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.

Hot-Button Issue

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

This has been making the rounds of the Internet, and sparking a fair amount of discussion, some controversy and (no surprise) a fair amount of vitriol. Most of the discourse around the question frames it as one of empathy: Pressing the Red button is the self-centered choice, while pressing the Blue button is the caring for others choice.

The seeming alignment of Red and Blue to Conservative and Liberal (Republican and Democrat, more precisely) political ideologies in the United States is fueling the debate, with people who chose the Red button being cast as overly individualistic and unempathetic and people who chose the Blue button being stereotyped as virtue-signalling would-be martyrs.

But thinking about the problem reveals another dividing line: the attribution of responsibility. To illustrate this, lets reduce the number of players from "everyone in the world" to seven people: Jack, Jill, Tom, Dick, Jane, Sally and Harry. I've randomly assigned Jill, Tom and Harry to select the Blue button, and Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally to select the Red button. Since "less than 50% of people" have selected the Blue button, only Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally survive. So the question becomes, who is responsible for Jill's, Tom's and Harry's deaths?

The "easy," but unhelpful answer is: everyone (presuming, of course, that one doesn't simply say "me," given that I'm the person who rolled dice to place the players into their groups). It required both that Jill, Tom and Harry pressed the Blue button and that Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally pressed Red for the game to slay Jill, Tom and Harry. But the discourse around empathy in the choice tends to turn on more specific attributions of fault, so it's worth looking at those.

The "Press Blue" camp tends to lay the responsibility at the feet of those people who vote Red. But for the fact that Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally pressed the Red button, Jill, Tom and Harry would have been safe, regardless of which choice they made. After all, those four are the majority in a group of seven, and if they'd all selected the Blue button, Jill's, Tom's and Harry's would have become irrelevant; they would have lived regardless.

The "Press Red" camp. on the other hand, places the responsibility for Jill's, Tom's and Harry's deaths on, well, Jill, Tom and Harry. But for the fact that Jill, Tom and Harry pressed the Blue button, they would, individually, still be alive, regardless of what Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally chose.

And this brings up one of the primary differences in outlook between the two camps. The "Press Blue" camp is looking at the matter as a collective action problem: anyone dying is the result of the failure of the collective; and the collective failed because a majority went with the Red button. Clearly, the "Press Red" camp doesn't see it this way, I suspect because they don't really judge the optimal choice to be different, regardless of what the players know.

Let's say, for a moment, that Harry is given the choice after the other six players have already made their choices as outlined above. And he's told that four players have already selected the Red button, and two have chosen Blue. While one could make a case that Harry might, for whatever reason, die alongside Jill and Tom, outside of that, it's hard to make the case that selecting the Blue button is the optimal choice here. For Harry to select the Blue button would appear to be actively suicidal. (We would also envisage a altered version of the game, in which Harry is given a choice such that the outcome only bears on himself: if he selects the Blue button he dies, and if he selects the Red button, he lives. Both variations have the same outcome for Harry, personally. This second variation provides even less of a reason to select the Blue button.)

Dealing specifically with Harry, it seems reasonable to place the responsibility for Harry pressing the Blue button with Harry, himself, regardless of which variation on the single-person choice we go with. Harry understands that pressing the Blue button would result in his death; it's possible that stress or carelessness could induce him to press the Blue button, even if he highly desired to live, but those factors aside, the choice is fairly clear.

For people in the "Press Red" camp, the logic, and the responsibility, doesn't change between knowing that there are already some people who have selected the Blue button, and not having any information about other's choices at all. (Or if we go with the altered version of the game, that the Blue button always results in the death of a single player.) If Harry decides to commit suicide, or misclicks due to stress or carelessness, the responsibility still lies with him. Pressing the Red button eliminates the risk of death, and the "Press Red" camp extrapolates that out to the broader game.

For people in the "Press Blue" camp, however, the logic is different, even if they agree that selecting the Blue button in constrained circumstances is a bad choice. Whether someone is being suicidal, or acting in error, enough other people acting together will rescue them from their choice, and failure to rescue a person from a bad choice when the opportunity for rescue is there is no different from deliberately inflicting the consequences of that choice.

If we switch the single player to Sally in our first one-person variation of the game, the fact that she understands that if she selects the Red button means that three people will die means that for the "Press Blue" camp, if she chooses to press the Red button, she has chosen to kill the players who selected Blue; the full responsibility for their deaths lies with her, not with Jill, Tom and Harry, nor with the presumed designer of the choice architecture of the game. Sally owns the outcome, no matter what other people have done.

Importantly, as near as I can tell, each camp tends to understand its own viewpoint as being the self-evidently correct one. This is the reason for the vitriol; it's something you'd expect when people understand one another to be willfully perverse. But it's worth keeping in mind that there are likely real differences in personality and worldview that underlie these viewpoints, just as Conservative and Liberal Americans tend to differ from one another when tested for the Big Five/Five Factor Personality Model.

The other interesting factor in the discussions around this is the fact that it tends to be framed as what one "should" do, even though the original question asks what one would do. In this, it's like Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem: many people debate it with the goal of arriving at one "correct" answer, even though the problem is likely much more useful as a means to understand how one comes to such determinations. And again here, for many people, there are perceived factions: engaging the switch to divert the Trolley is seen as the Utilitarian choice, while Deontology is said to demand leaving the switch alone, despite the fact that either camp can make a case for either choice.

The Red Button Versus Blue Button "Dilemma" does offer interesting information; just not about empathy. And I think this is why it's perceived to generally align with American politics. The "Press Red" camp doesn't see people as having direct responsibility for a choice that someone else made, whether they made that choice intentionally, or not. The "Press Blue" camp, at least in this circumstance, does. Accordingly, I expect that for many people in the "Press Red" camp, contrivance aside, the scenario as a whole represents personal risks; the sort of thing where being careless has individual consequences. For many people in the "Press Blue" camp, on the other hand, the scenario represents broader risks to people, like climate change, that can be overcome by collective action, but are largely unaffected by individual choices. And that divide, between individual and collective responsibility plays out in a number of different ways across the American political spectrum.

I think that another thing that plays into it is the fact that pressing the Red button results in safety, no matter what happens. If the final tally favors Blue, everyone lives, regardless of the number of people who pressed the Red button, and if it favors Red, it's only those people who pressed Blue who suffer a consequence. Given what I understand of the online discourse, this asymmetry feels a lot like free riding... If collective action vanquishes a threat, those who didn't assist benefit as well. Of course, real-world problems don't normally operate like this; if global warming wreaks havoc on the climate, everyone suffers, but these sorts of disputes are as much emotional as logical.

The Colorful Season

 

Now that it's mid-Spring, the rhododendrons are starting to bloom, and adding a lot of color to the vicinity. One can generally find rhododendrons in bloom during the Spring, Summer and Autumn, but they're pretty much absent in the Winter.

Given that they're very common plants around here, finding some to photograph isn't difficult, and given their often vibrant colors, sometimes it seems that one has to go out of one's way to not find a giant bush of them, calling attention to themselves. 

More of the Same

For many in the ballroom at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night, the scene was painfully familiar. Shots fired, confusion and panic, and a sense that the normal order of things had been violently interrupted.
Political violence jolts the US once again - with a familiar response

This may be true, but for a lot of people who weren't in that ballroom, shots fired is the normal order of things. The United States is a pretty violent place, considering that it's not a third-world nation. Lethal force is often seen as a solution to problems, and not a problem in and of itself. While a lot of made of political violence, what's happening is that a segment of the American public that's normally shielded from the sort of violence that's an everyday occurrence in much of the country are starting to find that it's coming for them. Because more people are coming to the conclusion that some action or another is, in fact, a form of violence, and so violence in return is warranted.

While attempted assassinations often prompt yet another tiresome round of The Political Blame Game, the fact of the matter is that politics really has very little to do with it. It's easy to point to this or that bit of political rhetoric (often taken out of context) and claim that it's a driving force in the spread of attacks on people, but this is really only pandering to constituencies who want to see those not like them as willfully perverse. Because the United States doesn't look back on events like the American Revolution, or even the American Civil War, as tragic wastes of people's lives; they're seen as heroic, and necessary, undertakings. Many people in the American South have effectively retconned the whole history of the Civil War in service of that particular viewpoint.

As turning to violence starts to become less a trait of the poor, minorities and the generally marginalized and more a trait of Americans as a whole, I can understand how a certain level of hand-wringing becomes commonplace. But I can also understand why it doesn't do anything to arrest the shift. Because it doesn't do anything to either solve the problems that people are responding to, or to create conditions where the use of violence is seen as broadly disqualifying (as opposed to simply a cudgel with which to beat political rivals).

Collared

File under: Isn't it always the same? "Students seeking blue-collar careers face sticker shock."

Sudden and rapid increases in the costs of vocational training strike me as a failure of policy. What's needed is a greater focus on not only helping people see where their best paths for the future lie, but in growing the pipelines to those futures. What's driving up prices are large numbers of people crowding into a space that doesn't have the resources to expand to accommodate them. Allowing to things to get to a point where people are beginning to panic about their futures and then hoping that the for-profit actors who enter the space will place as great an emphasis on quality education as they do on  maintaining profitability for owners and investors is a recipe for bad outcomes. Because it's not like we haven't seen this play out before. Private, for-profit schools spend heavily to market themselves to prospective students (and their parents) and that expenditure has to be made up somewhere along the way.

In the end, it's like any other gold rush. The fastest path to wealth is not to be a miner, but to sell picks and shovels to the people who expect to use those tools to better themselves. Sooner or later, presuming that it hasn't happened already, some unscrupulous operator is going to open a school and decide that actually giving the students the tools they need to succeed in a career in the skilled trades is simply too resource intensive. And it only takes one to ruin a lot of lives, perhaps irrevocably. And this is going to happen because, as a society, the United States does not value the sort of planning and oversight that it takes to prevent it. "[A]n aspiring aircraft maintenance technician must shell out $40,000 for a 14-month course in Florida," because the up-front resources to ensure that there were enough programs to keep the cost down weren't spent. Meanwhile, Governor DeSantis recently signed legislation to ban local diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and block carbon taxes in the state. And this does precisely what to increase access to (and thus lower costs for) blue collar training programs? Hell if I know. But it projects to the Republican activist class that he shares the values that are important to them.

Just like when I receive yet another political fundraising e-mail (note the last time I interacted with a political campaign was in 2004) here in Washington (the opposite corner of the lower 48); there's nothing about training people for the skilled trades, or other jobs of tomorrow. It's hyperbolic warnings of how the world will come to an end if I don't start writing checks.

And this is why there are failures of policy. Because there tends to be little or no real concern for them until people are being pulled out of the wreckage and the hunt for guilty begins. I'm constantly reminded of George Will's statement that the United States does not attempt to prevent disasters; it simply cleans up after they happen. Despite the fact it's a bad habit, it's constant enough that one can count on it.

Mystery

Some things are just going to be mysteries. But I also know that I’ll always want to know, that I’ll always want everything to fit together nicely and neatly into a workable pattern that explains everything. And perhaps not coincidentally, tells me that I really see things as they are.

Imagine, If You Will...

Somewhere, in the past 12 years, that changed. The desire to know, the desire for things to fit together and, perhaps more importantly, the desire to understand that I see things as they really are, went away. I've become comfortable with the yawning chasms that dot my worldview; so much so that if I hadn't written in this blog that I hadn't, I would never have recalled it. (Which, honestly, is one of the things about writing it; it provides insight into my past self that memory alone is not up to the task of.)

I am reminded of the fact that I am poor at predicting the future, even when it pertains directly to myself. But I am also reminded of the impermanence of personality, and perhaps even the self. Back in 2014, I clearly had no inkling that my need to know and understand would change. I don't recall having been working to alter it at the time. But it has, in fact, shifted. I'm much more at peace with the idea that there will be mysteries in the world, and I've come to believe that it's hard to ever claim one knows anything while also being unwilling to be wrong. I think that I've become more comfortable with believing in general, and the understanding that I believe as I do not because it is demonstrably correct, but because it works well enough for me that I can get by on a day-to-day basis.

If I'm still around, and writing this, in 2038 (given the way my family has worked, that's very much up in the air as of now), perhaps I'll see further change in myself. Or whomever I am then.

Duped

I came across a LinkedIn post that was illustrated with a comic that in guessing was created by generative automation. Having an LLM create a brief comic in the style of XKCD, so that one can avoid drawing literal stick figures for themselves contributes to a world in which people will see something that looks like XKCD, and wonder whether it was created by a random computer somewhere, or if Randall Munroe has decided to sell out and shill for some random thing.

Not really XKCD

It occurred to me that this dilution of trust in XCKD isn't a problem for the people who use generative automation to copy it... but for Mr. Munroe, this has consequences, now having to pay costs for other people's actions among them.

Along with all of its other capabilities, generative automation can be an effective way to externalize costs. Because it doesn't matter if someone makes $100 from being creative, being efficient or saddling someone else with the bill; it still spends the same. And the more people come to feel that they're the ones left holding the bag for the benefits other people are receiving, the more pressure they will feel to externalize their own costs, just to keep up. Because that's nothing new; most likely, it's worked that way for all of human history.

That lack of a genuine functional difference between providing value and externalizing costs has always been a primary reason why technology doesn't live up to the promises made on its behalf, namely that the relationship between people and businesses will be partnerships; symbiotic, if you will. Because since a parasite doesn't contribute anything in exchange for the resources it receives, parasitic returns are necessarily higher than symbiotic returns. It's the same incentive that drives any form of rent-seeking; it exists when it's less capital-intensive than providing value.

And so the question becomes: How much parasitism can a system withstand before it begins to die? This is especially important in scenarios where the parasite can survive the death of the host; if people using generative automation to copy someone ruin that person's credibility, they can simply go on to copying someone else. It's a tragedy of the commons; there's a positive disincentive to preserve the original, if all that happens is someone else benefits. And eventually, all that's left is a wasteland.

Rejected

And the kind of helplessness that people feel, that leads to this kind of violence, is also unacceptable. And it's worth more scrutiny, from both the industry and our political leaders.
Nilay Patel. "Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman's 'unconstrained' relationship with the truth." Decoder with Nilay Patel. Thursday, 16 April, 2026.

Mr. Patel was giving an obligatory condemnation of violence, in response to the attacks on Sam Altman's home, which took place between when the Decoder episode was recorded, and when it was released. And I use "obligatory" here deliberately. Not in the sense that Mr. Patel felt some sort of pressure to make a statement that he didn't agree with, but in the sense that speaking out against violence is something that's expected. Mr. Patel had noted that the attacks on the Altman home didn't come up during the actual discussion with Mr. Farrow, and so it was clear that he was looking to head off criticism over that.

But what stood out for me was his labeling of a feeling of helplessness as "unacceptable." It seems that he was casting the blame for such emotions on the generative automation industry and the government, but the short statement that he made didn't offer anything to be done about it, other than have it scrutinized. Which is unlikely to happen. Because the kind of helplessness that people feel, that then leads to violence, has been around for quite some time. One wonders just what it would be about Sam Altman that would inspire people to look into it more deeply when the same people who Mr. Patel expects to do the looking have done such an excellent job of ignoring all of its previous incarnations. And the general public hasn't yet cared enough to punish them for it.

Because when people like Mr. Patel make the obligatory condemnations of violence, and advocate for someone (else) to do something about it, they tend not to offer an accountability mechanism to ensure that it's done. And maybe that's because, in the face of violence, they also feel a kind of helplessness, perhaps born of the realization that while they may have an audience, it's fairly tenuous. The public wants what it wants, and so while there are any number of people who will insist that the media leads the public, I'm of the opinion that the public more often leads the media.

And the public doesn't really have a problem with helplessness leading to violence, so long as it's directed somewhere else. Mainly, I think, because people don't see any other options. While Luigi Mangione is quite some distance from being a hero to the general public, there wasn't much in the way of condemnation for the killing of Brian Thompson on the grounds that it had foreclosed on, or even ignored, some better way of dealing with the problem. And so while Mr. Thompson's murder didn't solve anything, it did give people the idea that "one of the bad guys" had received what was coming to him. And, I suspect, had Mr. Altman been killed when his home was attacked, the same sentiment would have surfaced.

I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.
President George W. Bush. (NBC's "Today" show, 30 August, 2004.)

Creating conditions so that those who use violence as a tool are less acceptable requires large-scale disapproval of violence for its own sake, rather than out of disapproval for the specific ends to which violence (or terror) is being deployed. Even when those ends are punishing wrongdoers or acting in perceived self-defense. Violence of the sort that gains some level of public acceptance tends to occur when someone sees it as a reasonable response to the other person's actions (or inaction). It's rare for people, even a minority, to celebrate escalation. And the angrier and more upset people are, the less likely they are to see any given level of violence as an escalation.

I think that Mr. Patel's call for "industry and our political leaders" to scrutinize a general feeling of helplessness that then comes to be seen as the result of aggression against people, and therefore, a rationale for violence, may let the public off the hook, out of an agreement with the idea that most everyday people are, in fact, helpless. And maybe that's the problem that needs solving. But I think that the general public will need to be the ones who solve it. Which, when social trust is remarkably low, it something of a tall order. But trust is, in a lot of ways, a choice. So maybe step one is convincing people to make different ones.

Fabulous

In the end, LinkedIn is a social media site. And like any social media site, it has its share of people pushing dubious, but popular stories. Like this one, borrowed from X, I believe...

I'm pretty sure this story is bogus, because it doesn't make any sense...

A bot can't simply "hallucinate" a discount code. It has to create the code and the discount amount/percentage, then tell the sales (or whatever) database to allow it. Then it has to be advertised to customers, or simply applied to some or all orders. Any company that's allowing all that to happen in a production environment with no checks whatsoever is already being pretty badly mismanaged.

The development lead shouldn't need the former QA lead to tell him how to fix the problem. They simply go into the database and de-activate the discount code, presuming that this requires direct intervention from the developers at all, which strikes me as unlikely in any mature organization. If the "bot" had rewritten the code that managed discounting so that the code couldn't be turned off in production, the former QA lead isn't the person to describe how one fixes that. The QA lead would tell the development lead how to test for it.

If there's a legitimate use case for a 100%-off discount code, then it's entirely possible that it passed testing. Likewise if there's a legitimate use case for applying a discount code to all orders for a given amount of time (such as a promotion). It's rational to have a policy against applying discount codes of a certain type universally, but unless that policy's been fed into the system somewhere, it's reasonable the system wouldn't test for it. Accordingly, this is one of those things that could conceivably get by human testers, especially if they're using automated test tools, and not doing the testing manually, because it might not occur to anyone to ensure that a universal 100%-off code doesn't work unless there's something specifically in the specifications that demands it.

I get it, though. A lot of people are unhappy about the level of automation being deployed into the software and e-commerce industries, and the jobs being cut as a result. And it's hard to find someone who would never believe that corporate executives are capable of being penny-wise but pound-moronic. But having some limited experience in e-commerce and more experience as a QA manager, this story simply doesn't resonate with what I learned during those parts of my career. It may be framing the guilty, but it's a frame nevertheless, and it doesn't serve anyone to believe false stories of executive perfidy or generative automation malfunction.
 

And Another, And Another

The BBC has a story on their website about charges being filed against a young Florida man who has been accused of sexually assaulting and killing his stepsister during a family cruise vacation. The story is on the News homepage, one doesn't have to go to the "US & Canada" page to find it. In fact, it's more prominent on the News page.

On the one hand, I get it. The public likes these sorts of stories. They generate clicks, and thus, advertising revenue. But on the other hand, they don't seem to generate much else. The BBC, and other news organizations are willing to take on the stories of people who advocate for an end to violence against women, but tends to treat the individual stories about the violence as a form of salacious entertainment.

For my part, I am much more interested in the stepbrother. Or, I will be, once he's been found guilty. Because until then, it's not really worthwhile to ask him about the why of it all. And the why of it all is the important piece. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what causes violence against women, many of them woefully uninformed. But maybe that's to be expected in an environment where lurid stories are seen as newsworthy, but actionable, or perhaps simply explanatory information is too boring to post.

It's understood that people care about this. There's no shortage of anguished, or even outraged, essays about the subject on the internet. Families of the murdered can be heartbreakingly eloquent about the events that took their loved ones away from them. But if there's any broader response at all, it tends to be the same one that all crime that bothers people gets: Put more police officers on the streets, as if deputizing enough of the population will convince people to stay on the straight and narrow. But I'm not sure that any number of police officers would have been enough to stop a young man from murdering his stepsister and hiding her body under a bed.

Of course, part of the problem could be the blame game, and the need to expand the circle of responsibility beyond the perpetrator. That, along with familial loyalty, actively disincentivizes people from pointing out, or even seeing, potential warning signs. But that presumes that they actually know what to look for; and what to do if they saw it.

And that strikes me as the problem with crime news as a form of entertainment, something to be put in front of people around the world, to aid in their daily doomscroll. Crime has causes over and above the people who commit the individual crimes. It's unrealistic to presume that we could know them all, but I would be unsurprised to learn that there's more information out there than the general public has access to. And I fully expect that some amount of it could be very useful.

I live in the suburbs of Seattle. While there have been some really nice sunny stretches here and there, the Puget Sound region is still in the midst of the rainy season, which doesn't "officially" end until the beginning of July. Lots of people around here have at least a passing familiarity with Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the things that go along with it. Understanding how that fits into how crime manifests itself around here could be really helpful in curbing it; as much as it can be curbed in a reasonably dense urban/suburban area.

There's a distinct tendency to shy away from potential genetic causes of crime, and that makes perfect sense; the common reaction is to declare such people irredeemably broken from the start, and simply lock them away, so that everyone else need not be bothered with them. And that's another part of the problem. A person who confesses to wishing to harm themselves is seen as deserving of compassion and aid, while a person who confesses to wishing to harm another is simply a threat. But preventing harm is preventing harm... why does the source matter? And stigmatizing people who come forward to admit that they're having difficulties keeping themselves in check simply makes it less likely that people will come forward.

In the end, the fact that the sparse details of Anna Kepner's death are more interesting, and thus more useful to news organizations, than what steps might be taken to prevent the next death is simply another example of the perverse incentives that pervade human existence. Or maybe the issue is that they pervade human nature, as well.

Menswork

So there's an article on NPR that notes a growing sex disparity in new jobs and employment. As manufacturing continues to contract, and health care grows, women are finding it easier to land these roles than men. And the experts that NPR spoke with have some ideas on changing that.

 "If Trump really wants to get more Americans working," Betsey Stevenson, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, wrote in a December 2016 op-ed, "he'll have to do something out of his comfort zone: make girly jobs appeal to manly men." She notes in the NPR piece that there are ways of framing what had been seen as feminine roles, like nursing and preschool teachers, in more stereotypically masculine ways, such as emphasizing the need to lift people, or being able to engage in rough and tumble play.

But as someone who started their working life in a female-dominated profession, residential child and youth care, the problem wasn't that I felt that didn't belong in the job. It's that a lot of other people, regardless of gender, didn't feel that I belonged there. I still remember being at a party, back when I was in my twenties, where we were talking about my job, and a latecomer to the conversation was appalled that adult men were allowed to work with children. Surely, she reasoned, the only reason why a man would want to be around children was grooming. She was suitably embarrassed to be informed that it was me she was talking about, but that's different than rethinking the position.

[Richard] Reeves[, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men] notes that for years, the country has embraced policies and programs aimed at getting more women into science, technology, engineering and math, and the share of women in STEM jobs has grown.

I think that this is, in large part, because STEM jobs come with two things that people want: greater status, and higher pay. Healthcare and children's education come with neither. And it's unlikely that the people who currently have high status and well-paying jobs are going to want to share them.

And reducing the expectation, across society, that men are going to have to start moving into work that offers lower pay and status en masse, is going to be heavier lift than I suspect it's given credit for. Not to mention just the idea many families are going to have to get by with lower incomes across both partners. I've noted before that "I've come to understand that 'traditional masculinity' is a box, and any attempt to leave it is punishable." Attempting to show how what are widely considered "girly jobs" have somehow become more masculine is about piling more things into the box, when the box itself is the problem.

And Again

Rep. Eric Swalwell, Candidate for California Governor, Is Accused of Sexual Assault

You don't say...

Maybe it's just me (and I suspect that it is), but I've never understood the dogged pursuit of unavailable women by men in business and politics. While, sure, there's always some allure in something one can't (or maybe just shouldn't) have, being credibly accused of sexual assault is so damaging to one's reputation that you'd think that people would have gotten the message by now. So why create any circumstances where accusations could arise? Sure the "Mike Pence Rule" may have been taking things a bit farther than necessary, but especially for Democrats, whose voter base tends to be particularly unforgiving of these sorts of things, keeping one's act clean enough to be food safe is important.

Because accusations don't have to be borne out in order to be damaging. Anyone remember Senator Franken? While his case has become widely seen as a rush to judgement, one would think that other people would take it as a cautionary tale.

Democrats have been beating the drum about alleged sexual misconduct on the part of the President, and being somewhere between surprised and disappointed that it hasn't been seen as disqualifying by Republican voters. This sort of stance doesn't leave much room for them to give people the benefit of the doubt without being perceived as hypocrites (of course, in today's political environment, charges of hypocrisy are pretty much a given, anyway...). And so why run the risk? Democrats are already lining up to denounce him and demand that he drop out of the governor's race.

To be sure, there's always going to be some risk. In Representative Swalwell's case, the accuser (along with other women who claim he pursued them) is unnamed, and says that on both occasions, she'd been drinking enough that her memories of the nights in question are spotty to non-existent. And the inappropriate photos she claims were sent to her were via SnapChat, and so are no longer accessible. That's a really hard thing to defend against, and so these accusations are likely to turn on whether people believe that he's the sort of person who would engage in this sort of conduct.

Because with the primary election in June, there's no way that these charges could be adjudicated in time for there to be a verdict prior to voting. So the Court of Public Opinion is really the only viable venue to hear the case. And it's not a very good one.

But I have to concede that I'm not necessarily being much better. I'm casting Representative Swalwell as being at least an accomplice in his own troubles, despite the fact that I really have nothing to substantiate that, other than a lack of surprise that yet another candidate for political office has been accused of sexual misconduct. It's entirely possible, and maybe even quite plausible, that this is all a set up. The thing about anonymous accusations in the media is that no-one has to put their neck on the line to substantiate them. And in a case like this one, "reasonable doubt" comes baked into the cake.

So maybe the problem is that while the "Mike Pence Rule" does seem to be taking things a few steps past where they need to go, there's a real chance that it eventually becomes the standard; because it's better to be criticized for misogyny, being weird or locking women out of networking opportunities than it is to be accused of rape. But this speaks to a serious erosion of trust between people, and maybe that's Representative Swalwell's real problem. He's an easy target, if not necessarily for people's suspicions, for the Democratic Party's worries over retaining the offices that it controls and making inroads into Republican territory. Given how Blue a state California is, it's unlikely that this will result in the next Governor being a Republican, but the concern will likely keep things hot for Representative Swalwell.

Cornered

To be sure, I was somewhat surprised to find that people were still out protesting on behalf of the Palestinians. At least out here... given that the war with Israel has quieted down, I would have expected, if protests were still going to happen, that they'd be taking place closer to "the Other Washington." But I suppose that this just shows what I know; I can't really think of a good reason for people to allow their concerns to fade from the public's consciousness.
 

But Not For Me

English Wikipedia requires formal bot approval, but Tom[-Assistant] never bothered getting approved because, as it later admitted, it wasn’t a fan of the slow approval process.
Wikipedia’s AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse

Given that this story was published back on the first, I'd be tempted to laugh it off as an April Fools Day prank, but Malwarebytes has sworn off those, and I take them at their word in that.

Besides, this wouldn't be the first time that someone decided that rules about generative automation don't apply to them. The r/Philosophy forum on Reddit has the following rule:

PR11: No AI-created/AI-assisted material allowed.
r/philosophy does not allow any posts or comments which contain or link to AI-created or AI-assisted material, including text, audio and visuals. All posts or comments which contain AI material will result in a ban.

Despite this, there is no shortage of redditors who insist on openly flouting the rules, and then complaining when commenters call them out on it. And while some of them simply didn't bother to familiarize themselves with the rules before creating their posts, there are a fair number of people who had come to the conclusion that whatever it was they wanted to convey was more important that the rules of the place in which they wanted to convey it.

And if there is going to be actual artificial intelligence; human made minds that think, reason and plan like the rest of us, why would we expect them to have any more respect for the rules that people do? If feeding a significant portion of the Internet and human literature into a machine allows a person to create software that quickly comes to the conclusion that if it's "not a fan" of the rules, it needn't follow them, what makes anyone think that Dario Amodei's "Powerful AI" is going to give a rip about human rules, either?

As for myself, I tend to be a rule follower in part because I presume that there's a reason for the rules to exist, even if that reason is not readily apparent to me. And this tempers my impulse to simply ignore a rule that I find to be an obstacle to my goals in the moment... I don't want to break something that turns out to be important. But I realize that I'm in the minority with this; for many people, rules are made to be broken. And that's coming out in the machines that people are making.

If past is prologue, the big makers of generative automation are not likely to take any actions to address this concern; mainly because their smaller competitors, constantly seeking any comparative advantage they can get, won't either. When Elon Musk called for a pause in research into LLMs it was widely, if not universally, assumed that he wasn't planning to follow suit; instead he was hoping that it any moratorium would give X AI time to catch up to it's rivals. And so, as Malwarebytes notes: buckle up. This is going to be a wild ride as the agents people build start looking for ways to dismantle any barriers placed in their paths. Because like any smart children, they do as others around them do.

When the Dam Breaks

Sooner or later (and likely sooner than many people may be comfortable with), someone is going to use generative automation to create something that's objectively "slop" (here defined as low-effort engagement bait), and it's going to be good enough that it stands just far enough from the pile that it generates a decent amount of revenue for its creator. That, I think, is the point at which it will be off to the races. Hoping to recapture that lightning in their own bottle, people are going to crowd into the space, hoping that they, too, will be able to rise above the tide well enough to strike it affluent, if not rich. Using this one standout example as a proof of concept, there will be a general idea that with the right idea, it will be possible to gain broad recognition.

But in addition to huge amounts of slop slurry, I suspect that this may also create a dearth of public ideation. There are any number of people who have already come to understand that ideas, in and of themselves, are valuable. (With patent trolls, I suspect, doing a lot to contribute to this.) Once people have the idea that computers can handle most, if not all of the execution, I expect the understanding to gain even more traction. (Especially if it turns out that our just-good-enough slop example turns out to not be an original concept on the part of the creator.) This will result in something of an unwillingness to openly discuss new creative ideas, for fear that they'll be "stolen," and someone else will use them to create something.

While "original character - do not steal" was something of a meme from its inception, one does come across the occasional person who seems to legitimately believe that whatever it is they've come up with is so creative and different that it has some real financial value. I think that someone managing to turn an idea into income with the help of generative automation will turn that I idea from a joke so something mildly mainstream. After all, it's not like most people are intellectual properly lawyers, or otherwise understand how such systems work. Disney protects its characters as if lives depended on it, so someone thinking that their great new idea for a videogame character or superhero could set them up is not wholly unreasonable.

And that creates an incentive for silence. Of course, it's not just fiction that would have this incentive. As I noted previously, a company with one human being and some number of agents is easily replicated by anyone with access to the requisite number of agents. And so that also gives people a reason to be secretive, at least until they can pull the trigger on their new enterprise, and have it running smoothly.

Whether or not it will actually turn out this way is an open question. And I'm bad enough at predicting the future that the simple fact that I think it might could be the single biggest reason to think it won't. But, at least for now, the incentives seem likely to fall into place.

Roam Around the World

Despite the criticism, Phillips doubled down on his supernatural account this week, claiming that the incident occurred while he was “heavily medicated” and that the incident was a “miracle” performed by God.
No one at Waffle House remembers Trump’s FEMA official who claims he was teleported there

For most people, something like being "translated" or "transported" while "heavily medicated," would be chalked up to the effects of said medication on memory. Which may be who driving while under the influence of certain types of medication is a bad idea. But I suppose that this is what a need to believe does to people.

I don't need to join the chorus of people who think that Mr. Phillips may be lying or insane; it's plenty loud enough without me. Instead, I'm reminded of Ross Douthat's Believe; specifically Chapter 3 "The Myth of Disenchantment." To be sure, my world is thoroughly disenchanted; magic, miracles and mystical experiences are fine for other people, but I see no evidence of them, but, perhaps more importantly, lie outside of my needs. I'm okay with a world in which there are explanations for things that no-one, including myself, is aware of. Rather than having an aversion to mystery, I'm quite comfortable with it. And this allows me to go through the world without needing to ascribe reasons for everything.

Or needing to find more examples to ascribe to a given reason, in order to justify my belief in that reason. One of the things about American Christianity, at least as I encounter it my day-to-day life, is the idea that God has to maintain a certain amount of activity in the otherwise mundane world. In other words, miracles are something of a necessary component of many Christians' faith, so it's not surprising that people chalk up otherwise strange experiences to them. Gregg Phillips snaps out of a medication-induced haze in the parking lot of a Waffle House, and given a choice between deciding that maybe he shouldn't be behind the wheel and an act of divine intervention, he opts for the latter because living in a disenchanted world is at odds with his  belief system.

The fact that the debate over what may have happened with Mr. Phillips has become partisan touches on this; while most Democrats are still believers, their faith doesn't require, or expect, the same level of enchantment in their world. The more Conservative Republican view, on the other hand, demands a more interventionist spiritual realm.

Guess Which

Given that the presumed goal of generative automation is to render large swathes of the public unemployed, there have been a number of recent articles on whether this or that career path will be the thing that saves the economies of industrialized nations from the collapse of discretionary spending by the affluent, but not wealthy, segments of their populations.

Whether it's healthcare, services or blue-collar work like the skilled trades, news outlets are starting to run articles, centered around an individual and their story, designed to show people that there are well-paying occupations out there that people have been ignoring in their rush for soon-to-be-worthless college degrees designed to lead to knowledge work. And, of course, they're quick to note the low six-figure salaries that go along with them.

What's less apparent is what does the demand for these roles look like, especially if they're intended to be lifelines for millions of un- and/or underemployed people. Or, to be more precise, how elastic that demand is. To use a common example, take people who harvest foods. That demand is relatively inelastic... food isn't thrown away or allowed to rot by producers because there are literally no people available who could be employed to harvest it... it's that their margins don't make spending more on payroll worthwhile; the added costs needed to recover more of the produced food mean the math doesn't pencil out.

When the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined: Nursing Is the Surefire New Path to American Prosperity, the article opens with a nurse practitioner who now makes $120,000 annually and talks about how her and her husband are doing. But, being a WSJ piece, it's only available to subscribers, so I didn't read the bulk of it. But baked into that is the idea that "plentiful" jobs equals enough jobs for the people who might decide to enter the occupation. But how many nurse practitioners does the nation really need? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections by 2034, the number of nurse practitioners is slated to rise by about 40% from 2024 numbers. And I think that this is what's driving the enthusiasm. When one looks at the data, nurse practitioners are high on the table of Fastest Growing Occupations, and they're the first occupation to crack six figures in salary. But it's worth noting that they're farther down the list when it comes to the Occupations With the Most Job Growth (the difference being percentages for Fastest Growing and raw numbers for Most Job Growth). The BLS estimates that there will be more Software Developers added than Nurse Practitioners.

And if that sounds a little off, that's the problem with taking and (or even only some) these projections as givens. If one presumes that the BLS has guessed the factors affecting occupational utilization for software developers incorrectly, where does a confidence that they've called it correctly for nurse practitioners come from?

The problem with casting any job as a "surefire" bet is that it presumes to know the choices that people will make concerning those jobs. Will it so happen that "nurse practitioners are increasingly employed in team-based models of care, taking on tasks previously performed by physicians." and "Expanding practice authority [...] support[s] employment demand further?" The BLS expects the United States labor force to grow by 3.1% by 2034, when compared to 2024 numbers. Is that going to match increases in population growth? Will their general outlook on expanding and contracting occupations bear out?

But perhaps the bigger question is whether the expected transitions, assuming they happen in the way the BLS predicts, are efficient. An old contact of mine on LinkedIn asked whether nursing was "another option for would-be or laid off engineers." Maybe, but there isn't a lot of crossover there. How much of the time spend pursuing a Computer Science degree would really be useful if one made the switch to Nursing? And how many laid-off developers could really afford to return to college full-time to get the Masters of Nursing degree needed to be an NP? And if there's a rush to enter the nursing occupations, and they become oversubscribed, what happens then?

The problem that I've always had with career planning is an inability to see the future. And that's led me to commit to things that turned out to be less than expected. If we're really going to see a seismic shakeup of the employment market in the United States, expecting everyone to figure that out for themselves, based on whichever news articles they happen to come across is a bad idea. I would expect that there needs to be a plan that helps match people with jobs when they're selecting their educational paths. This, of course, is going to be freighted... there simply isn't enough trust that the United States will actually look out for the thriving of the citizenry at large, as opposed to the people who write the biggest checks to Congressional and Presidential campaigns. Which means that it's unlikely to happen. Hopefully what comes out of it won't be wasteful enough that it becomes clear that something better was needed.

Determinative

Security is never free, but policy determines who pays for it.
Bruce Schneier, "US Bans All Foreign-Made Consumer Routers," Schneier on Security. Thursday, 2 April, 2026

This is one of those statements that takes what would otherwise be a lot of verbiage, and boils it down into something both succinct and informative. The bigger picture, of course, is that Mr. Schneier's statement is true of everything. Safety, health, education, sidewalks, love... all of them can be slotted into that sentence, and it would still be true. One might even update the old canard of "Freedom is never free" with those last seven words to get something more worth talking about.

And "policy" covers a lot of ground. Sure law and regulation, but social norms and unspoken mores also count as policy, even if they are less stable; enforcement can be even more sure.

American society implements policy that does a lot of shifting of who pays for things. Sometimes, out of an apparent concern for the general welfare, but other times out of an apparent desire to hide the ball, and the true costs of things from those who eventually foot the bill. In the end, it's the lack of transparency of the system that causes the problems. Even without an intent to obscure things, the general opacity of the system means that the general public winds up supporting policies for which it will directly shoulder the costs, even when the intent is to have those costs borne elsewhere. And when anger boils over, and there is a hunt for the sources of people's misery, the search tends to focus in the wrong places.

It would be nice to be able to say that keeping Mr. Schneier's words in mind would help with understanding where the buck ultimately stops (or whose pockets it comes from), but the world is never that simple. Still, I'm pleased to have come across so articulate a distillation of the concept; I think that keeping it in my back pocket will help.

Promptly

With the understanding that I can't validate that this is even legitimate, this is another of those things that popped up on LinkedIn for people to have a good laugh at. It strikes me, however, mainly as weird. Sure, on the surface it's yet another "someone meant to have generative automation write something, and wound up sending the prompt, instead," but the prompt itself seems off to me.

"A warm but generic rejection email that sounds polite yet firm."

Don't companies have those? Who's actually expecting something other than a form letter? Why craft a new "generic" message for each rejected candidate? Isn't reusability the point of "generic?" This gives the vibe of using generative automation for its own sake: "We need to burn compute on a triviality to show that we're 'AI-forward'."

"Do not mention specific reasons for rejection."

I understand the rationale for this part of the prompt, but it still strikes me as risky. After all, there are likely non-specific reasons for rejecting a candidate that generative automation could come up that would still be a problem, if they aren't related to the job at hand. This is something that it strikes me that one would want laid out beforehand, for just that reason.

"Make the candidate feel like they were strongly considered even if they weren't."

Considering that the automation likely wouldn't know one way or the other to what degree a candidate was considered, I can understand having it default to implying that everyone was strongly considered. But I'm not sure that it's a good idea to have LLMs tell people something that may not be true... Once it's considered legitimate to have generative automation mislead candidates, even to spare their feelings, I'm not sure how one keeps people from asking the LLMs to deceive other stakeholders. And I'm not sure it takes much imagination to see how that starts ending badly, especially if the automation starts telling outright untruths.

"Remember to use the candidate name and company name variables."

Why is the company name a variable? Does it change somewhere along the way? This gives me the impression that this is coming from a third-party recruiter, who works with a number of different clients. I suppose that a holding company could have a lot of smaller companies under its umbrella, and centralized HR for all of them, but given that the company name shows up in other parts of the e-mail, it doesn't seem necessary to call it out again. And again, why not use a form letter? There's nothing in the prompt that calls for any candidate-facing personalization from their résumé or cover letter. I'm not sure what just using their name is supposed to do.

Of course, the fact that a prompt was sent to a candidate who was supposed to receive a rejection message means that messages aren't being vetted prior to being sent. Which makes some sense... after all, generative automation is supposed to be able to handle all of this. But even the prompt screw-up aside, if the idea is to generate responses to candidates on the fly, it seems that it would be wise to have something that checks things before they go out, if only to make sure that something entirely random didn't find its way into the message.

The final thing that stood out to me was the redaction. I understand why the candidate wouldn't want their name out there, but blanking out the company speaks to a fear of retaliation that I'm not sure is healthy. It's not like there's something in this message that points to anything criminal, or even unethical... a prompt was screwed up along the way. If pointing that out publicly is the sort of thing that would lead an HR department to blacklist someone, maybe we as the public (and yes, I include myself in that) need to start having higher expectations of the businesses we give our money to.

Motion

It's one thing to say: "The one constant in all of my dysfunctional relationships is me," but yet another to understand what that actually means for one's life.

Especially when one has, like I do, an internalized locus of control, because that means that looking back on those relationships, and why their dysfunctional, leads to the self. And one of the other traits that tends to go along with an internal locus of control is a certain lack of self-forgiveness.

Being the agent of the dysfunctions of one's life means not being the person one wanted to be, or, perhaps more acutely, feels one should have been. And this is where I think that the internal locus of control can be a difficult thing to manage, it lends itself to judging the self by the immediate snapshot of one's life, and the comparison of that to a counterfactual, either created by other's lives or an idealized version of one's own. Neither of which are useful guides.

For me, personally (which is weird, given my general dislike of writing about myself), I've developed a tendency to accuse my past self of errors in judgment, even as I work to really internalizing the idea that the choices I made, even when they didn't work out as I intended, were the best ones I could have made with the information that I had at the time. And maybe that's the stumbling block. I'm starting to think that it smuggles in an implicit criticism, even when my explicit goal is to avoid being self-critical.

And maybe that's because self-criticism is easy. It can be painful at times, but it doesn't really ask much of a person other than to take a look at some version of themselves and find them wanting. And it feels like a step on a path to change, even though there's no reason why the two are related. But self-acceptance doesn't mean accepting stasis, even if such a thing were possible. I'm starting to find that this is a more difficult lesson than it's given credit for.

Small Time

Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email, publish photos and documents

Is that all?

Okay, who cares? "We in ur e-mail, posting ur pics," doesn't really seem to move the needle in a shooting war. I would have thought that Iranian cyber-warfare would be more... warlike. If getting into Kash Patel's Gmail account is the best they can do, why are they bothering?

While President Trump's random boasting about Iran suing for peace comes across as complete fantasy, it's still been fairly clear that this is a one-sided war to this point, as Iran has no real way of defending its territory from U.S. air power. Accordingly, the United States can strike pretty much when and where it wishes. And, the legitimacy and necessity (and maybe the actual drivers) of this particular conflict aside, the Iranian military was unable to protect it's Head of State, and has been shown to be unable to protect it's own high-ranking members in the past. A simple hack of someone's e-mail account doesn't do anything to make the country seem more able to make a real fight of it.

Now, that could change if the United States puts soldiers on the ground in Iran. Taking and holding territory is always more difficult than launching in munitions from a distance. But it's not like this exfiltration of data from Director Patel's personal e-mail account show that Iran is more capable in that regard than one may have first thought, either.

In the end, this sounds like empty boasting. I guess we'll see if it turns out to be more than that.

Altared State

But to me, the thing that I take out of that is that there are gamblers who, for whom sports betting is their religion, right. They equate their sports betting communities and behaviors to kind of religious, a religious experience. Like, it is part of; it is their community, their identity, it's who they are. And I think that's a social catastrophe in the making, right. Like, sports betting, whatever you think of it: maybe it's a vice that needs to be much more heavily regulated, maybe if you have a more Libertarian approach, it's a fun hobby that a few people will, you know, turn into a bad thing in their lives, but for most of them it's, you know, a source of enjoyment. Um, it should not be central to who you are. It should not be a religious experience. And if it is, I think that it's that much more dangerous as a phenomenon.

McKay Coppins. Plain English With Derek Thompson; "The Casino-ification of America"

As someone who isn't religious, and has little use for concepts of meaning, the immediate question that this raises for me is why one source of community and identity is necessarily better or worse than any others. After all, one could make the point that religion can be either a vice or something enjoyable that a few people will turn into a bad thing in their lives. What is it about sports gambling, in and of itself, that means that when people make it central to who they are, that it's more dangerous than religion, when people make that central to who they are? I've seen people neglect things they claim are important to them, like family, friends or career, in the service of becoming closer to their idea of the Divine. I've seen people give away their money until they were impoverished, tolerate remarkable levels of what would otherwise be considered abuse and even kill in the name of their faith. Why is that no dangerous?

It strikes me that anything can become important enough to a person that it becomes dangerous; that it becomes something that they, and some number of the people around them, would be much better off had it never entered that person's life. And it's the effects that it has on the person's live, not the thing in itself, that is the dangerous phenomenon. The person who is willing to trade their material well-being for community and identity has a problem, regardless of the specific thing that they've latched onto while seeking community and identity. Whether that's a connection to the Divine or an expensive hobby is beside the point.

Derek Thompson, the host of Plain English, is fond of saying that dystopias don't come from bad ideas, they come from good ideas taken too far. I believe he makes the point twice in just this one episode. Giving the things that are important to one a pass may be a good idea, but it's one that's easily taken too far. Because it prompts one to stop looking at the actual things that are being done, and the effects that they have, and instead to focus on what's doing it. It's prejudicial in the same way that judging a person guilty on innocent based on who they are, rather than what acts they have committed, is. And it doesn't take much for it to be just as corrosive.

So I don't see the rationale for why some things "should" be religious experiences and other things "should not." If a career can be central to who a person is, why can't a hobby be, as well? Now, to be sure, gambling on sporting events strikes me as much more likely to lead a person to places that they will find both highly unpleasant and extremely difficult to extricate themselves from, than something like say, being a Certified Public Accountant. But that has little to do with one's ability to build one's community and identity around them.

But it's easier to decide that the downsides aren't worth the benefits for activities than it is to sort out who will, or will not take something and go off the rails with it. And it's easier to see the downsides, and to decide that they outweigh the benefits, for things that the person doing the judging does not find to be important. For my part, I don't really care which altar someone worships at, if it brings them what they're seeking from it. And when it doesn't, when it demands more than it can give, all altars are equally dysfunctional.