing their current favorite games to play yours? For established companies like Bungie, the question becomes: Why should people continue to play your game, rather than explore what else is out there?" And I think that they didn't take that question as seriously as perhaps they might. And the business is starting to wither as a result.

One Week Left

A week from today will be the 4th of July, and 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It's supposed to be a big deal.

But it will, of course, be just another day in the grand scheme of things, and even in the life of the nation. Especially given that so many people have fundamental disagreements of what, if anything, there is to celebrate.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that "A House divided against itself cannot stand," but the United States has always been divided, often in multiple ways, and it's still here. The Trump Administration may not be doing much to bring the nation together (unsurprising, given how few people seem to genuinely want such an outcome), but even they are unlikely to bring the whole enterprise down around everyone's heads.

And so life will go on. As it has for all of the years before. Because change is expensive, and very few people feel flush enough to pay what it asks. And so they don't volunteer. And when change has to happen, the costs are passed along until they find someone with no choice but to cough up. And because the perception of scarcity is perhaps the biggest threat to self-governance, the American version of representative and participatory government seems to be at risk, even as it's grown to encompass a vast number of people that, in 1776, were not considered to have the requisite powers of reason to be allowed to have a say in things.

The trade-offs that would need to be made to improve things are straightforward, but also easier said than done, because someone's going to have to be the first person to extend a hand, even though there's a very real chance that it will be cut off, because one should never give a villain an even break. And sometimes, this comes across as a society that dearly loves to have villains.

As I've grown older, I've come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as deserves. The world is as it is, and there is no way in which it ought to be different. If one wants it to change, then one's task is to effectuate that change, either on one's own, or with a group of the like-minded. But, of course, there's more to it than that, because someone will have to pay the price for those changes, and if that feels more like a sacrifice (or theft) than an investment, there will be resistance. And to the degree that such resistance is taken to be the proof of one's correctness, it's cultivated. And so there will be grievance and resentment on what should be a nationwide celebration.

Because the United States of America is made up of people, just like everywhere else is. Perhaps there needs to be a greater recognition of that. That would also be something to celebrate.

Three by Three

Pew Research has published their most recent data on the political typology of the United States, which divides the nation into nine broad ideological categories, namely:

• No Apologies Right
• Faith First Conservatives
• Unconventional Right
• Pragmatic and Polite Right
• Tuned-Out Middle
• Order and Opportunity Left
• Left-Out Left
• Loyal Liberals
• Leftward Progressives

I find it somewhat convenient that there are four right-leaning types, four left-leaning and one rather disengaged one in the center, but I suppose that it makes things more accessible to people that way, given the degree to which many Americans understand politics to only have the single Right-Left dimension.

But, and perhaps this is simply more proof that I'm a nerd, the first thing that came to mind was a Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart, which also has nine types, defined in a grid having Good-Neutral-Evil on one axis and Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic on the other. Dropping Pew's "Tuned-Out Middle" into the "True Neutral" center box of D&D alignments is simple enough, but it become fairly complicated from there... Which type would map to Neutral Evil? Or Chaotic Good?

One could make a political quiz out of that itself... Give people the descriptions of the nine different Types, have them place them on an alignment chart and then see what their choices say about them, and their Type. Given that there are nine Types and nine alignments, I suspect that most people would seek to create a 1:1 correlation, but there's no reason why two or more Types couldn't share a single alignment. For people like me, who don't really believe that real world people ever genuinely qualify as Evil, they'd have to.

But I'm in the minority, I think. I'd be willing to bet that many Left-leaning Americans would have little difficulty filling the three Evil boxes on the alignment chart with the Right-leaning types from the Pew survey and vice-versa. And that there's useful (if perhaps depressing) information in that. Because part of the nature of high levels of partisanship, especially negative affective partisanship, is the view that people on the other side of things are the enemy. And part of the rationale that drives in-group versus out-group animosity is often the idea that the out-group is willfully, deliberately, perverse.

If, for example, a person who identifies with the Faith First Conservatives places themselves as Lawful Good, and slots the Left-Out Left into Chaotic Evil, that tells one a lot about how they view both groups. Them placing the Pragmatic and Polite Right into the Chaotic Evil box says something different, but just as enlightening, especially in a political environment where "having the right enemies" can be an important marker of group identity.

Limelight

One of the great things about just being out and conversing with random people is that one never knows that sorts of topics might come up. I had the opportunity to tell someone my theory on why people would set their resale prices for Trader Joe's mini tote bags (which are on sale again, by the way) at levels that no rational person would pay, and it spiraled into a conversation about the incentive structure of the attention economy.

My interlocutor was a bit conspiratorial for my tastes, but it was an interesting discussion nonetheless. I should come up with random things to talk to people about more often.

Because otherwise, I find, discussions tend to turn to things that cause people anxiety, and while it can be good to help soothe people's worries, sometimes it seems that it just reinforces those anxieties, or people become agitated if their concerns are not shared. Which I get; I understand the logic behind "misery shared is misery halved," after all. What I don't really understand is what I get out of my half-measure of someone else's misery. I'd rather take a stab at simply making them less miserable.

Which, like a lot of things, is more easily said that done. Now that I'm middle aged, I can look back on life and see something of a pattern. While people have always had worries about "the rich and powerful," there's been a general ratcheting up of who qualifies as that. The sorts of wealthy people that someone might tell you ran the world in the 1990s barely qualify as influential now; the bar for being "an élite" has risen much faster than the rate of inflation. Mainly, I think, because it tracks with visibility. Someone with the current equivalent of Bill Gates' fortune back in the day wouldn't command the same level of public attention that Mr. Gates did at the time, because they wouldn't be as close to the top of the list of wealthy people that one regularly hears about.

So now I'm curious about the role of visibility, and hence, the overall media landscape, in shaping people's general notions of who, or what, it running the show. I understand that my own limited media diet insulates me from a lot of this, but I'm starting to wonder if it plays a bigger role than I would have given it credit for. 

No, You're the Crazy One

[President] Derangement Syndrome is a partisan malady which is diagnosed as a way of calling out opposing partisans over their dislike of any given presidential administration. Republicans, for instance, will call out critics of the Trump Administration as having "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but it would be considered sacrilegious for a Republican to describe, say, President Trump as having "Obama Derangement Syndrome," despite the fact that it appears that Barack Obama has been living rent-free in Donald Trump's head for quite some time now.

I find this interesting for what it says about America politics; namely that even though partisans are wont to speak of the current political moment in very high-stakes, existential terms, they appear to believe that its inappropriate for opposing partisans to do so, even when it seems rational to do so.

President Trump, for example, has taken a lot of steps to punish Democratic leaning areas for apparently nothing more than voting Democratic, and the current Republican redistricting push is explicitly designed to make it easier for Republicans to hold on to the House of Representatives, and thus continue to allow the President to implement policies that are intended to be punitive. So why wouldn't Democrats see that as a threat to themselves and their vision for the nation? Why wouldn't they see the Trump Administration as deliberately wrongheaded? Many Republicans are happy to describe Barack Obama and Joe Biden that way, and it's not clear to me that the former Presidents were anywhere nearly as overtly hostile to their political opponents as President Trump openly describes himself as.

It's a weirdly one-sided vision of conflict.

I mean, if I were actively attempting to kill someone, I would expect them to be pulling out all the stops in defending themselves, if not trying to kill me first, and I think that a lot of people would find it disingenuous of me to expect that the other person would treat me as if I weren't ready, willing and able to do them harm. But that might just be the circles that I move in.

Because there seem to be a lot of people who not only see themselves as being obviously the Good Guys, but expect their opposition to see them that way as well. Which I sort of understand, but it strikes me as an outlook on the world that is immature bordering on actively childish. But maybe this is because I lack a sense of the world as being divided between forces of Good and Evil, and where the two sides understand the roles that they play in the greater narrative. Perhaps if I saw one or the other side as being deliberately perverse, I would also be of the opinion that they're the only side that would think to use unjustified aggression and that they would also realize this.

In this sense [President] Derangement Syndrome isn't a behavioral descriptor, but a moral one. So of course partisans don't use it to describe members of their own coalitions... to do so would be to call those people out as purposely wrong-headed, and violate tenets of in-group solidarity.

Worry, Worry

As with most technology, the problem that many people appear to have with generative automation isn't the technology itself; it's the idea that it's being deployed as a weapon against them by other people.

The United States is perhaps the worst place in the world for generative automation, because it's a society where circles of care tend to be small. If the negative consequences from the rollout of some or another technology don't land on the individual, their family or their friends, it's not of much concern. As is common, "not my problem" equates to "not a problem."

And I think that this is what's leading to the current wave of anxiety in the white-collar workforce. Blue-collar communities that have survived their own waves of downsizing, and the increased unemployment that came with it, aren't going to stand up for the same people who showed, by in large, little sympathy for them. And the investor class tends to see every dollar that goes to labor as a direct hit to their broader financial goals; and are willing to bet that enough of a customer base will remain for companies that layoffs will translate directly into increased returns.

And so people in technology are learning the lesson that so many other previously have learned; the United States believes that it can thrive even when fairly large segments of the population are barely (or not at all) getting by. Sure, the effect of ubiquitous automation may be an economic collapse that results in a repeat of the New Deal, but given the federal government's current willingness to fund subsidies with debt, that may not be as simple as people think it is.

Tech Tied

A snippet, from a LinkedIn post...

[Amazon] Quick: "Rima. If I stopped working tomorrow, what would you do first?"
Me: [long pause]

This is one of the things that I've never really understood about some people's relationship to technology. It's one thing to ask people how they would keep in contact with distant contacts without telephony... for most people, telephones (in general, not just cellular phones) have been around their entire lives; they've literally never known a time when one couldn't simply pick up the phone and call someone.

As much as I understand the Worldwide Director for Data & AI Go-To-Market at Amazon being a generative automation booster, the idea that she would have literally no idea how to do her job without access to a tool that she had no access to for most of her career seems very far-fetched to me. I still know how to navigate without using GPS, and can back a car into a driveway or parking space without backup cameras. These are really useful technologies, but they haven't scooped the old skills that I once used out of my brain. Granted, I'm bad at remembering telephone numbers these days, but it's not as if I couldn't tell you what I'd do if I lost access to my phonebook application.

To be fair, this is an Amazon executive advertising their product... a certain amount of hype and puffery is to be expected. But this isn't the only instance I've encountered of people positioning modern technology as the only way they can get things done, when there was a time in recent memory when they had to do otherwise. I understand the impulse to see technology as a necessity in this way, but it always stands out for me when people do.

Honestly

[Yohuru] Williams[, founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas] says it's time to have an "honest" conversation about the historical legacy of corporal punishment within the Black community. "That would be far more communal and affirmative of human dignity and the dignity of black life," he said. "Coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement, you kind of look back at this, and you go, 'We understand it from a historical standpoint.' But from a humanistic and community-centered, restorative justice practices standpoint, there's something that just doesn't sit right with me about this practice. And I think we owe it to ourselves as a community to revisit that."
D.C.-area artist turns belts into a conversation about discipline

I'm always dubious of calls for an "honest" conversation about things, mainly because the person making the call seems to appoint themselves the arbiter of what constitutes honesty. And since calls for honest conversation presuppose that the discourse to that point have been somehow dishonest, this tends to place the person into the position of somehow knowing the minds of others.

I understand Mr. Williams' viewpoint in this, but not everyone is a humanist, community-centric believer in the tenets of restorative justice. Accordingly, they're likely to have a different understanding of corporal punishment and its effects on the broader community. While I understand that the practice of corporal punishment doesn't sit right with him, that doesn't create an obligation for the community at large to come to an understanding that does sit well with him. Or that the current understanding is not an honest one.

There's nothing wrong with advocating for one's position. But I'm not a fan of the idea that it's the only genuine way of looking that things.

Unneighborly

According to the Wall Street Journal, State Farm sales agents are up in arms over a scheme to reduce their compensation and benefits, now that State Farm has lost the title of premier auto insurer to Progressive.

I don't blame them.

I used to be a State Farm customer. I was with them for many years.

One day, my car was in the parking lot of a local drugstore, when some yahoo hit it and drove away. I called State Farm and was told to use their online claims tool. Which I did. A week went by, with no response. In the meantime, I learned that I really needed to have my car fixed, because despite the fact that it ran perfectly well, the fact that it was now down a headlight and turn signal meant that it wasn't street legal.

So I called State Farm. And was told to use their online tool. I told customer service that I had. The agent looked, and, with clear surprise, told me that the company had simply dropped the ball; for reasons they couldn't explain, my report was still sitting there, waiting to be picked up.

Things went downhill from there. If someone had told me in advance how poorly things would have gone, I wouldn't have believed them. It was an unmitigated disaster. And completely unexpected, given that State Farm wasn't just some random online-only insurance startup.

And so I switched insurers. My State Farm agent, who I really liked, sent me a letter, asking me to come back, and promising me a discount on premiums. I felt badly for him; none of what happened was remotely his fault, yet he was the one expected to grovel. And I told him: what I was looking for was from someone for State Farm corporate to get on the phone and say that they hadn't met expectations. One mistake can be chalked up to human error. When literally nothing works as promised, there's a process problem that needs to be fixed.

I understand State Farm forcing cuts on agents, due to falling revenues. But when I stopped buying insurance through them, it wasn't due to premium rates; it was the impression that I couldn't be sure that I would get the services I was paying for. I shopped around when I switched companies, and the rates were pretty much all the same; the only real way to reduce what I was paying was to drop certain coverage. Given this, I suspect that I'm not the only person who didn't find State Farm to be good value for money. Making the agents take it on the chin won't fix that.

Hot Coffee

Taken in a Seattle-area Starbucks. (Where else?)

One thing that I've never taken the time to learn is image-manipulation software. I'm pretty sure that Photoshop could accentuate the steam rising from the white tumbler pretty easily. Come to think of it, I suspect that if I knew my camera well, I could have made the steam stand out simply by engaging the proper settings. But it's reasonably visible as it is, and that's good enough for my needs.
 

Looking Up

I avoid doomscrolling. I think. I'm not sure that I'm clear enough on the definition of the term to be able to confidently say that I don't do it. I don't spend much time on news sites these days, because most of them require subscriptions, and I don't find most of them valuable enough to trade date, let alone money, for. And other than Linkedin, I don't have much of a social media presence. I enjoyed Google+, but that's long dead at this point. I could never get a straight answer as to the proposed business models of the would-be alternatives, and so never moved over to any of them. I haunt Reddit once in a while, but don't spend much time reading the news there.

So I don't think that I indulge in a lot of doomscrolling. But even without it, it's hard to find positive news about what's going on in the would, since positive items neither sell subscriptions nor drive attention to advertisers. So my media diet tends to have a fairly negative bent to it... which I dislike, and so I'm less likely to spend a lot of time reading the news.

But why do that, when the positive news is out there... it's just a matter of going out and finding it. Part of it, I suspect, is an aversion to the treacly "rainbows and puppies" sort of good news. It's easy to sort, and easy to report, but it comes across as being pretty trivial. There are only so many rousingly successful grade school bake sales I can be bothered to read about. Perhaps it's due to the stories being mainly human interest. And of course there are always people out there doing good things... the population of the United States is in the hundreds of millions, we can't all be jackasses all the time.

I think that what I'm actually looking for is accessible technology news; something I can read to learn how people are getting out there and solving problem, with enough technical detail that it's not all about the personal stories involved, but in language that I can actually make heads or tails of, given that I don't have a technical education.

That's likely to be a rare beast, and unlikely to be free. But, given the length and breadth of the World Wide Web, it's out there somewhere, I just have to find it. I expect that it will be a worthwhile project. 

Enlightening

Why not?

I stopped in a local bookstore and found this display. I'd never heard of celebrity prayer candles before, but it turns out that there's a decent-sized cottage industry for this sort of thing. I already have a few too many things that I don't have an immediate use for, otherwise, I might have purchased one, just for the novelty factor.

I'm a bit surprised that this hasn't made anyone angry enough that it's become newsworthy, but I suppose I shouldn't complain when people take things in stride for a change.
 

Hidden

A low-effort fake profile from LinkedIn.

So I received a connection request on LinkedIn from a person I'd never heard of, and wasn't even a second-level contact. Curious, I looked at their profile. And was greeted by a raft of red flags.

This sort of thing is common with fraudulent LinkedIn profiles: the lack of connections, prior roles without details and only a handful of connection despite a seemingly long career. And all that before I did a reverse image search on the profile picture.

And that commonality can be part of the problem. Because while not all bogus profiles are so obviously bogus, it can be easy to come to the conclusion that they are. And thus, anyone with an ounce of sense should be able to spot them. But someone with a decent amount of time and some resources can avoid many of the obvious pitfalls; existing profiles can be "rented" or compromised, work histories can align with stated timeframes and locations, and a fabricated résumé can be constructed. That may be more effort than a stereotypical third-world fraudster can bring to the project, but not everyone conforms to the stereotype.
 

Can't Buy Me Love

Given the fact that part of the reason why SpaceX wants to build data centers in space is that they understand that many communities find living near ones on Earth sucks, the idea that opposition is the result of a foreign influence campaign by Chinese interests seems to be a bit misguided.

Look, I get it, there's the promise of money to be made from ubiquitous automation, and boosters of technology have long held that the general public is simply too ignorant for their concerns to be allowed to slow progress.

But there's a reason why there are individuals who aren't going for: "This will be great for everyone; just trust us," and that's because time and again, promised benefits haven't arrived (or, perhaps more accurately, haven't been shared), and rather than supporters of technology taking the responsibility to make those who bore the costs whole, fingers were pointed until the whole thing blew over.

If LLMs were going to be such moneymakers, why did Meta and Anthropic feel the need to pirate books to train their systems, rather than just paying for them? I think that there are more causes to be suspicious of generative automation firms than their supporters may be willing to cop to.

The fact of the matter is that "Big Business" are not considered trustworthy by many members of the general public, and "Big Business" hasn't done a whole lot over the years to change that. Generally speaking, it's rare that someone supports something where they bear the costs, but the benefits go to someone else.

All of that said, I think that it's more than "the rich" and "tech moguls" who think (or want to think) they smell a rat. There's a reason why the term "Luddite," is more of a pejorative today than it was originally. When groups of people are pitted against one another, it's common for one or both sides to not only believe they deserve to win, but to see the opposition to them as illegitimate. And a lot of people have hitched their wagons to the generative automation star. It's not only the well-off among them who might resent pushback.

Consolation

 Microsoft's Brad Smith made a blog post today about responding to concerns, especially from young people, about generative automation and the possible impacts on employment.

It's a very cromulent bit of corporation-speak, designed to convey to readers that Microsoft isn't so wealthy, powerful or distant that it doesn't care about people's worries concerning technology. And Mr. Smith is willing to say some things that other corporate executives have been less willing to; he notes that there has been "corporate pressure to reduce headcount to help pay for AI’s enormous capital expenditures," rather than pretending that job cuts were the result of generative automation being able to do the work better. I think I still fault him for making this admission only after that reality had become public knowledge, but honesty is honesty.

But as I read it, I kept being drawn back to the Copilot Super Bowl ad (since removed from YouTube) that aired in 2024. For all that Mr. Smith says that the goal of generative automation is to help people do better work, rather than replace them, the promise of that initial advertisement was that people could be "soloprenuers" by letting Copilot do the things they would hire other people to do. And I said at the time: "If one's fear is that technology will drive isolation, or that AI will render one's skills obsolete, the message of this commercial is not reassuring." I would liked to have seen Mr. Smith acknowledge that there are people who are afraid because Microsoft's messaging gave them reason to be afraid.

Mr. Smith notes that in their book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman note five "soft skills that are uniquely human," namely: curiosity, creativity, compassion, communications, and courage. Which is all fine and good. But these are not traits that are in short supply. If the majority of people thought that the demand for these skills were high enough to keep the job market afloat, there wouldn't be so much worry about a jobpocalypse on the horizon.

If widespread adoption of generative automation by businesses is inevitable, and the jobs shed to free up budget for capital expenditures aren't coming back, the technology is going to have to create demand for human labor somewhere else. And "human observation and insight" aren't going to be that demand unless, somehow, the percentage of returns going to labor increases markedly, such that demand for automation-produced goods and services really skyrockets. And that's not a prediction that technology industry analysts seem to be making at this point.

To the degree that progress can be described as a process of creative destruction, I suspect that the public at large is better off when creativity drives destruction, rather than destruction demanding sudden creativity. But the public at large isn't calling the shots. It's the investor class, in search of returns on their investments. And as a high-ranking executive at a publicly-traded company, it's not difficult to tell which of those groups Mr. Smith is more immediately answerable to. And so I wonder about the motivation of this post, from a public relations standpoint. Is this honestly what the leadership of the company is thinking, or is it being conciliatory in an attempt to head off anger that may impact profitability and investor confidence?

Early

I was at Costco this weekend, and noticed that a giant skeleton decoration was already up and on sale. While June seems pretty early for Halloween decorations to be on store shelves, it's something of a necessity if things are both going to be sold, but not in the way of the earlier and earlier start to the Christmas shopping season.

Personally, not being a big Christmas person, I'm not a fan of the longer and longer time that's being devoted to it. But I get it from the point of view of retailers. To the degree that Christmas shopping can be chalked up to impulse buys, it makes sense that stores that have items out first are going to capture sales. And this sets up something of a race to have things out early. And that pushes other seasonal items, like Halloween, earlier in the year.

We'll see if Halloween decorations are on the shelves in May next year, or if the march of the start of the Christmas season takes a year or two to catch its breath.
 

Numbered

I was watching a video by Hank Green, where he was announcing his new podcast, "Humans," and one of the points he was making was that to people who create media for the internet, whether that's YouTube videos, podcasts or what-have-you, they tend to see their audience in terms of numbers, rather than as individuals. Mr. Green said that he spends time in the comments of his videos specifically to interact with people as, well, people.

After that, I watched a short by a guy named "blumineck," in which he related the story of how he was fooled into making an outraged response video to someone appearing to be unsafe with a heavy bow, and had nearly posted it before he realized he'd fallen for a hoax. His takeaway from that was to always verify things, especially those that make one angry, before responding.

Which it pretty common advice about dealing with things on the Internet. I first encountered it well more than a decade ago.

But it occurs to me that between Mr. Green and blumineck, there may be a more general lesson there. And that is: "To many people on the Internet, you're simply a number."

When I posted a "fraudspotting" post on LinkedIn that gained enough traction to top 50,000 "impressions," LinkedIn didn't congratulate me on informing people, or potentially sparing a person whose profile had been copied from reputational damage. Rather they took note of the numbers, and encouraged me to post more in an attempt to keep those numbers rising.

Hank Green had pointed out in his video that for YouTube creators, their interests are somewhat aligned with those to YouTube (Alphabet) itself. YouTube's goal is to increase the number of people who watch videos on the website, and the amount of time that they watch. And to the degree that YouTube rewards more views with more money, a creator can share that goal.

But the goal of making numbers go up can lead to situations in which someone pretends to injure themselves to drive sharing of their video. It can lead to making inflammatory claims for the sake of responses. Or simply a raft of things that all come across as roughly the same as people copy what they have seen others be successful at, in a hope of driving the same numbers.

It's a different mindset than one would have for dealing with a live audience. And keeping that in mind makes the Internet more intelligible. 

Fanrage

I don't know if people understand how much the fandom of something or someone can come to feel valued and respected by the idea that whatever it is exists for them and them specifically. Telling fans to chill out or calm down in the face of changes to the object of their feelings is to tell them that the needs the fandom fulfills are, in fact, trivial.

And, to be sure, to many people, they are. For me, whether or not a character in a movie adaptation is faithful to some original portrayal of them is completely unimportant. But that can also be said for a lot of things that people find important... Importance is, after all, a subjective determination.

So I think that discounting people's emotional attachments may be something done too often in haste. 

Party All the Time

The lower court also “failed to follow our instruction in Callais that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns.”
Supreme Court permits Alabama to use congressional map struck by lower court as racially discriminatory. SCOTUSblog

So then, one wonders, what is?

In the unsigned order, handed down late last month, the 6 conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court basically said that a racial community that consistently votes in a partisan manner are partisans first, and members of their racial community second. Accordingly, gerrymandering districts in such a way as to dilute their voting power is a partisan act, and not a racially discriminatory one.

I understand the logic in play there, even if I highly doubt that this was what Congress had in mind with the various Voting Rights acts. But those were a long time ago, and in the meantime, the Supreme Court has become a hotbed of partisanship. Not because the justices are bad at their jobs, but because the White House and the Senate effectively control access to the court; and with the President now being the effective leader of their political party, anyone who cannot be shown to be loyal to the party line has zero chance of being nominated, let alone confirmed to the bench. In other words, being a loyal partisan is the job of a Justice of the Supreme Court.

And thus, we have a decision widely regarded as nakedly partisan.

Personally, I'm somewhat impressed the ability of partisans to see partisan bias as good for the country. The whole reason why the Louisiana legislature had redrawn its maps was to add another Republican seat to its Congressional delegation, and it had apparently concluded that there was no way they were going to convince enough voters in either of the districts held by Democrats to change their affiliations; so writing one of the districts out of existence was their only option.

One can debate whose fault this is; Black voters in Louisiana for not buying whatever it was Republicans there are selling, or the Republicans for not being willing to make a deal appealing enough to win over those voters. But the end result of the gerrymander is that it no longer matters... Not needing any more actual votes to secure a new seat, Republicans no longer need to offer anything better to Democratic voters, and they have no reason to respond to any shift those voters might make in their direction. Which, in turn, means that Democrats have no reason to consider Republican candidates. One-party systems, even when not enforced by law, tend to be unresponsive to fairly high levels of dissatisfaction for just this reason; unless their base of support completely collapses, they have the ability to tell those who disagree with them to simply lump it. And they don't have to reward anyone outside of their base of support, because those people have no way of inflicting pain on the establishment. And if their base currently benefits at the expense of outsiders, there's an active incentive to keep them outside.

Of course, one of the recurring blind spots of partisans is to see their positions as objectively right and good, and see the public as having a responsibility to them, rather than the other way around. I think that American politics has become more and more partisan since the election of Ronald Reagan, back when I was in junior high school, with Newt Gingrich and company really kicking the process into high gear. (Although this might simply be a factor of my being too young to really follow politics prior to that.) But they were abetted in this by a general fecklessness in government by both parties at a number of levels, which left a lot of people (and i think more join them every day) with the impression that the only way they could protect their interests was single-party dominance.

The very idea that partisan gerrymanders are allowable, but strictly racial gerrymanders are not speaks to this. While gerrymanders rely on the fact that people's votes can be reliably predicted fairly well in advance, their point is to make elections non-competitive. And this lessens the importance of policies that impact the electorate as a whole, in favor of the preferences of primary voters. To use myself as an example, if I only vote in the general elections, and will base my vote on the party affiliation of whomever is on the ballot, why should any care what my opinion on anything is? My vote isn't in play, and so it affords me no power. Given that political parties are simply private political organizations, why hand them, via their most vocal members, this sort of influence?

Coming up on 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the United States is still a disunified (and largely dysfunctional) polity. There's no rational reason why Democratic and Republican voters should be so at odds with one another that so many of them won't even consider voting across party lines. The divide may not be as total as it's often described, but it's present, and deeper than I suspect is healthy.

Elizabeth Willing Powel: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.”
Overheard, it is said, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787

Keep it? I'm not convinced that many people even want any part of it.

Severance

The problem with "inside the Beltway" punditry is that it tends to be divorced from the actual reasons why the public at large does things. I was listening to a recent episode of the Slate Politics podcast, and host David Plotz was attempting to make the point that Graham Platner's character flaws were different, and lesser, than President Trump's, as an answer to a an expected Republican callout of hypocrisy.

What serious Democrat cares if Republicans think they're a hypocrite, given the number of Republicans who already regard them as Enemies of the State? Democrats who are going to vote for Graham Platner will do so not because they've decided he's morally upstanding, but because control of the United States Senate is important, and a Senator Platner makes that more likely than Senator Susan Collins remaining in office does. Disliking the new rules of the game doesn't mean that people don't have to play. And the new rules of the game dictate that controlling the various levers of government is the only thing that matters.

As long as Democratic and Republican voters continue to organize themselves into two mutually hostile camps where "the other side losing" is considered equal to "winning," this is going to be the new normal, because the activist classes on both sides see themselves as too broke to be able to care about right and wrong.

Ironically, it's because they can't afford not to.

"Inside the Beltway" commentary that expects people to feel secure enough to take the high road simply comes across as disconnected from the way that people are actually engaging with politics. And it's difficult to offer workable solutions to a problem when one is committed to an incorrect diagnosis.

Junish

It's June again, and so it's also LGBTQ Pride Month. I have to admit that it's only the Third, and I'm already weary of the skirmishing between conservative Christians and Pride boosters, even if I understand the real and imagined stakes of the conflict.

It reminded me of Ross Douthat's Believe, which I read earlier this year. Chapter 6 is "Three Stumbling Blocks," barriers to returning to faith that Mr. Douthat believes people may encounter. After laying out his answers to "Why Does God Allow So Many Wicked Things to Happen?" and "Why Do Religious Institutions Do So Many Wicked Things?" he moves on to "Why are Traditional Religions So Hung Up on Sex?" (As an aside, I'm curious how he decided that these were the topics to tackle. Perhaps his readers who wrote to him about their vacillations over their choice to leave their faiths sought these answers.)

At one point in the section he notes:

It's possible to think that Christianity or Islam or any other faith is a locus of divinely revealed truth about the universe and that it's gotten sexual ethics almost completely wrong from the get-go. But there's a certain tension between those two beliefs, and it's hardly ridiculous to think that the second one substantially undermines the first. Come worship the God who revealed Himself to us, and who, by the way, let us go completely and cruelly wrong about sex and gender for several thousand years isn't an ideal pitch even if it seems to fit the spirit of the times.

Mr. Douthat then goes on to make his case that religions haven't gotten sexual ethics wrong, but that brings me to another thing that comes up every June: Juneteenth.

Now, when I first learned of Juneteenth, it was just something that people in Texas did to have another excuse for a barbecue. And I don't really pay any more attention to it now. But what's important here is that it doesn't draw sectarian fire in the same way that Pride month does. Even though one can make the case that God, by the way, let humanity go completely and cruelly wrong about owning other people as property for several thousand years.

If it's uncontroversial that Abrahamic acceptance of slavery was actively misguided, why is it so difficult to credit that Abrahamic sexual and gender ethics might also reasonably be considered to have outlived their usefulness? The Bible is pretty clear on the permissibility of owning slaves; Mosaic law doesn't beat around the bush on the topic. Sure, there are people who string together various parts of Scripture to make the case that the Bible actually condemns slave owning, but if that's the case it's remarkable that it took some eighteen centuries for the message to get across, and reasonable to ask why such a long delay.

To defend divine revelation that everyone ought to be either in a monogamous, cisgender, mixed-sex relationship or celibate for life, while discarding divine revelation that slavery is permissible and that slaves have responsibilities to their owners as flawed comes across as cherry-picking. While Mr. Douthat confidently states: "But the social history of the last few decades should, at the very least, disturb one's confidence that the world before the sexual revolution was simply oppressive and the world since simply more liberated and just," making the case that the social history of the period from June 19, 1865 to today should disturb one's confidence that the world before emancipation was simply oppressive, et cetera, would be to invite being pilloried as an unreconstructed racist. Perhaps I'm incorrect in this, but I can't see Mr. Douthat attempting to make the second case, despite the current state of the African-American community writ large.

The sectarian sniping over Pride Month, and whether or not LGBTQ people fit properly into some divine plan is pointless, and drives home the fact that religion can be completely (even if "cruelly" overstates things) out-of-step with modern ethical understanding; all in the name of a refusal to simply live and let live when Internet clout points are on the line.

Vector

There is a type of fraud, perpetrated against job seekers, termed a "Contagious Interview." The tactic has been around for a few years now, and like many fraud tactics, has been evolving and spreading. Originally, it was targeted at developers: a fraudster would ask a job seeker to clone and execute code from code hosting platforms, like GitHub. The code package would have a malicious payload attached to it, and if it was run in an insecure environment, that payload would be installed on the target's computer/network.

It's taken a while, but the technique is now being deployed against other job seekers. Some examples I've heard of are people being asked to record videos of themselves for verification purposes or even something as simple as being sent a Zoom link. In each case, the target is presented with an error message or dialog box that informs them that a driver, or their Zoom installation, is out-of-date and that specific commands need to be run in the Terminal to address this and continue.

Of course, updating camera drivers or video conferencing software doesn't require Terminal commands; this fraud depends on targets following instructions, even when they don't understand precisely what they are doing. And that relies, at least in part, on a certain amount of anxiety. And there's no shortage of anxiety among job seekers today. Someone flustered by a potential roadblock between them and an interview is much more likely to follow dodgy instructions than someone feeling more secure in their situation.

And, of course, someone stressed from being unemployed will find being stolen from via malicious software running on their computer to be a bigger blow than someone with a steady income. But money is money, and the fact that a dollar, pound or euro goes a fairly long way in a poor or developing nation means that people there will continue to target people in wealthy nations who are looking for work. It's a form of resource curse unto itself, and one that will keep evolving, so long as the world's poor have easy access to websites and people's inboxes.

Handed Over

“James Madison’s design — ‘ambition must be made to counteract ambition’ — assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive. He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.”
The Week, quoting Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post.

I understand Mr. Zakaria’s point, but I feel it somewhat obscures an important factor. For many Republican lawmakers the congregants in “the personality cult of one man” are the people whose support they need to be reelected. No matter how well a lawmaker’s chosen policies might serve the nation as a whole, they cannot implement them if they are voted out of office.

Donald Trump controls the Republican Party because he is able to influence it’s activists and primary electorate to vote in accordance with what he understands his interests to be, because those voters believe that those are also their interests. And this is due to a long history of “the political establishment,” as it were, paying lip service to making people’s lives better, but sacrificing their direct interests at nearly every opportunity. Donald Trump only needed to have just enough credibility to get people to think that “this time might be different,” and he was in.

Republican members of Congress have the ability to neither counteract the ambition of the President with their own ambitions nor to jealously guard their powers against the executive, because any ambition other than using their powers to be an instrument of the President’s will is punished by the “MAGA” base. And a public airing of the missteps that brought Congress to this place won’t do anyone any good. As long as those people who are motivated to turn out for Republican primary elections believe that if President Trump stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone to death, that it would be the best thing for them and the nation at large, the Republican party doesn’t need to “surrender its institutional ambition;” it has already lost any ability it may have had to retain it.

The best way to save a home from a fire is to prevent ignition. Once hoses are being taken from the hook-and-ladder and attached to hydrants, the question isn’t “Will the structure burn?” but "How much of it will remain once the flames are extinguished?”

Mr. Zakaria’s point, at least as quoted by The Week, starts with noting that for partisans, corruption isn’t about what is being done, but about who is doing it. This interpretation of The Rule of Law is nothing new at this point. This is a function of the fact that holding a member of one’s own “tribe” accountable comes with costs. People who understand impartial application of the rules to be fundamentally unaffordable are predictably unwilling to pay what it asks.

Exceptionality

Anyone can be an exception to a rule. But when a large number of people all claim to be the same exception to the same rule, they have simply defined a new rule.

I find it interesting which supposed "rules" of society are so broadly unpopular that that the appear to exist for no other reason than to allow people to loudly proclaim that they are an, if not the, exception to said rules.

I suppose it's another way of seeking meaning in life by being better in some way than other people, by presuming that the "average person" blindly, or by virtue of their own mediocrity, falls into some or another undesirable category, when living, breathing examples of such people are nearly impossible to actually find.

The Mountain is Out

 

"The mountain is out" being a local idiom for a being a clear day.

Puget Sound is one of the best places to get a good view of Mount Rainier, and since I had occasion to ride the ferry today, I decided to take advantage of the sunny weather to get a few shots of it.

It's a deceptively placid vista, given that Mount Rainier is still an active, if slumbering, volcano.

Degrees of Human

I've seen a number of "The most valuable professionals of the next however many years will be" posts on LinkedIn recently. If you've seen them, you likely know the sort; they generally end in some bland aphorism about "being human."

And I get it; the goal is to affirm that there's a way to dodge the generative automation "jobpocalypse," at least for a time, by presenting some or another skillset as being immune from automation. But also as accessible. I checked the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' Fastest Growing Occupations data, and according to that, the most valuable professionals of the 2024 to 2034 period all have a "Doctoral or professional degree" which, according to the National Center for Education Statistics will run someone about $20,000 a year (or about $50,000 with living expenses factored in) on average for a 4 to 8 year program. So, it's understandable that telling people that things they can learn during evenings and weekends will move them to the top of the pile is enticing.

But it doesn't speak to how high the pile actually is. "The people who are getting ahead are doing X" does not entail that everyone who does X gets ahead. If the number of people who have skills that combine "business and data" (to use one common formulation that I've seen) is fairly large compared to the actual number of roles that will exist, then people with those skills might be "the most valuable professionals" on a relative basis, but not an absolute one. And honestly, I haven't seen any particularly scarce skills on people's lists.

These sorts of posts strike me as being an outgrowth of American individualism, placing the onus for being in-demand on the individual, rather than seeking to understand what the broader society would need to look like to keep the overall demand for human labor high. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but as a strategy, history tells us that it doesn't work as well as it's often advertised. As individuals, "leaning into our humanity," whatever that means, will not, in and of itself, solve the problems that will arise if ubiquitous automation torpedoes the careers of a significant number of people. It's going to take something somewhat more focused on the broader question of aggregate demand than that.

Future Present

So, as I noted back in January, I've been re-reading William Gibson. Specifically, the "Sprawl Trilogy" of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I've been picking the books up as I found them, and it took a while for there to be a new copy of MLO on the shelves anywhere nearby.

I'm still fascinated by how retro-futuristic it all seems, with random bits of technology, some arguably available today and some still pretty fare out, layered on top of a world that's still recognizable as being the mid-1980s. And it's the degree to which the technology isn't actually all that important to the story that stands out for me, in a way that it didn't when I first read the books back in the 1990s.

The idea that the technology is merely part of the set dressing is a common one; I suspect that a lot of the Star Wars franchise is built around the idea. The difference with Gibson is that he manages, at least to me, to still build a coherent world. Given the amount of data that various technologies in the world are capable of moving wirelessly, the lack of cellular telephony seems strange, but it doesn't give me the sense that it's random, in the way that much of the technology in Star Wars did.

Perhaps this is because it's done more in service to the story being written. When Case walks past a bank of pay phones in Neuromancer, and they each ring as he passes them, the understanding that the AI is attempting to reach him comes through clearly, and this softens the idea that the phones simply shouldn't be there.

I suspect that near-future science-fiction is always going to have a problem with "stepping on its coattails" as it were: technology that's going to be ubiquitous in 50 years time might still be so out in front of what's currently available that only a select few people are even aware that it has any potential. And this makes projecting into the future difficult, outside of "obvious" advances.

For myself, I find the look back into what a compelling vision of the future looked like more than a quarter-century ago to be fascinating. Perhaps I should pick up some other science-fiction of the 80s and 90s, and see what other version of the future resonated with people.

Good Reads

What does it take to be a "good news consumer?" Pew research asked this question, and posted a short article on the answers recently. While a plurality of people (some 32 percent) didn't answer, and a about 10% gave an answer that Pew coded as "Other," the most popular answers are listed below, in order of popularity:

1. Be discerning or skeptical
2. Follow the news or stay informed
3. Get news from quality sources
4. Research or fact check the news
5. Get news from a variety of sources
6. Get news from a variety of perspectives
7. Not share inaccurate information
8. Use the news to make decisions

I suspect that I would have fallen into the other category, because the first thing that comes to my mind is to understand the difference between being informed and being entertained. While I agree with the 3% of people who gave an answer of "Use the news to make decisions," I don't generally find most news to be actionable in that way. It's interesting, occasionally very much so, but things like "The U.S. threatens to revoke the Palestinian U.N. ambassador's visa," "Can the West survive ‘drastic’ Colorado River cuts?" or "Trump's priorities are in deep trouble after his revenge tour" don't have anything in them that I need to, or can, act upon.

And in that sense, they're not really all that informative. Not because the information wasn't new, but because there isn't much I can do with it, when it comes to decision-making. And this doesn't even touch upon the stereotypical "if it bleeds, it leads" type of story, which may give people a certain sense of danger, but doesn't offer anything in the way of solutions.

Now, I'm aware that my own news diet is particularly sparse when it comes to actionable information because I don't follow the news consistently enough to pay to subscribe to anything. And if one really wants information that's useful in making decisions, paying for it is the way to go. I've been toying with the idea for some time, but I'm the sort to go for a few days without really checking in on things, and in a situation where what's really being paid for is temporary access, that's a recipe for wasting money. I'm also unenthusiastic about trial periods that require credit cards, and automatic renewals, in the hope that I'll simply forget to cancel and become a recurring revenue stream. (But I understand the incentive structure. And the fact that this is a case where pretty much everyone is doing it.)

Am I a "good news consumer?" I suspect not. While I understand the difference between actionable news and the sort of things one reads as a diversion, I'm not really motivated to seek out "news I can use," as it were, and that limits my intake to things that I don't really gain much by learning. Perhaps I should rectify that.

Here "We" Go Again

Cure cancer... really? That's pretty big news, I wonder why it hasn't gotten out farther.

I think I'd like to nominate the human willingness to pass the buck as the most annoying thing. This is the sort of post that one makes to bask in the likes, upvotes and other forms of Internet applause that come from calling out a problem and laying it squarely at the feet of people who have better things to do than read social media posts by some rando.

"Greed and billionaires" are wonderful targets specifically because most people won't be bothered to stand up for them, and it allows for feel-good slacktivism; the audience can feel good about themselves for being supportive of the stand being taken, but that support comes at absolutely zero cost to themselves. "Billionaires" aren't going around with vacuum cleaners, sucking the money out of everyone's pockets: they're investing in and/or running businesses offering goods and services that everyday people want. Things that people like me (and yeah, I'll own this) would rather have. Would an end to world hunger, global climate change and cancer (I'm still dubious about that last one) be good? Absolutely. Is it worth more to me than the books I just bought the other day? Apparently not.

And I'm not the only one. There are any number of people who would rather spend their money on things that they feel enhance their material well-being than fund capturing human potential. That's how investors and board chairs and chief fill-in-the-blank officers become billionaires in the first place.

There's an idea that a bunch of wealthy people could get together, shell out a bunch of money and make the world a better place overnight, and still remain fabulously wealthy. (Whether or not that would actually be the case, I don't know.) Which is really just another way of minimizing the costs to others of the things that people want.

Presuming that there are cures for cancer that are waiting on nothing more than enough funding to float down from the heavens, it's somewhat within the power of the public at large to solve these problems. Wealthy people became so because the current rules allow for it. So step one is to change those rules.

But that becomes a collective action problem. The legislative majorities needed to enact such policies would require that a pretty good-sized chunk of the populace, at least here in the United States, put aside their differences and work together towards a common goal; and believe that they can reach that goal without inflicting unreasonable amounts of pain on themselves or otherwise doing something unpalatable.

And that's why it becomes easy to blame "billionaires." They could supposedly make all of these problems go away with sweeping acts of charity, and criticizing them for not doing so conveniently does away with all of the arguing and messiness that enduring solutions would entail.

Error Handling

When I was younger (a rather long timeframe, these days), I too would indulge in attempting to refute other people's ethical frameworks by coming up with a situation in which the correct thing, as presented by them, conflicted with my own ethical intuitions. There are a lot of different ways of answering this tactic, but one that I'm somewhat surprised that I never encountered is just to say: "Yes. And..?"

If the goal is to determine what some or another system of ethics says about something, what does it matter what a critic's intuitions says about the matter. The perception that the ground is level can easily lead someone to an understanding that the Earth is flat; and the most common response to this is, basically, to tell that person that their intuition is wildly incorrect, and leave it at that. So why is this not a more common tactic in ethics?

Of the approximately eight quadrillion variations on Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem that people have come up with, a common one is to posit a doctor who has six patients, five of whom are in dire need of organ transplants, while the sixth has healthy organs. Leaving aside the real-world logistical problems of such an act, a common knock on Utilitarianism is the idea that it says that it's ethically acceptable to kill the sixth patient so save the others. But I'm not sure why an actual Utilitarian would care: If killing patient six is the ethical thing to do, it's the ethical thing to do.

After all, the idea that other people's ethical intuitions are faulty when they disagree with one's own is not particularly controversial: the idea that the Trail of Tears was ethically unjustified, and that the people who supported the forced migration were wrong is mostly taken as given today. To argue that people at the time wouldn't have supported it if it had been ethically suspect would likely go nowhere.

So I wonder why so many people seem uncomfortable admitting to disagreements with other people's ethical outlooks. If the point behind the study of ethics is to get to a correct understanding of right action, it shouldn't matter if people feel validated by it.

Evaluated

I saw a social media post today claiming that Alphabet was now "worth $4.8 trillion." Considering that I didn't see any reporting on that anywhere, I'm dubious about that number, but it started me thinking. Just how does one determine how much a company is "worth."

After all, it wouldn't be possible to simply hand over $4.8 trillion and just own Alphabet... if a significant number of shareholders were all looking to proactively sell, the price would immediately drop. Likewise, if someone (or an organization) with a remarkable amount of liquidity decided to buy up a significant portion of the shares, the price would rise. Stock prices are generally set between buyers and sellers, and valuations are generally determined on the basis of some average of the transactions that take place over a given timeframe. So, at least as far as I'm concerned, the statement that "a given company is worth some number of dollars," doesn't really tell us anything.

Except, maybe, about investors. It occurs to me that to value a company is to presume that it's possible (at least in theory) for all of the shares to change hands over a reasonable span of time. Leaving aside for a moment the changes in share price that such a shift would bring about, any valuation implies that some amount of money is currently tied up in the company's stock. Some of it can be thought of as not being "real," since it doesn't matter how long the stock has been held by it current owner; if it hasn't been sold recently, and isn't currently for sale, no-one has to actually produce the money to buy it... but the owner is credited as having grown wealthier all the same.

And that wealth is counted just like money in the bank would be. A lot is made of wealth inequality, but it's rare to hear about how much of that wealth is represented simply in terms of an expectation that, if someone were to sell something, they would be able to receive a certain amount of money for it. But if all of these expectations were added together, how would that compare to the amounts of hard currency there is? Could people actually buy all of these companies at their stated valuations? Or do expectations represent the bulk of modern money supplies? 

Euphemized

I was listening to an episode of The New York Times "The Opinions" podcast recently, and the topic was theft as a form of political action. The podcast coined the term "microlooting" for this activity, which I suspect is known to most people simply as "shoplifting." The New York Times being part of the "mainstream media," the term has quickly become a front in the United State's culture wars, with Conservative outlets being quick to jump on the practice as yet more proof of Liberal moral turpitude (not to mention un-Americanism). But for me, the real problem with shoplifting as a form of "direct action" is that it does nothing to solve the problem, and framing it as some sort of political protest obscures that point.

In 1978, when Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, the highest marginal income tax rate was 70%, payable on income over $108,300. In 2024, the rate was 37%, payable on income over $609,350. This represents about a 50% cut in the rate, given that $108,300 in 1978 was about $531,400 in 2024 dollars. Sneaking lemons out of Whole Foods does nothing to address this simple fact.

Politicians have been offering up tax cuts as a means of purchasing political support for my entire adult life by this point, and people have gone along with it, because a lowering of taxes feels like some sort of relief of their own feelings of poverty; until wealthy people, whose taxes also went down, started pulling away from them. There would be much more money for public services if tax rates went back to where they had been in 1978, but no-one wants that; the general feeling that "someone else" should be paying for it is fairly deeply ingrained in American culture by now.

The problem with large-scale direct action and political protest in the United States is not the collective action problem that it's made out to be. It's a social trust problem. The Right and Left of American politics have very different idea of what an ideal society should look like, and their mutual animosity tends to lead each to want to place the costs on the other. Both are effectively faith-based approaches to issue of governance that regard the other as heretical. And both of them are beholden to large segments of the American public that are basically looking out for themselves.

Because when Amazon was offering better prices than brick-and-mortar retailers due to not collecting sales taxes for whichever state the buyer was in, or Uber and Lyft were undercutting taxi companies by simply not following the rules those companies had to follow, the public's silence on this was taken as approval. And now that people are saying to wealthy executive and investors "Okay, now share some of the take with the rest of us," they come across as surprised that the answer is mostly "No."

High levels of income and wealth inequality are solved in the same way that housing shortages (and resulting high prices) are solved: one doesn't let the situation get to that point in the first place. Because there are now a lot of people whose material comforts explicitly rely on the current status quo, and many of them aren't in "the 1%." And they're going to turn out to protect their interests. This is just how loss aversion works.

Many people in the United States feel that political apathy is something that they're entitled to, and therefore, shouldn't have to pay a price for. But everything has a price, and deferring payments rarely make them go away.

Unsolicited

Now that it's graduation season again, I've pulled together some of the things that I've learned about life from having lived it for the past few decades. I don't know that anyone will find them useful, but here they are, anyway.

• Enjoying what you do is important, because you're going to need to put in a lot of hours to be exceptional at it. It's hard to excel at something you hate doing. Drudgery and chores are rarely paths to greatness.
• The fact that something doesn't feel like work when you're doing it doesn't make it valueless or trivial.
• "Do what you love" isn't advice, it's a sound bite. Cultivate your interests as broadly as you can manage; that will make it easier to find something within them that other people need doing. That intersection is important.
• The best way to learn a skill is to tackle a problem that's 1) important to you to solve and 2) requires the skill in question. 
• Be careful about fighting with people (physically or otherwise), because the costs can be high even when you "win."
• Whenever someone is doing something that doesn't make any sense to you, set out to learn what they're being graded on, and who is doing the grading.
• At Some Point, Everybody's New (ASPEN). Don't be afraid to be the new person and don't make others afraid of it, either.
• You will never be perfect. You can play whack-a-mole with your weaknesses for the rest of life, and still not fix them all. Unless you literally have no other choice, always play to your strong suit(s).
• Partner with other people, so that they help make up for your shortcomings, and you help make up for theirs.
• Learn from the mistakes of others; you'll never live long enough to make them all yourself.
• When conversing with someone, you're speaking from your assumptions, experiences and outlook. But they're listening from theirs, and everything you tell them will be filtered through that. And, just as importantly, vice versa.
• When you see a chance to connect with someone over something, make time to take it, especially if you've had a difficult relationship with them in the past.
• Understand what's important to you; what you are willing to make time for, and what you have to make time from.
• The job of an influencer is to sell a lifestyle; not the work it takes to attain it.
• Common sense requires common experience.
• Don't look for reasons to take things personally.
• People will line up around the block to tell you how terrible you are; they need neither your help nor your competition.
• When people are confident in you, trust that they have good reason to be, and then work to prove them right.

Shortfall

Many of the negative consequences of consumer AI usage are caused by loneliness, isolation and gullibility.

Seth Godin. "AI together."

I would disagree with this, somewhat. Or maybe I would simply re-frame it. What I think are at work in cases of "AI Psychosis" and similar technologically-driven maladies are simple unmet needs. And part of what generative automation strike so many people as "sycophantic" is that it's designed to meet user needs. And like a lot of consumer products, it's not designed to care precisely how it does that.

People are always sensitive to their unmet needs; although perhaps "driven by" would be a better way to put it. And one of the aspects of American culture that people are constantly pointing out is its tendency towards individuality. And this means that people are less likely than one might want them to be sensitive, and responsive, to the needs of people around them.

And into that deficit steps generative automation. And people who can't find enough connection, community or validation from the people around them now have a ready source; and one that never becomes tired, impatient or needy itself. Why would anyone expect that people wouldn't cling to that? If they'd met a person with those traits, they'd be considered foolish to not hold on to them for dear life.

So I'm not sure that trying to steer generative automation in a direction where it doesn't meet those people's needs either is really the best way to go. Even if it is much easier than changing our society, and it's response to people. 

Reasons

With average gasoline prices in the United States having climbed from a little below $3.00 a gallon back in late February to just north of $4.50 a gallon as of this week, I'm curious as to what the broad message from the Trump Administration is going to be; and to whom it will be directed.

Generally speaking, the Trump Administration care about reliable Republican voters, who, for the most part, don't need much in the way of reassurance from the White House or Capitol Hill, because they tend to be willing to give the Administration the benefit of the doubt. This is one of the more tangible benefits of negative partisanship. But it seems unlikely that, even with aggressive gerrymandering, that a reliance only on high-propensity Republican voters will allow Republicans to carry the House of Representatives. The recent Supreme Court decision allowing for the breakup of "majority minority" districts might help, but not if enough Republican voters stay home, and low-propensity voters, are, more or less by definition, the most likely to skip this upcoming election cycle.

Which may mean that the Administration will have no choice but to defend itself as November comes closer. The President may have enough sway with Republican primary voters to punish Republican defector from his gerrymandering plan in places like Indiana, but that's not the same as being able to drive general election turnout. And there have been indications that people who voted for President Trump because they believed his campaign promises about creating economic boom times and not having the United States involved in foreign entanglements don't think that his tariff regime and strongarming NATO line up with what they thought they were going to get. And they're not part of the activist class that believes that the Republican Party is entitles to leadership by virtue of being right about all things at all times.

On the other hand, the Democrats may be of the opinion that their job is too easy at this point. Despite more than a decade of President Trump and the Republican party being able to do more or less what they want without a significant erosion in their core base of support, it seems difficult for Democrats to come up with any message more cogent than "Trump bad." Which may be true, but it's a very limited message for a political party that's supposed to be the standard-bearer for the idea that government can, and does, solve people's problems. Simply changing the occupant of the Oval Office is not the same as actually making changes that impact people's lives for the better.

So I'm somewhat looking forward to what the parties' messages are going to be, as November comes closer. Being in a reliably Blue state my own House and Senate races are highly unlikely to bear any resemblance to "competitive" so the local media market is likely to be quiet. Which will likely mean seeking out the various party talking points; which is perhaps what more people should be doing anyway. 

Bounced

While we're on the topic of job searches, I was scrolling through LinkedIn today, and came across a post from someone who said that they were "85% to 90% qualified for." They'd tailored their résumé for the position, and "had a decent feeling that [they] would be called back for an interview."

They weren't. Instead "Not even 24 hours later, [they] received an email that basically said that [their] qualifications were impressive, but [the company] decided to go with a different candidate." The poster claimed to be "baffled" by this, and concluded: "The ATS screening likely didn’t see direct industry language and automatically rejected me, even though I do the job they described, just in a different industry."

Or, someone (or more likely, multiple someones) who was (were) 90%+ qualified and had same industry experience applied, and interview queue was filled before anyone got to their résumé. While I'm not a betting man, if I had to put money on it, one way or the other, I suspect I know which one I would go for. Because the unemployment rate in the industries that are most represented on LinkedIn is fairly high. It's not rocket science; if companies can receive 200+ résumés in 24 hours for an open position, their chances of finding someone who's more or less a 100% match is fairly good, unless they've been thoughtless about their qualifications or job descriptions. (Companies looking for 5+ years of experience on technologies that are not yet 5 years old still abound.)

Applicant Tracking Systems, especially those that have generative automation baked into them, are common bogeymen in today's employment market. It's easy to point to examples of people receiving rejection letters on very short turnaround and complain that no actual human beings ever look at most résumés. But in an environment where a company can be flooded with applications in short order, of course most résumés will never be reviewed by a human being... no-one's in the business of hiring armies of people just to read résumés.

Known Quantity

Back in 2020, I'd made a note to myself of the following:

According to Lee Hecht Harrison, there are three basic ways in which people obtain new roles:

Created Position: 5%
Known Candidate: 70%
Applicant Pool: 25%

In effect, in 80% of hires, the new hire is a known quantity.

I wonder if the numbers have changed, and if so, what they are now. The current employers' market in the technology industries has been driving a lot of angst, but, at least in the circles I move in, I've been seeing a lot of people looking to crack the Applicant Pool section of things.

Perhaps one of the good things about having been in the labor force for as long as I have is that I'm known to a lot of people. I've put quite a bit of effort into leaving positive impressions, and it's paid off on a couple of occasions.

Back in the day, I tended to view such networking as akin to cheating; but I like to think that I've matured in the interim.