Bad For Good

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s comments to Politico during an interview are stirring up controversy. I also disagree with how he laid things out, but perhaps for a different reason.

The fastest way to lose an argument is to unknowingly accept a hostile premise. And yeah, I think Mr. Altman screwed up. Because he doesn’t think big enough about what ubiquitous automation should be able to do for people. Here’s the comment that people have become riled up about:

“I think there’s a lot of daylight,” Altman told Decoded co-author and POLITICO senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon. Asked specifically where he diverges from Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, Altman said, “we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.”

And here’s something that he said a bit later in the interview:

“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen,’” said Altman. “Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.”

For me, the problem is the assumption that the benefits of generative automation won’t be universally accessible seem to be baked into the statements. If there are parts of the world in which the best available use case for generative automation is perpetrating more effective theft or fraud against people with more resources than themselves, what, exactly, has the technology done for them? Given that a person who has a realistic opportunity to materially improve their lot in life via the “good stuff” the technology is purported to be bringing would prefer that to being bothered with the risks of perpetrating “bad stuff,” if someone lacks access to the ability succeed via doing “good stuff,” one can make the case the technology has failed them. Is pervasive automation worth the costs if it can’t make the pie bigger by increasing the size of everyone’s individual slices? Mr. Altman’s statements are based on a presumption that the technology can’t fundamentally alter the incentives of people. That it can’t create better, safer and more socially acceptable ways of looking out for one’s material well-being.

Of course, one can make the case that people will do “bad stuff” because they’re fundamentally bad people, and the tradeoff is going to be empowering them along with the fundamentally good people. Okay, then. But for the person who now finds themselves assailed by bad people consistently using generative automation in endless attempts to dispossess them of whatever “good stuff” they’re able to obtain for themselves (or that bad people incorrectly think they’ve obtained), how better off are they in the end? It’s not likely to be the case that the added benefits will necessarily cover the costs of required added security measures. So some people are going to be left holding the bag.

Sure, generative automation will solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. But Mr. Altman’s statement seems to assume the fact that there are going to be people whose problems are either a) unaffected or b) made worse by the technology, and that this is a necessary trade-off. To me, that presupposes that the technology is simply incapable of creating enough abundance that the winners will be ready, willing and able to share with the losers, while still seeing themselves as winners. And if technology never manages to live up to the hype, that starting point may indicate that things won’t turn out as optimistically as might be hoped.

And “all the other bad things that will happen” is papering over a lot. If a person believes that creating a highly effective biological weapon is a solution to a known problem, either because they feel they have a direct use for one, or (to paraphrase Robert Frank) because it’s bad not to have bioweapons when the other side has bioweapons, then that is just as reasonable a potential outcome as major hacks, scams and other “misuse” of the technology. Because “misuse” is little more than a use case that an outside evaluator doesn’t like.

In the end, the world should not have to accept more major hacks, misuse of the technology, scams, et cetera, because one of “the benefits of this technology and people having the agency,” should be the ability of people to not rely on these things to lead good lives.

Traded Away

(Note: There are some long quotes here from the original story, as I'd like to preserve the context for my analysis.)

So, to make a long story short, a now 35 year-old man who's only identified by a middle name, Thomas, was a problem gambler racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debts. After bankruptcy, he had himself added to his state's self-exclusion list, so he couldn't sign up with sports books again. NPR relates:

"Then one day, about two years later, I'm scrolling on Instagram and I came across an ad for Kalshi," said Thomas. "I was bored and thought this could be fun, and it ended up turning into something that wasn't fun at all."

You can guess what happened after that... more tens of thousands of debts piled up. Realizing that things were getting out of control...

"I asked a live agent to close my account. I have a gambling addiction and have been self-excluded from regulated gambling platforms for years," Thomas wrote the company in a chat feature of the app, according to a log of the conversation shared with NPR.

An automated response from Kalshi noted that "self-exclusion is a responsible trading safeguard designed to be irreversible." It offered other solutions: "Three different responsible risk-management actions can be taken: trading break, voluntary opt-out, and a personalized funding cap."

Thomas insisted he wanted to be banned from the app. Two days later, he also made three separate requests to Kalshi over email for his account to be permanently closed, correspondence he shared with NPR show.

Kalshi did eventually bar Thomas from betting.

NPR went to Kalshi for an explanation.

Dani Lever, a Kalshi spokeswoman, called Thomas "a cherry-picked case."

She went on: "If you ask our millions of traders, they would emphatically tell you that an exchange model is significantly healthier than a sportsbook model: our profits aren't tied to trader losses, so we don't have the same predatory incentives."

At this point, I found myself wondering, if Ms. Lever claimed that Kalshi didn't have "predatory incentives" to keep Thomas on the platform, why not simply let him sign up for the self-exclusion list? If Kalshi didn't need his business, why the hoops to jump through?

"We've prioritized making Kalshi the safest venue for people to trade on," Kalshi's Lever said in a statement, pointing to features that nudge bettors to take a break, establish limits on what traders can deposit and partnerships with mental health counseling to assist problem traders.

But again, why not immediately allow people who understand that they have a problem to skip the rigamarole and go straight to self-exclusion? Sure, Kalshi isn't a traditional sports book; it's not the counterparty to the trades and wagers that customers make, so they don't have the same incentives to hang on to losing customers exclusively. But it seems that they want to hang on to all of their customers. So why didn't NPR ask about that?

Of course, there's little reason to expect that a company will voluntarily take actions that will damage its own business model and earnings potential. The point of businesses is to make other people's money into their owners' money as efficiently as possible, after all. And Kalshi regarding the NPR story as a hit-piece and not wanting to be fully cooperative and transparent makes perfect sense, given that. But to simply say that Thomas' story was "cherry picked" misses the point; of course the people who wreck their savings by burning through tens of thousands of dollars on multiple occasions are the outliers. If that were the average outcome, there would have been immense public pressure for legislators to become more involved, and people would have been running on it as a campaign issue. And if the stories are rare enough to be "cherry-picked" then it shouldn't be much of a problem for Kalshi to allow those customers to leave.

Because note that the question at issue here isn't why Kalshi didn't detect that Thomas had a problem and bar him from trading sports futures on the site; it's why they didn't immediately allow him to block himself from the site when he came to them and said he had a problem. If Kalshi didn't see Thomas never trading again on their platform as a problem, why decline to allow for immediate self-exclusion and redirect people to "nudges?"

Now, maybe NPR asked those questions, and Dani Lever from Kalshi blew them off. It wouldn't be the first time a company simply ignored questions where the answers wouldn't make them look as good as they wanted to. But in that case, include that in the story, so that the audience has the complete picture?

Granted, it's not difficult to decide that, for all of Kalshi's high-minded rhetoric about their incentives, they're hard up enough for revenue that they keenly feel the loss of every customer who decides they need to cut themselves off, and this explains their reluctance to take problem gamblers at their word. But that's an inference that could have been better supported, with a bit more digging.

Afar

I'm of the opinion that "media bias" (which is really just media outlets seeking to give their audiences what they want) exists more in the realm of story selection and framing than in outright manipulation of facts or making things up. Sure, an outlet might be more or less likely to treat something as credible, based on its political leanings, but this is still, as far as I'm concerned, a function of the audience's desires.

In any event, NPR (which tends to be my poster child for this thesis) recently ran an article on a Wisconsin pastor who was barred from re-entering the United States after having gone to Guatemala to visit his mother, who was ill. In fairness to NPR, this story comes from an outfit called "Religion News Service," so it's likely that it was reported in other outlets as well.

It's another example of the understanding that outcomes should be driven by whether or not the subject is a good or bad person, rather than whether or not the rules point to that outcome. While Reverend Paredes and his family are portrayed quite sympathetically, the article itself notes: "Soon after, he was notified by the U.S. government he was ineligible to apply to return to the U.S. until 2035 because of a 1991 deportation order."

And while the pastor claims that he was unaware of any such order, there's nothing in the piece that notes that no such order actually exists.

This is the sort of advocacy piece that might better serve its intended audience if it focused more on changing the immigration system, so that the rules were clearer and more accessible. And perhaps more broadly publicized. Reverend Paredes seemed to be under the impression that since immigration officials weren't chasing him around, that he had been cleared to stay in the United States; when that wasn't actually the case. He may have received bad legal advice when he consulted with a lawyer before returning to Guatemala, but had he himself been better versed on the rules, he may have understood that something didn't add up properly. Yet this story is more about the outcome, than the process. And I think that this contributes to the idea that the American Left is in favor of open borders.

There are stories to be told about the way that the American immigration system works. More of a focus on making that system better may be of more help then the human-interest stories the seem to dominate the coverage. 

Like Sunday Morning

I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and as I approached an intersection, I noticed an older woman dancing on the other side of the street. There was no music, no-one was singing; she just danced there, near a lamppost by the corner. As I was crossing the street, she stopped dancing, and stood in place, as if she was waiting for me.

"It's not easy," she said to me, as I stepped onto the sidewalk. "It's not easy being homeless. It's not like that Lionel Ritchie song." The old  Commodores' song came to mind almost immediately, and sat in the back of my head, waiting, while the woman continued to speak. She looked older than me, but that's the thing about homeless people; living on the streets ages them, so it's hard to guess their ages from looking at them.

"You be careful out here today, okay?" She then turned away from me, and I walked on. She hadn't asked for anything; which was good, because I hadn't brought anything to spare and my car was a few blocks away.

I walked on; I was meeting a friend. There were a few other homeless people nearby; I presumed that there were services for them of some sort in the building. One corner housed a city office, closed for the evening.

"You see, I've begged, stole and I borrowed," I sang gently to myself as I walked away. I didn't suspect the woman would be there when I came back through that way later. She wasn't. Neither were the others. I wondered if they'd found safe places to spend the night.

Having spent the early part of my adult life in Chicago, I wasn't as acquainted with homelessness as I am now, living here. The climate there was much less forgiving, especially in the winter. I can understand why people here both see the problem as insurmountable, and expect the city and county governments to fix it anyway. It's that desire for someone else to bear the costs, of course, that stands in the way of the necessary trade-offs to reduce the number of people on the street. Such, of course, is the way of things.

Reboot

Leaders in D.C. and Silicon Valley are worried the public backlash against AI and data centers will hamper the development of this staggeringly powerful and existentially dangerous technology. The new label is part of a broader effort to shift the narrative.
Trump and CEOs try to shed AI's toxic branding

Someone, whether that's Jensen Huang or Donald Trump expects this rebranding exercise to work, and I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be right. Because these are relatively intelligent people (yes, even the President) and they wouldn't attempt something like this if they didn't think it had a reasonable chance of success.

I want to call that out as a problem, but it's really just the nature of the beast. In order for this to backfire in people's faces, a fairly large number of people need to, in effect, have nothing else that they need to pay attention to. And that simply isn't the case right now. Schemes like this make people upset when the presumption is that they count on the fact that people are stupid. So any expectation that suddenly going from calling generative automation "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence" will actually change the public perception of the technology becomes a marker of contempt. When it's really simply the realization that most people don't know enough about the topic to understand that the change is, at this point, purely semantic because they have other, more important things, to devote their attention to.

And if I'm going to criticize "leaders in D.C." for anything in this, it's the fact that so many people are too busy keeping their heads above water to have the time to be more conversant in the technology. As for leaders in Silicon Valley, if they weren't trying to snow people about the benefits of their new technologies, then I'd be worried.

Both Ways

The understanding that "no one is coming to save you/us" is that people who are unable to help themselves will not be helped by others. But perhaps implicit in that individualistic ethos is the idea that the same audience will not mobilize to help others who cannot help themselves. And this makes sense; it's the way reciprocity works, and reciprocity is not always a positive thing. It's not uncommon to find people angrily declaring that since they received no outside aid in a difficult time of their lives, they plan to refuse any pleas for any from other people.

But given that, I wonder if the ethos of the individual becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain degree. As people buy into the idea that they are on their own, and cannot rely on the assistance of others, do they also buy into the idea that going to the aid of others is either foolish, or a luxury that they cannot afford. There is a degree to which the focus on sparking feelings of poverty in people may be too central to the way Americans talk to one another. Making it clear that it's everyone for themselves may be useful in fostering self-reliance, but there's a reason why Thomas Hobbes described life a world in which people could not effectively cooperate as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Allied

The "American Infrastructure Alliance" has formed to push for data center growth in Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas. Supposedly, the goal is to work with state and local governments on "responsible development" and, in so doing, head of potential moratoriums on new sites. (As opposed to the America's Infrastructure Alliance, which concerns itself with transportation, and the AI Infrastructure Coalition, which is a different group.)

Personally, what I was looking for in the Axios story on the outfit was some indication that they would come out against data center projects looking to have the elected officials they read into their projects sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. After all, if the point is, as International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers international President Kenneth Cooper says, "development that benefits workers, communities and our nation," then the developers should be willing to lay all of their cards on the table, no?

Personally, I suspect that the group isn't going to be as effective as its members may want it to be. Because the issue isn't really benefits... it's costs. Data centers have a very high level of perceived costs for the communities in which they are situation. Water usage may be overstated, but in places where the electrical grid needs to be updated or expanded to manage the extra capacity, power costs go up, and data centers are are often large, ugly and noisy. And while the labor unions that have signed on to the group are touting the jobs that will be created are mostly going to be temporary... it may take a small army of electricians to build out a data center, but it won't need all of them to maintain it. And if the union workers who build data centers live elsewhere, the impact of their wages on the local economy will also be short-lived.

The various businesses and unions that are backing this new alliance are going to have to make the case that the benefits to the communities where data centers will be built will match or outweigh the costs to them. But part of what allows businesses to be successful is often the ability to externalize costs (like not having to pay for training data), and the expectation that communities will "take one for the team" has already been articulated by some parties.

If the idea that this is simply another scheme to transfer wealth from rural communities to corporate shareholders and union executives take hold, this project will be dead on arrival. Considering the substantial head start that idea already has, this "American Infrastructure Alliance" likely has its work cut out for it.

PS: I went looking for a website for the group, to see what they had to say in their own words, but didn't manage to turn one up. Maybe it's a bit early for that yet.

Fractured

"The Opinions" from the New York Times is one of the podcasts in my regular rotation. A recent episode is part of a continuation of Robert Siegel's Friday politics wrap-ups that formerly ran on National Public Radio. David Brooks has retired from the New York Times, so there's been something of a rotating cast presenting the Conservative position in the discussions. This week, the chair was filled by Timothy Carney of The Washington Examiner and American Enterprise Institute.

While Messrs. Carney and Dionne were discussing how the Democrats could appeal to more conservative/Evangelical Christian voters, Mr. Carney made the following comment, which I quote here, at length, because I want to capture all of the context.

And that Religious Right is just harder for the Democrats to reach when you've got the national party -- I mean the Biden Administration, and Biden wasn't some crazy Culture Warrior, they changed documents to say "chestfeeding" and "birthing people" instead of "breastfeeding" and "mom." That cultural extremism, that's going to turn off people who, you know, are just regular churchgoing people in the Middle America, who might not even be 100% pro-life. They might not even care so much about the cultural issues. They just want somebody who seems sort of normal. And I think that is, part of Iowa, and if Democrats want to win that place back, you know, they're going to run candidates in those places who are more moderate.

Can those people distance themselves from the national leadership, or can the national leadership and the Democratic Party dial down the culture warring?

Mr. Carney's contention that use of terms deigned to appeal to the transgender community and other parts of the Democratic constituency that wants to push back against (or even completely overturn) conventional gender norms is "cultural extremism" and "culture warring" struck me as interesting. Changing some government documents is going to an extreme, and prosecuting the Culture Wars against Christians in the United States? That's all it takes? After all, there's no change in law in the example that Mr. Carney notes. Nothing new is being enacted on a policy level with the change in terminology. It's just the adoption of Progressive ideas of inclusive language. While I understand that (and why) this may be a big deal to some people, if that's what counts as extremism, I wonder what "more moderate" will need to look like in practice.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Mr. Carney spoke of inclusive language as "going to turn off people who [...] might not even be 100% pro-life." Inclusive language and abortion rights are not the same, even if both positions are associated with Progressives. Which brings me to my next point...

As the conversation continued, E. J. Dionne made the following comment, which I think is more important that in was credited for:

[T]he alienation between these two constituencies, is kind of a push-pull thing, because for an awful lot of liberals, including some religious liberals, the dominance of a hard Religious Right on the Conservative religious side has really turned off a lot of people.

One of the things that I have understood to be true about the United States for a long time now, and I don't believe will change anytime soon, is that the American public is not unified. Further, many of its factions have mutually hostile relationships to other factions. And I think that this is because many people see themselves as the primary characters in other people's stories.

I've told this story several times before, so I'm going to keep it short. In my time at a HBC/U, other students didn't see the fact that I spoke like a White kid from the suburbs as being the result of growing up in a suburb that was approximately 90% White. They saw it as an intentional repudiation of themselves; I had made a deliberate choice to not be like them, as a way of placing myself above them.

For many conservative/Evangelical Christians, people don't reject conventional gender labels and roles because those labels and roles don't work for them. They do it out of a desire to oppose conservative/Evangelical Christians and Christianity more broadly. And the same with abortion. This is why Mr. Carney conflates the two issues. There are many Conservatives who understand the entire Progressive (or more broadly Liberal) project as a hateful plot against their just deserts, rather than something with a rationale, and goals, of its own.

And this is a problem for the Democrats, because their coalition is made up of a number of smaller interest groups, which may or may not have much in common with one another, but (in certain races) can damage the prospects of the whole by staying home on any given Election Day. The LGBTQ-et cetera cluster of Democratic voters wants to be shown that they matter and are important. And there are Democratic politicians, candidates and party operatives who want to make that show for them, as a means of delivering something to a voting block that they can't afford to ignore. But the alienation (or, if you'd rather, hostility) between them and the "just regular churchgoing people in the Middle America," means that any overtures to the one are going to be seen as an attack on the other. But each side feels that it has a right to such overtures, and sees the resentment of the other side as unjustified.

This places Democrats in a difficult position, because it's then difficult to mobilize parts of their coalition to turn out for them without also giving Republicans ammunition to drive hostile factions to turn out against them. Because there's no such thing as distancing oneself from the Culture Wars, "Woke 1.0," or some or another flavor of "extremism." There's simply distancing oneself from people, and their interests. Mr. Carney suggests, without coming out an saying it, that Democrats should exile the transgender community to the political wilderness, in hopes that they'll pick up enough "regular churchgoing people" in places like Iowa to make up the shortfall. And in so doing, he legitimizes the alienation between those two groups, when that's part of the problem the nation needs to solve.

There Are Only Us

While the world outside has seen reams of coverage of the war – and seems to have largely forgotten that it started with Hamas’ massacre of some 1,200 people – Israel’s media has mostly averted its eyes from the suffering in Gaza.
‘NAZA’: the film causing outrage in Israel

"The world outside" of Israel is billions of people, not just the Jewish state's vocal critics in the industrialized west. And presuming that "I think, therefore I am" is accurate, I am one of those people. And I have not at all forgotten the events of October 7th, 2023. But I, like many people, don't believe that the Hamas attack on Israel justifies any given action that the government of Israel might take in response to it. One can recall the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians while not concluding that Israel has followed international humanitarian rules with regard to the treatment of Palestinian civilians.

Because Hamas is not a formal military force with uniforms, bases and dedicated military infrastructure, it's undeniably difficult to understand, just by looking at a person, whether or not they are a member of the group, someone who provides material support to the group or is an outspoken critic of the group. But that doesn't mean it's reasonable to prosecute a war with an attitude of "kill them all, God will know his own." And that's really what the Israeli government and military has been accused of. And it seems that there's some sensitivity around that; if the Israeli government felt that the general public in Israel would support putting the screws to Gazans, whether or not they were Hamas members, Israel's media would have "averted its eyes." They'd be celebrating actions as victories.

Despite what the Netanyahu administration might believe, it has no right to the support of people outside of Israel. If it wants such support, it must request it. And requests are granted on the benefactor's terms. If "the world outside" wants more measured action in dealing with the people of Gaza, the world is within its rights to condition support for Israel on that. Countering with a charge that Hamas' 2023 attack has been somehow forgotten is disingenuous. Israelis are allowed to see themselves as being unambiguously the Good Guys in their conflict with Hamas. But that's different than being entitled to everyone else, or even all of their fellow Israelis, having an obligation to concur with that self-assessment.

Breezy, With a Chance of Blackouts

It being late September here in the Seattle area, the Rainy Season has started up again. So from now until about next July, the skies will be gray off and on, and every so often, a relatively small amount of water will fall from the sky. (And by small, I mean between one-tenth and one-quarter of an inch over the course of a day. Seattle may be famously rainy, but a tropical storm or a hurricane drops more water over several hours to a day than we commonly see up here in a year.)

Sometimes, there's a little bit of wind, to go with all of that rain. And that's when things become hairy. Today, for instance, the winds were forecast to be southerly, at about 10 miles per hour or so, with gusts peaking at a little more than twice that.

The winds struck me as calm today. I went out to the grocery store, and while I was gone, a squall or two brought down some branches and a bunch of leaves, but nothing particularly strong was in evidence.

But, as I type this, some fifty thousand people in the greater Puget Sound area are without power, mostly just south of the state capitol, Olympia, which is some ways south of here. On a day that was admittedly wet, but barely windy enough to really be noticeable.

And that seems par for the course around here. Power outages seem to be a regular occurrence whenever the weather is the slightest bit ornery. Are the winds strong enough to actually fly a kite? Have the kite surfers called in from work to rush down to the shores of the Sound? Then you can pretty much bet that the power is out somewhere.

A lot has been made of the fact that China, and likely other state actors, have been putting in a lot of work to infiltrate utility networks across the United States, to cut off the power or wreck energy supplies in the case of a war. Here, they don't need to put in the effort, just looking at a power line funny seem to be all it takes. Part of the problem is, I suspect, that I don't live in Seattle proper, which appears to have much more durable infrastructure (and a different power company) than the suburbs. Still, this is a major metropolitan area, and electricity isn't a new technology.

This lack of reliability in the power grid is the source of a certain amount of friction, as state and local governments work to wean the area from fossil fuels, through regulations such as not allowing natural gas to be used in newly-constructed homes for heating and cooking. Which is fine, but if the power goes down somewhere every time Mother Nature so much as twitches, an exclusive reliance on electricity leaves people in the cold and dark, rather than just the dark. And this drives opposition to climate initiatives.

I have no idea how power companies are run, so maybe PSE is doing their best, and this is just a difficult place to keep the lights on. But it seems to me that other places have solved this.

Sign Off

The sign reads: "If you were to die tonight, are you sure you're going to heaven? Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved - you and your household. Acts 16:31."

At first, I thought that the woman on the far corner was a panhandler. It's somewhat common for them to put a fair amount of detail into their signs, explaining their plight. Or, perhaps, a protester... this particular corner in the next suburb over seems to be a somewhat popular one for people with axes to grind against something or another.

As it turned out, she was something of a missionary, holding up her neatly-lettered white sign with a message of salvation on it. Despite the fact that western Washington has a reputation for being a secular place, there are a fair number of churches out this way, including a local megachurch on the other side of town that seems to change its name (and controlling pastor) every couple of years or so. So, I find it somewhat surprising when people are out stumping for Christianity in general, rather than seeking attendees for their church in particular.

But the other thing that I found interesting about this is something that I hadn't really thought about previously. The bottom of the woman's sign references a particular passage from the Bible that it (partially) quotes: "Acts 16:31." For someone who was unfamiliar with Christianity, that citation wouldn't mean anything. Although I suppose the Internet would help with that, it still strikes me that this is the sort of thing that's aimed more at lapsed Christians (who would be more likely to understand the notation) than non-Christians.

In any event, by the time I made it to the store and back, she was gone, as is common. I wonder if she prompted anyone to change. Or, other than myself, to even take specific notice of her. 

Telephone

Social media isn't much difference from any other source of information, except for the fact that pretty much anyone can provide that information, regardless of their qualifications, or the source of their information.

Take this snippet about travel writer Rick Steves helping a local foundation that runs a hygiene center for homeless people a bit north of here, in Lynnwood, Washington:

While the broad strokes of the story are roughly correct, the only details that are accurate are the fact that Mr. Steves spent $2.25 million and that it was the best $2.25 million he could imagine spending.

• The hygiene center was not in Seattle. It is, as I noted above, in Lynnwood, which is one of the northern suburbs. Seattle has a number of hygiene centers of its own.
• Mr. Steves did not purchase the center. He purchased the property that housed it, which it had been allowed to use rent-free until the previous owner sold it. The center was, and still is, run by a local foundation, and can still operate rent-free.
• Renovations and expansion were paid for by further donations from the community, and it was already serving about 700 people.

Still an inspiring story? Sure. But that's kind of the point... an accurate telling of the story is just as inspiring. It's still a good thing done for the community.

In any event, the purpose of this blog post isn't to complain that someone screwed up the details of what is, for me, a local story. It's to note how quickly it happened. The events recounted here are less than a year old at this point.

I doubt that the narrative was changed due to any sort of deliberate intention to misinform people about what happened. I'm sure that part of it came from squeezing the whole things down to just 35 words. But it's interesting to see how a story can change in this way, and how quickly the social media machine will make changes to things. Interestingly, the post where I saw this picture had the story correct, so I'm not sure why the author went with a picture with such clear errors.

But maybe that's how this happens... people don't really read through things like this, even when they are presenting them to other people. 

A "Them" Problem

In academic performance, boys lag well behind girls in elementary school, high school, and college, where female undergraduates now outnumber their male peers roughly 2 to 1. That ratio was about even in the early 1980s.

"The problem with men" The Week. Saturday Wrap.

When I was a freshman in college, in 1986, I went to a HBC/U, and the ratio there was roughly 5 to 1. No one considered this a male problem. Rather, it was a Black problem. Like a lot of things, the idea that boys lag behind girls in school is now considered symptomatic of a larger societal concern because White, middle-class, city-dwellers/suburbanites have come to see it as a problem for themselves.

And what this means is that things can spend a lot of time in minority communities without anyone paying attention to them. Then, when the same factors show up in the "mainstream," it's suddenly a crisis. In 2024, the Wall Street Journal had an article on a generation that they claimed was languishing in a state of arrested development, due to attaining milestones such a marriage and parenthood later, or not at all. But again, Black Americans hit the point where the majority was unmarried in the 1970s or 80s. The perception and reality of poverty has been a bigger problem in that community for a long time. But the alarm bells are ringing because the White people in the article looked like they should have the standard markers of "middle class-ness." When the less well-off were encountering these problems, there wasn't the same generalized concern.

This is a pattern that repeats itself. The problems of non-White communities are ignored, especially when they aren't "middle-class" concerns, and then, when it becomes visible to the "mainstream," there is a sense that it somehow snuck up on everyone.

I know that I tend to harp on the idea that the United States is not a unified polity, but there are times when that lack of unity leads to problems. In this case, there is an idea that Black America and White America are fundamentally different, and have different concerns. The chalking up of problems in the Black community to "pathologies" means that Black people aren't treated as canaries in the coal mine; which would allow problems to be addressed early, to everyone's benefit.

Action Required

Has there ever been an industry rollout, from a PR perspective, sort of worse than AI? Which has sort of been: “It’s coming, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, it might end the world, it could very well destroy your job. But you know, as a consolation, this chatbot will help you describe how to commit suicide.”
David French, The Opinions Podcast: “Trump's Political Instincts ‘Are Clearly Fading’.” 19 September, 2026

Some of this is that the companies have done a terrible job at messaging. They have effectively said, “We’re going to destroy all your jobs and potentially destroy humanity, but we’re going to IPO for a massive valuation and we’re going to set up camp in your local communities with data centers, which by the way, don’t employ people and drive up the cost of power. But, it’s okay. China.”
Jonathan Kanter, Decoder Podcast: “Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn’t kill everyone????” 19 September, 2026

While Dario Amodei may think that the messaging around generative automation is less important than prior failures of corporate America to live up to its promises to make people's lives better, if this is the impression that people have of the public messaging from Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI et cetera, the companies sure aren't doing themselves any favors.

Back when Mr. Amodei was backing up one of his engineers in a debate with an investor on X, he noted that earning the public's trust would require more than promises to cure cancer; the cure actually needed to be delivered. But when I read Messrs. French and Kanter characterizing the messaging from the industry, neither of them mention curing cancer. And perhaps that's the problem that industry players have; their lofty promises aren't actually making it into the public's consciousness. To be sure, I'm not convinced that many people take the idea that generative automation will be able to come up with a cure for cancer(s) in the short term, but the fact that the pledge isn't even part of the discussion is telling.

And maybe that's because cancer cures have been promised for decades now, yet have never materialized, but maybe it's because it's not anything that anyone expects immediately, and so it becomes a matter of giving companies a lot now, in the hope of some benefit later. And the breakthroughs that the frontier labs are actually announcing aren't immediately useful to the general public. In other words, while it's impressive that an OpenAI model disproved a conjecture concerning the planar unit distance problem, what does that disproof do for the many thousands of people who have lost their jobs because the C-suite of their company decided that agents could do the work more cheaply or simply to free up capital for data center construction? Perhaps the lofty promises are being ignored because there's no concrete indication that the generative automation labs are actual working to bring any of them to fruition. Rather they're the typical technology smokescreens that corporate executives seek to hind behind when they ask for public subsidies for their shareholders and their own salaries.

But as Mr. Amodei pointed out, this is not, fundamentally, an advertising problem; rather, it's an action problem. And while I think that yes, finding a way to do away with the scourge of cancer will show people that the industry is serious about doing something good for people, there are a myriad of much smaller problems that could use solutions in the near term. It occurs to me that the rapid pace of frontier model creation, to the point where the industry claims that they cannot be sure their products are safe, becomes a tacit admission that the current models aren't really useful for much of anything. Chatbots can, allegedly, completely wreck a person's mental health, but they can't reliably shave even one-half of one percent from people's cost of living. They produce little, if anything, that makes life better for the average person. Even people who are more productive as a result of using generative automation in their day-to-day work aren't necessarily seeing their wages rise from it.

While it's not true that the technology moguls are the only people benefiting from this new technology (the trades involved in data center construction are seeing dollar signs), for the average member of the public, this whole enterprise comes across as high-risk, low-reward, buttressed by justifications that seem flimsy on their face. This gives the impression that the technology companies believe that they don't actually need the public's support. Sooner or later, I suspect that the broader public will contest that with them.

Fire In The Hole

There's a decent amount of Internet schadenfreude being aimed at Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke after a podcast interview in which he noted that while generative automation allows employees to create more, faster, when they don't then check that work, it becomes "slop grenades" (perhaps more commonly known as "workslop") lobbed at other employees.

According to a Business Insider article about the interview, "Lütke said AI is most valuable when it makes people's thinking clearer and more concise."

Okay, fair enough, but in the all-hands memo that was reported, he said that "Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify."

That's significantly different from "consider your tasks, and where generative automation can make you clearer or more concise, use it." The memo seemed to presuppose that humans simply couldn't match the clarity and conciseness of an LLM. And if people are expected to reflexively turn to generative automation to do work, and are being graded on being seen to do so the "slop grenades" are a feature, not a bug.

In the all-hands memo, it's noted that: "What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by... using it a lot." Well, this is what everyone "using it a lot" looks like.

The problem, he said, is that the tools make it easy to pass along work that has not been properly evaluated.

From the memo that I saw reported, the message seemed to be "use the tools all the time and let the feedback mechanisms sort it out." There's no call for employees to evaluate their outputs themselves before sending them. Now, I'm going to admit that I don't know if I've seen the memo as it was sent to Shopify employees... screenshots purporting to be the message in question were shared to LinkedIn, and that's what I read.

In any event, it seems to me that Mr. Lütke is running into something that I remember encountering in my professional career... people don't do what someone tells them... they do what they hear. And a hallmark of good communication is narrowing the gap between those two things as much as can be managed. While Mr. Lütke may have intended for Shopify employees to be careful to ensure that their use of generative automation didn't simply create more work for people, when employees read that "In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that much just to re-qualify. [...] That sounds daunting, but given the nature if the tools, this doesn't even sound terribly ambitious to me anymore," their focus is going to be on meeting that benchmark, especially given that the memo also noted that "We will add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire."

Of course Shopify didn't intend for people to use generative automation willy-nilly and then simply lob the raw outputs over the wall to their colleagues. But Mr. Lütke's memo didn't make an expectation that employees would check those outputs to see if they actually provided value clear to anyone. And that's where the miss occurred. Employees internalized the implicit assumption that all automation was good automation, and left it to feedback from others to inform them if they were on the right track. But the sheer volume of material that an LLM can put out in short timeframes can make evaluating all of it difficult, especially for someone who is receiving work items from a number of people.

Perhaps the real lesson from this is that CEOs are people, too, and they're just as susceptible to believing that their words are accurate carriers of their intent as anyone else. And of finding out the hard way that they're mistaken.

Justification

There is a saying, and I have no idea where it first originated, that says: "There is no wrong way to do the right thing." There are a few different ways, it seems, in which people mean this, but it still tends to sound to me as just a different way of saying: "When the end is lawful, the means are also lawful,"* or, more prosaically, "The ends justifies the means."  My own expression of this is commonly "Right makes right," as in "The correctness of my intentions justifies the actions I take in bringing them about."

While this strikes me as a rather crude statement of consequentialist ethics, the problem, as I encounter it in the real world, is not the consequentialism of it, for all that there may be many valid criticisms of consequentialism. It is, instead, the fact that it's commonly a post hoc rationale, deployed as a shield against criticism of an action.

And this may be the fundamental problem. The understanding that there is no wrong way to do the right thing justifies pretty much anything that can be explained as being in the service of a desirable end. Which, on the one hand, makes a certain amount of sense; it's merely the understanding that it makes sense to do what needs to be done to reach appropriate ends. But on the other hand, it has the same problem that many questions of morality and ethics do... whose standards are things intended to be working toward?

Take, for example, President Trump's push to remove millions of immigrants from the United States. The alleged goal of all of this is to create more jobs for American citizens. Leaving aside, for the moment, the idea that it seems unlikely that this goal will actually be attained (and that there are also political goals in play), if that's all that one is interested in, then how the program actually works on the ground doesn't matter. Any amount of suffering and misery that may be caused will be more than counterbalanced if it leads to a net gain in employment for citizens.

And for people who are unemployed or underemployed, they may feel themselves straited enough that other concerns are luxuries that they simply cannot afford at the moment. And maybe that's the bigger problem; "There is no wrong way to do the right thing" tends to show up when someone i really needs "the right thing" to happen, but isn't going to bear the costs of a "wrong way" of bringing it about.

* "Cum finis set licit, etiam media sunt licita." Hermann Busenbaum, Jesuit Theologian.

Payoff

As I see it, the thing about this most recent promise of a "Trump Dividend" is that it wouldn't be necessary if the economy of the United States was working for people in a way that they want it to. If unemployment was low, if median wages were rising and inflation was being kept in check, people would be happy enough with the Trump Administration that (likely) empty promises of cash payouts (which are best a one-time fix, and come with consequences for both inflation and the federal budget) wouldn't be needed. It's a quick fix for an electoral problem that Republicans are facing, intended to paper over the fact that the longer-term economic problems that people want solved aren't being solved.

And there are a number of reasons for this. One of them being that large scale economic dysfunction isn't simple to correct. Things work they way they do because of the incentives that they're responding to, and those incentives have often been built up over years. Another reason is that people's expectations don't have to be realistic. And just because an expectation is unrealistic doesn't mean that someone won't run for office on a promise of fulfilling it.

But perhaps the most important reason is that having things actually working well, and having people feel that things are working well, while they are different goals, aren't easily distinguishable by the general public, more or less by definition. And this incentivizes politicians to focus on public sentiment, because, in the end, that's actually what they're being judged on.

President Trump's primary political skill lies in convincing people that their perceptions are accurate; at least in the sense that if they feel good about the economy, it's because the economy is actually doing well. Likewise, when people have a sense that levels of immigration or the trade deficit are creating problems for them, the President affirms them in that, and assures them that their perceptions are, in fact, accurate.

This skill is not, however, infallible. Because when people come to the conclusion that the problem resides in the White House, the conviction that they're correct in their perceptions becomes a liability. Like President Biden before him, President Trump has attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince people that when their lived experience doesn't line up with positive economic indicators, it's the indicators (at least when he takes credit for them) that are correct.

Which brings us to the idea of a "Trump Dividend." The President has promised dividends before; like the $2,000 tariff dividend or the DOGE Dividend, which, like this current promise, was set at $5,000. Neither of these have materialized, but perhaps more importantly, the billions of dollars of government savings/revenue that would have paid for them never materialized, either.

I'd like to say that the President underestimated the complexity and time that would be needed to bring about what was promised, but that presupposes that the President really engaged on the topic, and I'm dubious about that. And this latest pledge of a dividend seems to be more of the same.  

One Score and Five

Today is September 11th, 2026... twenty-five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Unsurprisingly, it's been a day where the news media has been looking back at the events, and stories of people who were there, or otherwise affected by the event. There is, I think, something of a temptation to make that a very expansive set, but while it may be safe to say that the population of the United States as a whole saw some impacts from the al-Qaeda attacks, I don't think that it's accurate to say that each of us, as individuals, were affected.

Perhaps because I was sleep-deprived that morning, but still needed to drive to work, it wasn't something that I could pay very much attention to when I was first hearing about it. News reports were preliminary, and so while I made the drive from Seattle to the office, things would change, but I was busy navigating the expressway.

As the full picture started to become clear, terrorism took on a new urgency in the lives of a lot of people I knew (and very many more that I didn't know). For me, though, it was simply another thing to be added to the series of vague background threats that populated my life. I was still in my early thirties, and so, statistically speaking, gun violence was still far and away the most likely thing I would have had to worry about. And while any number of people advocated for moving (Islamic) terrorism into that top spot, I was never really moved by any of it. I think that's because the threat of terrorism made a lot of people feel unsafe in a way they hadn't before, that wasn't true for me; I was already aware that an unseen clock was ticking down somewhere; it perhaps ticking slightly faster than before wasn't a cause for alarm.

Now, it's true that the new airport security measures created changes for everyone who flew, and I did get on a plane from time to time (in fact, I went on a vacation in early 2002), but it didn't take much to realize that rather than solving the problem, it just shifted it. Coming back from London in 2004, Heathrow airport struck me as a dream target for a bomber; they wouldn't have needed to get a bomb onto a plane, there was a perfectly good mass of people in the run-up to the security checkpoints, similar to what I encountered at Chicago O'Hare in 2023. The infrastructure of flying was protected, but the actual fliers themselves were exposed until they reached that secure infrastructure.

While I can be something of a suspicious person, I never harbored enough of a mistrust of government to buy into the whole Trutherism movement that sprang up around the event, even if some of the literature was moderately entertaining. I might not have a high opinion of the Powers That Be, but I tend to consider them more ineffectual than malicious. And so that was another side effect of the attacks in which I found myself an observer, rather than a participant.

In the end, while I can remember what I was doing when I heard the news, that's mainly because it happened to coincide with a change in my daily routine prescribed by my doctor. Being on the other side of the continent from the attack places a lot of literal distance between me and the events. I do think that I have more interest in how people in other parts of the world see the United States. I recall spending a fair amount of time on red, double-decker, busses explaining how Americans tend to see the world. And while the initial idea for this weblog predates the attacks, it was having conversations that entailed me laying out aspects of the United States for people not native to it that finally convinced me to launch it.

I understand that I'm a different person now than I was then, but that's mostly because it was more than two decades ago, and very little of thirty-something me has survived the intervening years. And now I live in a world in which many of the people I interact with were too young for it to be significant in their lives; that honor belongs to the SARS-2-CoV pandemic. So it seems like a big splash in a fast-flowing river; an event when it happened, but with little in the way of visible ripples this far downstream.

Islands

LinkedIn differs slightly from other social media sites due to its general focus on networking (although one might say that nowadays, it's primarily about social selling and general self-promotion). A side effect of this is that people, at least those who aren't hoping to defraud someone, tend to use their real names.

This leads to an interesting facet of the site; when people complain about businesses, they tend not to name the business they're referring to. Since their comments can be attributed to them by potential employers who peruse their profiles, there is a particular style of "LinkedIn speak" that people tend to use. This is most visible when people are discussing their own layoffs, but it appears when other topics are talked about as well. When people address the topic directly, the rationale tends to be the same... they don't want to risk being thought of as a bad hire of one sort or another. And so they don't name names.

And this makes sense. What I'm not sure makes sense is the broader response to this from the overall LinkedIn community. Or, for that matter, the public at large.

People fear burning bridges with potential future employers. And this frees up businesses from having to fear burning bridges with prospective (and current) customers and employees. Given that businesses don't have to care what people think of them (because they won't be named) they can act as they choose. They can suddenly throw people out of their jobs, they can treat employment candidates poorly and they can even mistreat their customers. Because even if someone takes to LinkedIn to decry this behavior, the company won't be named.

Especially ironic in this sense are the posts that purport to be warnings to businesses of the potential reputational damage of bad behavior when they detail the behavior, but don't name the business that perpetrated it. After all, how can a businesses reputation be damaged when no-one is willing to say that they did it?

The perception of powerlessness begets powerlessness. People feel that businesses can punish them with impunity, and this prompts them to keep their heads down, and not do anything that might draw negative attention to themselves; even when they believe that a business has behaved badly. This allows businesses to retaliate with impunity, because even if people were inclined to hold them accountable, they often don't know who the bad actor is. People see the overall lack of consequences, and the cycle continues.

One of the things that I tend to harp on is the idea that the United States is not a unified polity. Big picture, it's made up of a number of different ethnic and racial groups, most of whom feel that they have their own interests that are independent of (if not at odds with) those of the society at large. Drilling down, the overall individualism of American society creates circumstances where people look out for themselves first (even at the expense of others) because they are convinced that everyone else will do the same. And so it takes some pretty remarkable events to inspire people to collective action, and even that unity tends to be tenuous and short-lived. This prompts a feeling of isolation and powerlessness, which can often become a reality of isolation and powerlessness. 

Silence

I tend to post pictures to the blog here fairly often. I pretty much always carry a camera with me, and so I usually have a photograph to post, either by itself, or to illustrate a post.

But today, for some reason, Blogger is not allowing me to upload from my computer. These things happen, so it wouldn't be a big deal, except for one problem: there's no error message. The picture simply isn't displayed. This sort of occurrence, "failing silently," makes things difficult for users because it's hard to troubleshoot. After all, there's no information about what may have gone wrong that can be searched on the Internet or noted in a support ticket.

And I've noticed similar problems in Android; sometimes, an application simply fails to launch, and no explanation is given for why. I'm given to understand that this is poor programming practice, and so I wonder a bit why Google, of all companies, isn't better about it. After all, being unable to complete a task and having no idea why makes for a very poor customer experience.

Of course, the problem may not be on Google's end, which complicates matters. Perhaps an update to a browser extension, or some other software, is causing the problem, and there's no error message because Google isn't even aware that there's been a failure on Blogger's part.

This is the thing about modern computing... there are so many parts, and so many vendors, that the number of possible causes is astronomical. And that's not something that's going to change anytime soon. 

Out and About

In a corner of the Expo hall at PAX West, sandwiched between a local vendor that sells video games and anime merchandise and another vendor selling customizable lightsabers, the Washington Secretary of State's office set up a booth.

Secretary Hobbs himself as there yesterday. There's also a cardboard cutout of him, that, to be honest, shows him appearing somewhat stiff and uncomfortable, with a Captain America shield and Thor's hammer.

Curious, I asked the employees staffing the booth what had prompted them to put in an appearance at a video gaming convention. "This is where the people are," was the answer. It also seems that Secretary Hobbs is something of a geek himself. He certainly seemed to be in his element when I saw him.

The booth had a prize wheel that people could spin to win one of several small prizes that were on the table, like a candy bar, or a cloisonné pin of the department's mascot, Mark the Ballot. (Not the worst pun I've ever heard, but it's in contention...) When I swung by today, I asked if the booth was managing good engagement, and they said that they were. Which is good. While I understand that politicians aren't the most popular people on the face of the Earth, I do appreciate it, and applaud them, for getting out and being seen. I couldn't have told you who the current Secretary of State was, before this weekend. So I'm glad that I came across him.

And if it gets more young people out to vote, they should chalk up a win for that, too.
 

Newsbait

Out of six headlines, four are clearly clickbait, and one is a press release. No wonder the media isn't doing well. News, information about the world, is a poor fit for the attention rat race. And with all of the competition out there from social media sites and other internet-based sources of information, the investments needed to do the job well have poor returns. Subscription models are fine, but that raises the question of returns for the subscribers, especially in situations where one is simply paying for temporary access to the information.

My personal theory is that much of the news is entertaining, rather than informative. Sure, one can learn something from it, but the jury deliberations in the Lindsay Clancy case aren't big news because people can use that information to better their material circumstances. The story has a soap-opera quality about it that can make it an entertaining diversion from other things going on in the world. But so do a lot of other stories. And if they don't, creative, catchy headlines can make them seem as though they do.

And when the main vehicle that pays for news coverage is the advertising that plays alongside, around and sometimes over it, creative and catchy headlines for otherwise banal stories become a matter of survival. And so that's what tends to proliferate.

One More Time?

Posts here on Blogger can have Labels, and I give at least one Label to every post I publish. Some of those Labels I don't use very often, like "Stories" or "Identity." Others are pretty much obsolete; I don't plan to go back to "The Origin of Species" or "The Republic" anytime soon, if ever.

One Label, "Rampant Idiocy," has been retired. I decided that it was more uncharitable than I really wanted to be... calling people out as stupid is demeaning to people I didn't know, and insulting to people who honestly have better things to care about than what some random blogger thinks of them. So, on balance, I'm glad I stopped using it.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't occasions that I want to bring it back...

The House is set to vote as soon as Tuesday on a four-page resolution that "condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States."

House Democrats fume about GOP's anti-socialism bill

Really? This is what Republicans in Congress think is important? Big picture, I get it. Donald Trump, with no end of assistance from the Republicans in Congress and other offices across the country, has done a bang-up job of tarnishing the Republican brand in the eyes of the public (most importantly, the low-propensity and only marginally partisan voters that Republicans will need to turn out for them) and are hoping that Red-baiting (I note the irony of this) will help rescue their chances of retaining control of the House of Representatives.

Now, had they happened to consult with me at the beginning of the 119th Congress, back at the start of 2025, and asked how to put a stop to the spread of "socialism" in the United States, I would have suggested something simpler: Make Capitalism work for more people.

Maybe it's just me, but if Socialism is honestly gaining ground in the United States of 2026, it's because people are neither convinced nor hopeful that the current "free market" is working for them. And they want to try something different. It's no different than how the nation ended up with Donald Trump being President for a second term, the Biden-Harris administration did so little that people who weren't ardent Democrats could point to that the electorate decided that giving someone who had already shown he didn't give a lick about actually governing another shot was their best option.

And now Republicans in the House of Representatives want a pointless vote simply so they can try to hang it around Democrats' necks come this November. Because this is the best they can do, given their unwillingness to stand up to the President, and their inability to keep their voters in their corner. Making America Great Again, at its very best.

And so I find myself plunked down in front of my keyboard, when I really should be in bed, doing my level best to contain the impulse to dust off "Rampant Idiocy" and allow the part of me that revels in being snarky and snide to run free.

Calling people out as stupid, however, won't solve anything. Speaker Johnson isn't going to read whatever takedown I could come up with, and then pledge to do better by the citizens of this country. He'd simply write me off as a partisan hack, and go back to whatever it is he does on a day-to-day basis. And the people in Louisiana who voted for him would likely think him correct in doing so. Because they don't think the problem is a failure of governance; they, like Republican voters around the nation, are much more likely to think the problem is a bunch of immoral and/or irrational people whose dire economic straits are solely their own doing.

So here we are, with Congress looking to gin up another Red Scare. Because virtue signalling is a less expensive way of getting votes than actually working to solve problems. 

The Less Things Change

When I was growing up, I lived in a distant suburb of Chicago. One of the most distant, actually; out past the city limits and one was considered to have exited Chicagland entirely. It was about 90% White when I lived there, and as a result, I tend to talk like, and have the same interests as, a White guy from the suburbs. This caused something of a problem when I went away to college at a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). For many of my classmates, my accent and hobbies weren't simply artifacts of a life spent out in the boondocks, they were a deliberate repudiation of both them, and being Black.

And this was my introduction to the idea that many people in the United States are quite sensitive to actions, attitudes or lifestyles that can be construed as a rejection of themselves. As time went on, I came to understand that this could be a very sore point for people, even rising to the level of a perceived attack on them; something to be retaliated against. Which brings me to this:

Many locals interviewed by the USA TODAY Network declined to speak publicly, citing concerns about potential political retribution if they were quoted picking one name over the other.
The Gulf of What? Has Trump's name change caught on?

With Freedom Fries 3.0 being the newest thing to hit the new cycle, I decided to check if 2.0 was still in effect. And, as far as Google Search is concerned, it is. And so I came across the USA Today article that I quoted above. While I'm sure that some of the fears of retribution are overblown, that leaves others as perfectly reasonable. Not that seeking to punish someone for going along with President Trump's pretty executive orders comes across as remotely reasonable to me.

But then again, I see the President's executive orders, and people's willingness to take sides on them, as being less important than whether it might rain again tomorrow, or whether traffic will be bad. I certainly don't see it as either a rejection or, or an attack on, myself. Sure, the President has a greater inclination for performative childishness than I might prefer, but he's hardly the only person for whom that is true. And so this can be nothing other than a pointless sideshow, rather than a rationale for sharpening the knives.

While I think I would have been surprised by this turn of events back when I was in college, part of that is due to the fact that I was a young person in college, and just learning about how the broader adult world worked. Now, having been a resident of said world for the past few decades, it's more evident to me that there's nothing new to see here.

And None For All

Much of the public outcry over data-center construction has centered on electricity costs, water consumption and noise. [...] Unions and construction trade groups are now entering the fray from the other side, warning that such actions endanger thousands of building-related jobs.
Blue-Collar Jobs Are the New Flashpoint in Data-Center Fight

People who understand that they will benefit from building datacenters are unhappy with people who understand that they will incur costs from living near datacenters. I think that about sums it up.

And it's a microcosm of the bigger debate over datacenters: Who will benefit, and who will pay the costs? It's a given that it's more profitable to do something when the costs of doing it are shared, but benefits are concentrated. And, as Dario Amodei has pointed out, businesses generally have a poor track record of living up to: "It'll be great! You'll see!"

Construction unions versus communities is a bit different, as it comes across more as a zero-sum game; for one side to get what it wants, the other has to lose out. But it's still the sort of contest of competing interests that boils down to a fundamental disconnect between who benefits from a given set of developments, and who bears the costs for them, with both sides feeling that they're being called upon to subsidize gains for someone else.

And this is a bigger societal problem that's going to have to be addressed: when people feel that they're left holding the bag for benefits that accrue to someone else, they stop supporting initiatives where they're unable to see any tangible, direct, benefits to themselves, even when that creates hardships for others.

It's Not Everything

It's difficult to find a television these days that isn't "smart;" meaning that it's connected to the Internet, is sending information about what one watches on it to someone else and is designed to be a conduit for targeted advertising. And now this same mindset is, unsurprisingly, coming for computer monitors as well.

Near the end of the Ars Technica story I was reading on how LG had been pushing advertisements into monitors, and what this could mean for smart monitors, the author makes the following point:

Ads and OSes [Operating Systems] could one day help drive down the price of monitors, as they did TVs.

I get it, but this presumes that price begins and ends with the amount of money one pays for something. If a monitor, or a television, for that matter, is set up so that I have to engage with advertising for some amount of time before I can do what I set out to do, that's also a price to be paid. The fact that it isn't a monetary cost doesn't change that.

A number of services and whatnot on the web are described as "free," because they don't require uses to open their wallets, or grant access to their bank accounts in order to use them. But money is not the only measure of price, despite that social convention. The whole idea behind the concept of the "attention economy" is that attention has value... generally speaking, it's only organizations that are seeking attention without offering anything in return that actively promote the idea that it's valueless.

But a lot of people passively promote the idea. I don't Scharon Harding, for example, doesn't see attention as having no value, but casting trading attention for monetary payment as a way of driving down the price conveys that idea. Which gets in the way of people understanding that they are, in fact, paying something, and can make the same sorts of cost-benefit and value for value calculations they would for anything else. After all, it's well understood that businesses place a dollar amount on the time they can get (or require) that people watch advertising for things they likely don't want. Why shouldn't the public at large?

Year One

I received my first digital camera as a gift in 2001. Since then, I've developed the habit of taking a camera with me everywhere I go, to the point where if I forget to bring one along, I think of myself as not having a camera, despite the fact that my cellular phone has one built in.

Every so often I go out and around specifically to take pictures, for one reason or another. In 2004, the BBC was having a photo contest, and I was looking from something interesting to shoot, and recalled that there was a weekly anti-war protest over in Lake Forest Park.

So I went over and shot some pictures. Didn't win any prizes, or anything. But it was fun. I'm reminded of all this due to World Photography Week, and was talking a walk down memory lane, courtesy of my store of digital photographs.

Other than the name of the President, the current Lake Forest Park protests aren't much different than the old ones; if the call to "Impeach Bush" were gone, it might not be evident that I hadn't taken this in the fall of 2025.
 

Extollation

Per Bloomberg, AI innovator Fei-Fei Li says Americans should be setting an example for the rest of the world when it comes to extolling the benefits of AI.
AI 'godmother': US skeptics have wrong mindset about the tech

Benefits for whom?

By contrast, many countries in Asia demonstrate a more positive attitude toward AI, according to Pew. Li chalks that up to a strong focus on the technology throughout early education in those regions.
AI Pioneer Fei-Fei Li Warns of Risks From Growing Tech Backlash

But a lot of counties in Asia, like China and Japan, are much higher-trust societies than the United States. And a greater focus on technology during early childhood education is not going to fix that.

This goes back to the conversation between Gavin Baker and Dario Amodei over the weekend. One of the points that Mr. Amodei made was that many people in the general public "always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over," and part of the reason for this is that companies, governments and the technology industry don't keep their promises to make things better for people.

Take Uber, for example. They promised a better way of getting a ride. Now I can't go from the airport to a hotel when I travel without giving up personal information, and Uber has been accused of monitoring the battery levels of people's phones to judge whether or not they'd be up to paying surge pricing. An unmitigated good, this isn't.

Or consider the following, from a recent episode of the podcast Decoder. Host Nilay Patel makes this observation, almost as a throwaway comment:

I had a partner at a very, very large consulting firm tell me they had done hundreds of AI deployments and less than two dozen had yielded positive ROI. I said, “Can you just tell me that on the record?” And he said, “Absolutely not. We want hundreds more.”

If businesses won't be honest about the results their enterprise customers can expect, because they want to keep selling lucrative, but non-cost-effective, services, why would anyone think that businesses would be more forthcoming with the public?

Senator Josh Hawley can open a Congressional subcommittee hearing with: "We’re here today to talk about one of the effects of this AI boom: the partnership between the AI industry and some of the biggest corporations in America to effectively scam consumers out of every last dollar they have in order to buy products that they need and rely on," without sounding like crackpot because people honestly believe that immiserating them for the benefit of executives and wealthy investors is the plan. It's unrealistic to presume that people going to extol the benefits of a technology that they understand is primarily intended to be a weapon against them.

There are a lot of technology boosters and techno-optimists who will happily pontificate about how generative automation, general artificial intelligence or what-have-you will make work optional and usher in a post-scarcity, utopian, society. All companies have to do to get there is receive a subsidy in the form of massive amounts of data from the public without needing to pay for any of it. I suspect that it's rational for people to be suspicious that a industry that claims that paying for its inputs will doom it will actually be ready, willing and/or able to share the wealth later.

Negativity Bias

I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.  The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it.
Dario Amodei. Saturday, 15 August, 2026

I understand where Mr. Amodei is coming from here, but I think that I would portray the public as a little less paranoid. I don't believe that companies are setting out to "screw me over." Rather, I understand that the point of a business is to transfer wealth from other people to the owners of the business. Period. A business can set out to do just enough to maintain itself as a going concern, it can swing for the fences or pick a point in-between, but at the end of the day every business I deal with regards some or all of the money in my checking account as its rightful entitlement and seeks to find a way to transfer that to its owners.

And businesses have been known to go overboard. Back in 2013, Jamies Graigie, then the CEO of Church and Dwight, was railing against laundry detergent pods, which gained traction in the market when Proctor and Gamble (which had been working on the technology since the 1960s) introduced Tide Pods. Mr. Graigie's problem with Tide Pods was simple; they eliminated waste by providing precise amounts of detergent. But that waste translates directly into higher sales, and thus, to profits. Which is what shareholders want. More recently (two weeks ago), a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing accused corporations of using information gleaned about users to determine their willingness to pay higher prices, and thus charge them more. To be sure, there was a certain amount of grandstanding going on, with Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) noting in a press release that companies were out to "scam working Americans out of their hard-earned money," but it's pretty much understood that this is how businesses operate.

So, as I would put it, the public has a negative view of generative automation because they understand that the goal of companies is to use technology to increase their profitability, whether or not the technology actually makes the public better off. And this is a rational understanding, because the big shareholders in companies expect this... it's why they invest in new technologies in the first place. Mr. Amodei's post on X was a response to an investor, Gavin Baker. And one of Mr. Baker's critiques in the overall discussion was that bringing up the dangers of generative automation, or actual artificial intelligence, if that ever arises, is frightening the public, and is thus a driver of opposition. And Mr. Amodei's response is basically that what people are reacting to is the perception, honed over decades (with the help of people like Senator Hawley), that the business of business is to benefit people like Messrs. Baker and Amodei (and maybe even Senator Hawley), at the direct expense of the public at large.

We’re here today to talk about one of the effects of this AI boom: the partnership between the AI industry and some of the biggest corporations in America to effectively scam consumers out of every last dollar they have in order to buy products that they need and rely on.
Senator Josh Hawley

And while I don't buy into the talk of scams, since most businesses are not actively engaged in any sort of fraud, the fact of the matter is that money spends just as well regardless of how it was obtained. A business that makes $100 from providing good value for money can't do anything more with it than one that sells someone garbage or simply finds a way to provide nothing at all of use in return. And to the degree that money for nothing is a more efficient business model than money for value, it doesn't require an Economics degree to understand which option investors will find more attractive; especially in the short term. And this actively creates the sort of perverse incentives that Mr. Amodei understands erode public trust.

I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.  The thing that will work is actually curing cancer.  I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.  That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
Dario Amodei

I would go a step farther. Generative automation has to do more than simply "cure cancer" (which is a much taller order than Mr. Amodei's X post gives it credit for). It has to make that cure accessible to people who need it, rather than it simply being another way for "some of the biggest corporations in America" to extract money from people by leaving them with the option of watching family members die. If Anthropic creates a cure for cancer, only for Johnson & Johnson or Eli Lily & Company to monopolize it and use it to extract money from the public, the promise to benefit the world will still be considered undelivered on.

And here, Mr. Amodei's optimism may be showing. In a low-trust society, where many people feel that they can only trust themselves to look out for them, it's going to take more than technological advancement to win back trust. It's going to take showing people that they, and their interests, are important. But Mr. Amodei is certainly correct in his understanding "that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin" won't accomplish that.

Suburbia

Today is World Photography Day, so I went out with my camera, and snapped some frames. This year's theme is "home," but, to be honest, I find the place where I live kind of boring. Suburban cul-de-sacs are like that.

So I went over to downtown Redmond, which isn't too far away, and took some pictures down there. For no particular reason, I found this shot of some of the new apartments and condominiums that have been built over the past several years to be interesting, so here it is. 

On-Call

Ultimately, the [Trusted Contact] feature puts the responsibility back on the user, adds [Holly] Wilcox[, director of the Center for Suicide Prevention at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health]. She would like to see companies like OpenAI be more proactive in partnering with existing crisis resources like 988.

"So maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point who's trained and knows the tools of what to do for suicide prevention," she says. "And have them jump in and say, 'You know, what's going on? Can I help?"
She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI risks

I've heard this suggestion made before, when it comes to generative automation chatbots and people in mental heath crises or otherwise at risk. But so far, I haven't heard the question of "who would these humans be" addressed. And that's important. Not to mention how this would all work.

If "a human" receives a ping from ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever that a person it is communicating with is showing signs of being "at risk," what should come along with that? Are they dumped into the conversation cold, and have to then sort out who the person is, and what's going on, in real time? Are they given information that the user has already given the chatbot? If so, how much? And what happens if the person communicating with the chatbot doesn't want to talk to "a human?" Is "a human" allowed to force the issue, and, if the user is signed into the service that summoned them, force the service to not re-open communications with the user unless "a human" gives the all-clear? What can, or should, companies program into their user interfaces to detect people attempting to work around safeguards? What will be the tolerance for false positives, as well as false negatives? For the idea to be viable, these questions will have to be answered.

To be sure, "maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point" isn't a bad suggestion on the face of it, but it's a very simple suggestion on a way to solve a very complicated problem, and the sorts of news stories in which this pops up don't often have the space to go into the depth required. The NPR story that I quote from to lead off this post isn't about how to solve the problems associated with people turning to LLM-powered chatbots for mental health advice; it's the story of an attractive woman who killed herself, and her family's heartbreak, driven by her journalist mother. This is a human-interest story not a technology story. And I suspect that it feeds neatly into the overall suspicion of LLMs, and the companies that make them, on the part of the NPR audience.

And there's nothing wrong with human interest stories. There's nothing wrong with a sympathetic portrayal of a woman, and her parents, designed to bring attention to a tragic situation and a potential risk factor of an emergent technology. But there does need to be some follow-up. "Maybe having a human jump into the conversation at some point," requires, at a minimum, a number of people who are going to be on-call, such that there are always people available, so that there is going to be "a human" available, whenever a chatbot detects some level of a person being at risk. That, in and of itself, is going to have measurable costs. In 2023, the wait time for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline was less than a minute. Understanding what it will take to keep the wait time low will be important. Not to mention the idea that there are likely some number of people who are turning to ChatGPT or Copilot or a different service specifically because they mistrust the 988 service.

But half of LGBTQ+ people in a recent survey by Pew Charitable Trusts said they worried a call to 988 could end in an unwanted interaction with police or a forced hospitalization.
Mental health crisis line 988 fields significantly more calls, 12 times as many texts in first year

Regardless of how realistic a concern that is, given an Administration (and 988 is a federal program) that has show itself to be hostile to the LGBT community, it's not necessarily an irrational one (and even if it was, we are talking about a mental heath service here). And, speaking of the current Administration, it also stands to reason that immigrants could be leery about using 988.

So there's a concern, worth taking seriously, that part of the reason why people turn to generative automation for mental health advice and guidance is that the resources with actual people behind them carry some sort of real or perceived risk for them.

I don't think that any of this is insurmountable. But it does require addressing, at least if a program is going to be successful. So I'd like to see a news story, or a podcast, perhaps, that actually looks at what it would take to build out this idea.

Telltale

 A  LinkedIn posted that I'd made pointing out some of the telltales of faked profiles prompted a simple enough question: "Why would anyone prey on someone that is looking for a job?"

There is, of course, a simple answer, "Money," but there's also a somewhat more nuanced answer: A painful, but recoverable, financial loss for someone in the United States or Europe can be a life-changing amount of money for someone in a poor country, and many of the random frauds that pop up on LinkedIn originate in just such poor countries.

There is a steady background hum of fraudulent activity on LinkedIn, a lot of it really minor; people shilling for companies that promise to get people jobs, offering résumé reviews/writing of dubious value or pointing job seekers to fake "recruiter" profiles. Things that LinkedIn, perhaps of necessity, is somewhat tolerant of, so one doesn't have to look very hard to find it. And that means that most of it is, in the grand scheme of things, unsophisticated. Much of it is boilerplate, and that means that it usually has telltales that something isn't right.

Which is all fine and good, but seeing a telltale, and knowing what it is are not the same. And this is where LinkedIn could be doing a better job for its users. As a run-of-the-mill social media platform, LinkedIn lives or dies by time on site and posts viewed, and so posts encouraging posting are common. But most people who use the site don't come there simply to read posts... they're social selling, looking for a job or trying to make connections. And fraudsters attempt to insert themselves into those activities. The occasional post informing people of what to look for would be useful to them, and it would let would-be thieves and con artists know that the site is on to them.