Another Go-Round

There was a protest today; big surprise. I didn't see it take place... I only caught some of the preparation for it, a long line of cars, formed up on the shoulder of Interstate 405 North, bedecked with flags. There were a number of Iranian flags, and a fairly good representation of the Stars and Stripes, too. What was somewhat surprising was the number of Israeli flags that the protestors had brought along. Traffic was flowing too quickly (as in, it wasn't stop-and-go) for me to risk taking a picture. I'd hoped to get a snapshot when I came back the other way, but by then, the protest had moved from its staging area to wherever it was actually planned for.

I'm starting to have the same thought whenever I see a large protest against the Administration around here: This place is too Blue for anyone to care. Neither the President nor Republicans in Congress are going to be moved by a protest in the Seattle suburbs. It's much more likely that they'll regard it as convenient fundraising fodder, casting the protestors as anti-American supporters of the government of Iran.

I understand why dialog with Red America isn't happening, but I'm still of the opinion that it's the most fruitful path forward. Which, perhaps, isn't saying much. It's possible that the United States is too far gone for a coming together to even be possible, let alone change anything. There's too much invested in the fighting, and each side sees backing away from that investment as a crippling loss.

News reports claim that the Supreme Leader of Iran has been killed in the strikes, and we'll see how things materialize in the wake of that. It's unlikely that the United States will be able to find someone high up in government who will agree to work with Washington, as happened in Venezuela. But it's just as unlikely that Iran would fare much better than Iraq did, in the event of an invasion. So the best case scenario may be an internal uprising within Iran. We'll see if it comes to pass.

Remembrance

A pair of firefighters cleaning up the remnants of a van fire, down in Kent last Sunday. I would say that it's unusual events like this that prompt me to carry a camera with me pretty much whenever I leave the house, but in looking at this picture to evaluate whether I was going to post it, I noticed the fact that the firefighter's names are on the bottoms of their coats, which had completely gotten by me when I was actually at the scene.

And that brings me to another of the reasons that I carry a camera; I'm not as observant as I would like to be. Perhaps, if I hadn't been viewing the world through the small screen on the back of the camera body, I would have noticed the names, but I wouldn't place any money on that. And I'd forgotten about the Starbucks across the street until I looked at the photographs again.

I wonder how much of the world around me has slipped through my fingers, due to inattention or a memory that, sometimes, seems barely worthy of the name. And in that sense, the camera is a net, that backstops my fallible senses.

Ticced Off

The fallout from John Davidson shouting "nigger," at this year's British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards continues. I'd like to say that I understand, but I don't. Jamie Foxx can claim all he wants that Mr. Davidson meant what he said, but the random shouting of obscenities (otherwise known as "coprolalia") is what Tourette's Syndrome is all about for many people, despite it not being a consistent feature of the disorder. (Not that Mr. Davidson himself hasn't joined in the pile-on, questioning why the BBC would chose to seat him near a live microphone.)

The word doesn't have intent grafted on to it. Its history is not an integral part of it. Yes, it had a lot of baggage. But there's no need to be saddled with that baggage, regardless of the circumstances. The word is a word. Nothing more, nothing less. And in this circumstance, it wasn't an expression of bigotry or anger; it was simply a vocal tic, of a sort that's been been known about for 200 years.

Beating up on the BBC is not going to make "nigger" go away. Just like accusing Mr. Davidson on bad faith can't suddenly rid him of his disease. And treating him as if he is just using it as cover for racial animus is to give into the generalized distrust that the Black community (especially here in the United States) seems to have for the rest of the world.

I'm still of the opinion that treating this as anything more than an unfortunate side effect of mental disease or defect grants "nigger" the very power that people seem so afraid that it has. Treating it much like any other six-letter word would go much farther towards defanging it than outrage and recrimination every time it appears on-air. 

Talking the Talk

The State of the Union address was yesterday, and today there were multiple fundraising e-mails in my inbox, laying out the partisan talking points that people would only hear if they coughed up some money, apparently. It makes sense that I would see a spike in fundraising appeals, since the address captures so much media attention, but it all left me with a question.

Just who, exactly, is the State of the Union address (and the opposition response, for that matter) for?

I get that for the President, it's basically a chance for self-promotion that the media will carry and talk about, and for the opposition, it's the opportunity to get someone in front of the camera who might not otherwise have such a large stage, but who would miss the State of the Union were it to go on hiatus and simply never resume? For whom is the address actually important?

Sure, a lot of different actors have turned it to their own advantage. As I noted the President was able to get up and tell the story the nation that he wanted voters to share. The Democrats were able show themselves protesting during the address, and spotlight Abigail Spanberger as a spokesperson. The media was able to show loyalty to their audiences by highlighting either their uncritical acceptance of the President's speech or their often-ignored fact-checking of same, and fundraisers were able to cherry pick the parts that seemed the most likely to prompt partisans to open their wallets.

But just about any speech by a sitting President can accomplish these goals. There's nothing genuinely informative about the State of the Union; it's generally a recitation of White House talking points that everyone already knows. So why bother with it?

It seems like a relic that exists now because it existed then, and no-one wants to be the person who asks what purpose it serves. 

Bugging

I set out, every year, to have my taxes completed well in advance of April 15th. And this year, I thought that I'd gotten quite the jump on it. It had been a week or so since I'd received the last of the forms I needed, and I sat down to get everything squared away. Only to run into an obstacle at the last moment.

Namely, that there was a bug in the H&R Block software that I was using for tax preparation, and it was convinced that I'd left a field blank, even while it showed me the value that it had calculated for the field. I went back to that section of the data entry process, and tried it all again, only to encounter the same error. And the error prevented me from e-filing the documents. Which wasn't, in and of itself, a huge problem. After all, I could just as easily have printed everything out, and dropped it into a mailbox.

What bothered me about it was that this was a fairly serious problem, that prevented the use of one of the primary features of the software, and is was present in the production release. And it pertained to a situation that was not new... people could just as easily have encountered this problem in previous years, so this was a failure in a system that had worked previously.

One of the problems that people have with modern capitalism, at least as they often encounter it, is that there always seems to be a drive to cut as many corners as possible, in the constant quest for marginally better shareholder value. Almost to the point where poor quality becomes an end in itself, something that investors affirmatively look for, as a guide to where they should place their assets.

I think the problem that institutions have in the United States, whether it's capitalism, or something like the press, is the the people who run them don't see their long-term health as enough of a benefit to themselves (or anyone else, for that matter) to look after it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that when people come to the conclusion that capitalism runs primarily on rent-seeking and exploitation, that they're no longer going to support it. But if the time horizon is always the next quarter, and no farther, the idea that in ten years, or even five years, people are going to turn on this system becomes a problem for later. So why not continue to squeeze the orange has hard as one can?

In the story of the goose that laid golden eggs, the moral is often taken to be that the greedy killers should have been happy with what they were getting, rather than hoping for a single massive payday. But as I understand the tale, their problem was that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the goose. And I think that this is what's happening now. Investors fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the society that they rely upon for their investments to be worth anything. And so they're going to be surprised when it can't, or won't, support them any longer.

Countdown

It's taken as a given that economic trade produces "winners and losers." But in a nation like the United States, where social trust is low and individualism is high, this seems like a recipe for long-term instability, as populism rises on both the Left and the Right.

While the desire of economic winners to keep their gains is understandable, what's less clear is why they expect the losers to simply accept that they're going to be left behind. I suspect that part of it is that low social trust tends to manifest itself as a belief that others are incompetent. Why worry about the impacts on other people, when one is convinced that those other people are easily distracted away from problems or not brave enough to start a conflict?

But I'd be willing to bet that a commitment to the Just World Hypothesis is also at work. People tend to be unwilling to see their own benefits as having been gained by past injustices, and there is also a tendency to believe that other people also understand the current situation as just, and accusations of prior bad acts to be made in bad faith. And I think that this worldview, which supposes that people know that they deserve to be in the place they are in, pushes back against ideas that a more equitable balancing of economic forces should be considered.

Given how much people view the current wave of automation as being disrespectful of them, it remains to be seen if it will create tangible benefits that mollify the public before a general anger boils over into a reaction that sets the technology back, at least here in the United States. These competing clocks are invisible, at least to me, and so I have no real sense of which one may be ticking faster than the other.

Billion-Dollar Baby

So, I've been hearing people talk about the idea of autonomous automation allowing for one-person, billion-dollar valuation companies. It's a topic that comes up on financial and technology podcasts from time to time.

And it's raised a question for me... What would these companies sell? Now, I get that it could be something new and wonderful that no-one has thought of yet, so I'm really asking what characteristics the goods and services they would offer would have.

Because if we're talking about a company that's 1 human being, and X number of automated agents, then anyone who has access to X number of automated agents could make the same thing. There could be other capital needs, but perhaps not, depending on what exactly it is that's being produced. So how does our one-person company protect its market(s) well enough to get to a billion-dollar valuation, rather than simply becoming a proof-of-concept for a number of other market actors? Would it need to be something where the primary market is people who don't have access to the same level of automation?

And, speaking of proof-of-concept, if our one-person company demonstrates that a whole class of goods/services could be produced entirely with automated agents, that could really do a number on the employment market. So does their product or service also need to be more-or-less downturn-proof? And how would that work in practice? Would it create demand for physical human labor in another area? Or would it be something that isn't aimed at the public at large? (Which goes back to the first question... because if other people could make their own version, anyone with the means to copy the product or service might not be a good long-term customer.)

In the end, I understand that talk of one-person, billion-dollar valuation companies is really about a level of techno-"optimism;" the idea that capital could create its own labor, and thus result in fairly big gains for the investor class... But I think that a lot of the speculation makes the implicit assumption that nothing else changes in the overall environment, and I suspect that wouldn't be the case. We'll see, I suppose, sooner or later.

Deduced

There are a couple of rather famous deductive arguments for the existence of God.

Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument can be considered to be a direct argument... it explicitly references God.

• It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.
• God exists as an idea in the mind.
• A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
• Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined that does exist).
• But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined.)
• Therefore, God exists.

The Kalām cosmological argument, on the other hand, might be considered an indirect argument... it claims the Universe has a cause, but doesn't directly say anything about said cause. Other people, however, have added on to it.

• Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
• The universe began to exist.
• Therefore, the universe has a cause.

In each case, the final sentence, the one that begins "therefore" is considered to be true if one accepts the preceding statements, the premises, to be true. And this is part of what makes them popular. An apologist will walk someone through the premises, seeking agreement with each one, and then present the conclusion as granted. Which I get, because it works. The only way to avoid having to either agree with the conclusion or admit to following faulty logic is to deny one or more of the premises, which are generally held out to be common-sense statements that no-one should have a problem with.

But I was reading about these, as part of my amateur interest in philosophy, and it occurred to me: What do these arguments actually mean, anyway? Sure, they have their "common-sense" meanings, but is that actually what they mean?

Take the Ontological Argument. What does "greater" mean in this instance? How should it be understood? The argument doesn't hold up as well if I substitute "taller" for "greater." Because if it's true that "a being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, taller than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind," it does not follow that if I imagine a being a million feet tall, that there must be some real being that's taller than that. It appears, at least to me, to indicate that imaginary height does not matter. Going back to "greatness," this would seem to indicate that I find whomever I consider to be the greatest, and bestow the title of "God" upon them, but that's where it ends.

Likewise with the Cosmological Argument, what does it mean to "begin to exist?" I like to build plastic models as a pastime. And it's true that at some undefined point in the assembly process, a Mobile Suit or an aircraft "begins to exist." Now you don't see it, now you do. But it began to exist because it was assembled from parts that already existed. It's generally presumed that in the Cosmological Argument that the universe began to exist ex nihilo, but there's nothing in the syllogism itself that requires that interpretation. And because the Big Bang is, effectively an Event Horizon, there's no way of knowing whether the Universe simply sprang into existence, or if our current spacetime is simply the current arrangement of matter and energy that already existed in some or another form. So then, even if it's understood that the Universe began to exist, I'm not sure that this tells us anything, especially if energy may be neither created nor destroyed.

Now, to be sure, I don't think that I've put these two long-standing arguments to rest. I'm not that smart. I'm fairly certain that other people have come up with similar objections, and that someone else has come up with counter-arguments. I'm just surprised that I haven't encountered them, and their counters, more often.

On the Rails

One of the interesting things about buzzwords is that they acquire widely-understood, yet completely informal, definitions. My favorite recent example is "guardrails," which has become a shorthand for, effectively, building robust harm-prevention measures into new technologies. Which is interesting, because in the everyday world, that's not what guardrails are designed to do. Consider this post I made about a pickup truck going off the road near where I lived at the time.

The problem wasn't that the guardrails didn't work as designed... it was that an airborne pickup truck was not one of the situations that they'd been designed to contend with. But the guardrails were there; anyone happening by would see them. The point could be made that a new design may have been in order, but it was clear that they had been put in place.

And I think that is somewhat lacking in many of today's discussions of technological guardrails; the difference between inadequate and non-existent guardrails is non-obvious. And so for "guardrails" to be evident, they have to be so obvious as to be intrusive.

I have a set of "kitchen knives" that need to be disposed of. I nearly never used them (in part because they were just that bad), and I've finally gotten around to buying a semi-decent quality knife block with semi-decent quality knives. The "easy" way to dispose of the old knives would be to securely cover their blades in duct tape and throw them away, but I figured it was worth asking about online to find out if there were any better ways. No luck... my question was removed; likely before anyone saw it. The "guardrail" visibly did its job, but did so by presuming that my query was too dangerous for public consumption. Doubtless, there are likely people for whom that's the intended outcome, but it strikes me as overzealous.

And while it's clearer that guardrails are working when they're intrusive, that provides an incentive for people to move to where there are no guardrails. Granted, I'm not going to go searching for a free-speech haven just to ask for a good way to ditch some kitchen utensils, but I doubt that everyone finds their questions as trivial as that one.

A Modest Request

I saw a panhandler today whose sign read: "At least give me the finger." It was both comedic and heartbreaking. The young man appeared to be in the process of giving up for the day, he was walking away from the corner. It's a popular place for panhandlers; there is a Jack-in-the-Box there, which I suppose increases the likelihood that any given car might have someone with cash in it.

It occurs to me that I don't know whether the greater Seattle area has a relatively high number of panhandlers or not. I live in the suburbs, so while there are certain spots where panhandlers and buskers tend to set up, I've never encountered them in numbers. And even the usual spots don't always have someone there. (This doesn't stop the more conservative/fearful among the population from seeing them as symptomatic of apocalyptic levels of social disorder It's somewhat surprising how many people apparently cannot tell the difference between panhandlers and supervillains.)

Now, while there are some panhandlers who don't strike me as being on the up-and-up, for many of them, it seems that what you see is what you get; a down-on-their-luck person who has been reduced to begging funds and/or food from passers-by in order to survive. Often it's just one person. Sometimes, there will be a mother with her child(ren) or a family. Childless couples, however, are vanishingly rare; perhaps they tend to split up to work different places.

Today was sunny and warm, especially considering it's only mid-February, so it wasn't a terrible day to have to be out of doors. But neither Winter nor the rainy season are over yet, so we'll see how things work out.

Of course, the real problem isn't the weather; Seattle's climate is fairly mild, when compared to some of the alternatives. It's the fact that Seattle, like pretty much every other place in the United States, understands itself to be too poor to devote enough resources to the problem to actually solve it. This is, in part, due to a lack of coordination, and a willingness to defect... While Texas and Florida made headlines for putting migrants on busses and sending them to large cities in more liberal-minded states, the practice of shipping homeless people off to become somebody else's problem goes back a lot farther than that. So any city that actual starts to make a dent in their own homeless problem risks becoming a target for elected officials elsewhere looking to find someone else to foot the bill for their own homeless population.

It's also a side effect of the individualistic culture that has grown up in the United States. It's not hard to find someone who will claim that living-wage jobs are freely available for the asking, even when unemployment was significantly higher than it is now. (Of course, asking them just where said jobs were located rarely resulted in answers.) And when the impoverished are viewed as intentional freeloaders, who could get back on their feet whenever they wanted to, people who give are seen as chumps; a perception that many are keen to avoid.

I doubt that I'll ever see the young man again. Panhandlers tend to be a transient population. I'd like to say that as long as he maintains his sense of humor, he'll be okay. But that places the onus back on him, and I know he needs more than that. 

Demonstrated

 

There was another protest today, and it was a good day for it. I'm still of the opinion that deep-Blue Washington state is not the most effective place for it, but it's really not about that.

Bad Read

Representative Ro Khanna (D-California) read out six names that had been redacted, and then unredacted in "the Epstein Files." According to the Department of Justice, four of the names were of random people who had been in a photo lineup. According to Representative Khanna, the fault lies with the DoJ.

While it seems patently evident that the Department of Justice has been sloppy with their handling of the documents, I think that ownership of this particular screw-up belongs to Representative Khanna, simply because it had already been established that simply being named in the set of documents released, or even knowing Jeffry Epstien, is not, in and of itself, evidence of guilt. Representative Khanna blames the DoJ for not explaining why the names were in the documents earlier, but it shouldn't have been up to the DoJ to make clear what everyone already knew.

The idea that there was a smoking gun, being hidden by the Department of Justice, that would blow the lid off of a ring of powerful men who were into sex with teenaged girls, always rested on the ideas that a) Jeffrey Epstein compiled information on people who were committing crimes along with him, and b) that he pretty much exclusively surrounded himself with other people who were into sex with underage girls. That's what it takes to believe that the simple fact that one's name could be found in the documents made one a wealthy and powerful person who was engaged in the rape of minors.

Hoping that Q-Anon's (remember them?) obsession with the idea that there was an Illuminati-like ring of pedophiles running around sleeping with children would become a weapon against President Trump was a bad idea from the jump, based as it was on the conjecture that enough people could be peeled away from the Trumpist coalition on that basis to weaken him politically. Personally, I'd hoped that Democrats would give up on being anti-Trump and pro-fixing things that need fixing in the United States, but it turned out that the Democrats were more than capable of remaining single-minded for longer than I could remain irrational.

It would be nice if this blunder dialed back the strange alliance with conspiracy theorizing that seems to have become popular with the political class (it has zero chance of ending it) but I doubt that it will. Too many people have hitched their wagons to the idea that this will be straw that breaks the camel's back, apparently unaware that thus far, it's been a very resilient camel.

Pass It On

I was reading the most recent posting on Schneier on Security, when I found a weird, rambling conspiracy theory in the comments. The general thrust of it seems to be that "an American Citizen," who is never named, was unjustly imprisoned after the were attacked by "a Muslim" who is named on more than one occasion. It's a pretty clear attempt to slander a person, who was likely the actual victim of whatever crime occurred, by casting them as the perpetrator, and to slander the local law enforcement and judiciary, by claiming that they're in on the scheme. Oh, and there were allegations of antisemitism thrown in as a follow-on. Ho hum, nothing to see here.

But it seemed like the sort of thing that one might find posted, verbatim, in other places. After all, it had exactly zero to do with a proposed law to stop 3D printers in New York from making firearms parts, so it stood to reason that someone had taken their copypasta hatchet job on the road, and dropped the text into the comment sections of other weblogs. This is, after all, a way of spreading the message and getting it in front of more people.

So I found a snippet that came across as likely to be somewhat unique, and dropped it into Google, framing it within double quotes so the search engine would understand that I was looking for the exact string. I was somewhat surprised that it didn't seem to pop up anywhere. I was more surprised to see the generative automation overview synthesize the allegations and present them as "recent reports."

Names redacted, because I don't intend to help spread this inanity...

Also interesting was that it linked to a prior post on Schneier on Security, even though the conspiratorial comment could not be found there... presumably, it had already been deleted, if not for being crazy, for being completely off-topic. But the overview states that the allegations appear on the blog. Which is technically true, I suppose, but there is a difference between a blog and its comments section, especially for public blogs like Schneier on Security, where pretty much anyone can post.

To be sure, this is an edge case and a half... I found the results that I did because I was looking to see where else the wild allegations and conspiracy had been posted, so I'd clipped directly from the text to drop into Google, which would have really narrowed the pool of possible things that the automation would find as matches.

But that doesn't mean that it's not a problem, especially given that names are not unique identifiers of people, and the fact that the automation clearly had access to a cached or archived version of previous posts. The automation simply rolls out a list of names.

And I think that this is what people are getting at when they point out that the generative automation companies are pushing to be first and best to market, and leaving the safety aspects of things until later, or to someone else. Because this isn't a problem of "A.I. slop;" this is a matter of the automation repeating random things it finds on the web. And given that web sites are seeing less traffic, as people simply take the overviews and go, it wouldn't take much for something like this to take on a life of its own, divorced from the comments section(s) in which it was first planted.

Thaw

So there's a local company that uses their street-facing sign mainly for political messaging. In the entire time I've noticed what it's said, it's pretty much never been about business. Usually, the signs have small government or simply anti-Democratic Party messages... whoever runs the place seemed to have really had it in for Governor Gregoire, back in the day. But the last couple of messages have been different, and the most recent one really stood out.

Not that there has ever been any explicitly Trumpist messaging on the sign in the past, but the obviously Republican leaning of the previous signs had given me the impression that this was someone who, if not a staunch supporter of the current administration, could likely always be counted on to direct their fire elsewhere. The fact that even this person, whoever they are, felt the need to take a stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement speaks to the difficulty that the Republicans may have in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Of course, the chances of a Republican carrying the 1st District of Washington are don't even make it to slim. Zero seems like a much more accurate number, to be honest. But that's never stopped the owner of Chain Saws Plus from railing against the generally Left-of-Center political consensus of the area. And, given that they're still in business, there are people who don't hold that against them. So I'm fairly certain that this isn't a business decision; made as a peace offering to the more Liberal elements of the Eastside.

Instead, this seems like someone who's actually willing to come out and be critical of "their" side in all of this. And while I doubt that would translate into a vote to re-elect Representative DelBene, it does seem like one fewer vote for any GOP challenger(s). (Not that I'd expect any Republican candidates to make it out of the primary, absent a large, and fractured, group of Democratic candidates.)

Reliance on low-propensity voters has shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans, even if President Trump doesn't seem to be aware of the fact. If the Republicans can't count on people who have defined themselves in terms of negative partisanship against the Democrats to turn out, the President's concern that another impeachment is headed his way may turn out to be correct.

Degenerated

A connection of mine made a post on LinkedIn about the use of generative automation in the gaming industry, and how that's become basically cover for bad management.

Someone who saw the post took offense, not at the post itself, or its theme, but at the fact that it struck them as having been artificially generated. (I decided to drop the text into a few "GPT Detector" sites, by the way, and even my favorite false positive generator came back with a "0% GPT" score.)

Pointing out the patterns in writing that one believes that LLMs have been trained (intentionally or not) to favor is a different task than pointing out patterns in writing that are unique to LLMs. I think that there is a tendency to become caught up in the idea of "the flaw of averages," the idea that the "average" of a group of people, even a large group, won't actually match any given individual in that group. Applied to detecting LLMs and GPT-created text, it presumes that some artifacts of the training data that come out in generated text are unique to generated text; observe enough people and you'll see something like a given phrasing or sentence structure come out of the data, but the precise phrasing or structure exist nowhere in the data.

Which is reasonable, but to actually validate that for any given piece of text, one would need an in-depth understanding of the training data. To claim, for instance, that only generative automation uses emojis to mark bulleted lists is to make a pretty sweeping claim about quite a lot of human social media posting; one that's effectively impossible to empirically support. And I have it on pretty good authority that ChatGPT didn't invent the m-dash.

Big picture, I understand the feeling that generative automation is equivalent to "low-effort." I've seen my share of generated artwork, and come away with the impression that the person felt a need to have some sort of illustration, but not anything worth investing significant time, effort or money into, and so it felt perfunctory... the Social Media Gods say that text with pictures gets more Engagement, so here's a picture: please Engage now.

But I'm not sure that angry call-outs do anything productive. (Not that there's anything wrong with simply venting on the Internet, mind you.) People can snipe at one another for a supposed unwillingness to treat online posting with the respect that it deserves, but in the end, that sort of feeds the very Engagement beast that sits at the heart of the problem. And because spending the time to write posts oneself is the norm, there's little drive to step up and comment on that fact. It's not much different from the reasons why rage-bait outperforms more positive postings: the "Must. Denounce. Now." impulse feeds into the incentive structure of social media more broadly. (Which, of course, makes them an attractive mode on online interaction themselves.)

What makes things on social media go away isn't vitriol, it's apathy. (Another sentence structure supposedly coined by LLMs, by the way.)

It's likely overstating things to claim that the use of generative automation in social media is reaching the level of a moral panic, but I suspect that the number of people who feel actively slighted by it is growing. And sensitivity to slights can produce the perverse habit of seeking them out, in order to respond to them. Which, in turn, can lead to one's slight detector is perfectly calibrated.

For my part, I've come to realize that I don't naturally analyze text for signs of automation. I think that I'm okay with lacking the skill to do so; I'm unconvinced that learning to do it well enough to be accurate is time well spent.

Mirror Image

The question that the widespread adoption of generative automation by business will raise is not "What will be the effects on productivity?" Rather, I think it will be, "What will be the effects on demand, especially demand for human labor?" I can imagine a worst-case scenario in which automation, especially autonomous automation, creates a world in which access to raw materials becomes paramount. If doesn't matter, for instance, if people own a robot that can cook for them if they have nothing of value to trade for food.

I suspect, as with so many other things, that these sorts of problems will not crop up unexpectedly so much as it will turn out that people were expecting "someone else" to take care of the problem, preferably in a manner that wouldn't cost them anything. And when it turns out that "someone else" was actually "no one else," emergency measures, none of them really to anyone's liking, will wind up being enacted.

What strikes me as a slowly building panic over the disruptions to the job market in the technology sector, both current and expected in the future, speaks to this. While it's not hard to find techno-optimists who will loudly proclaim that "genuine human interaction" will suddenly become highly valuable in a highly automated society, they tend to be short on explanations as to how a large segment of the current workforce will come to be employed this way. And the people who see not only their jobs going away, but their future prospects for supporting themselves, remain unconvinced.

Cultivating new lines of work that would be expensive to impossible for even genuine "artificial general intelligence" to carry out would seem to be a priority, but such cultivation will, in the short term at least, be unprofitable... which is why no-one's currently turning their resources to it; the expected return on that investment is pretty much non-existent. And while there are people who will look to government to solve the problem, the resources are going to have to come from somewhere, and decades of nurturing a distrust of government efficacy and a dislike of taxation are likely to result in quite a bit of time spent in looking for someone to extract the resources from who have resources to take, yet lack the political voice to block their taking.

In the end, finding a social solution has to be more important to the majority of people than searching for personal ones. But stereotypical American individualism, to say nothing of social division, actively works against that. The saying that "Whenever you say, 'Someone should do something,' remember that Someone stands in front of you whenever you look in the mirror," applies here as much as to anything else, however. And if I don't think that "someone else" will start working on the problem, perhaps I should start educating myself on what that work entails.

Grimelight

Perhaps the real problem with the video, shared by President Trump on his Truth Social account, that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, is that it triggered calls for its removal, rather than an examination of why it was posted. I don't believe for a moment that President Trump allowed some anonymous staffer to post the video to his account without anyone knowing what was in the entire video. The President's previous comments about Africa and the African diaspora have made no secret of his disdain. Which is nothing new... I suspect it would be silly of me to say that Donald Trump is the only racist to have occupied the White House during my lifetime.

The idea that there are members of the MAGA movement who are simply unreconstructed racists is simply taken as given by many. But, okay... the United States has had its share, if not more of unreconstructed racists for as long as I've been around, too... but the White House giving an implicit stamp of approval to such messaging seems unique to the Trump Administration, at least in modern times.

Even if we accept (and I don't) the idea that the video was posted to the social media account of the President of the United States without anyone vetting it thoroughly for its message, the fact that it originated with a meme account points to it being a form of "red meat" for the President's base of voters. And that raises the question, at least for me, of why memes? Of all of the things that the President's Truth Social account could be sharing, why bother with random stuff like this; especially if it's going to be hand-waved through? One would think the last thing the White House wants is for some random message to be seen coming from the President. Donald Trump has pretty much zero in the way of "regular guy" credentials, so why engage in the bored teenager act?

When I was in high school, I knew a number of people who had no compunctions against calling me "nigger" to my face. Most of them didn't strike me as racists, and I concluded that it wasn't racist, but personal. They were seeking to get a rise out of me. And I suspect that this is what's at work here. The President is like a class clown who craves the spotlight badly enough to do whatever he can to keep it trained on themselves.

The thimble thunderstorm of the video spread internationally pretty quickly, and generated a lot of heat, even if there was little light. I'm not in the camp that says the President is attempting to distract people from other things... the news cycle can present multiple things to the public at once. Donald Trump simply needs for one of those things to be him.

Democrats were, of course, going to take the bait on this one; their political incentives demand that they constantly decry this or that random bit of inanity that the President's engaged in, even if the smart move would be to simply roll their eyes and find something more constructive to do with their time. But enough people demand constant vigilance, and responsiveness, that they're force to play ball, and keep themselves in the spotlight as well. And this time, even a few Republicans felt the need to get in on the act, despite the fact that it has likely earned them the moniker RINO from the MAGA faithful. But it ensured that reporters would be rushing to get comment from the press secretary and the President himself, both of whom said pretty much the same things they say every other time.

The constituency for this is hard to pin down, because it seems that so many people are on the lookout for, and responsive to, signs that President Trump is doing something; even when that something is not governing. Elements of the political Left and Right alike seem to have little better to do than to boo or cheer the President, who responds with a constant stream of random acts for them to respond to. But what I don't understand is why these groups must never be allowed to go hungry. Why does Congress and the news media dutifully play the same tired role, over and over again. What does the outrage machine offer in return, that the rest of the public cannot match? 

Generation Narrow

I was watching YouTube over dinner, and "the algorithm" suggested "Psychology of Gen X." Being a member of "Generation X" myself, I decided I'd have a watch, and see if I recognized anything of myself. I'm of the opinion that age cohort, as the informal groupings known as "The Baby Boomers," "Generation Z" et cetera are known have become the new Zodiac; clustering broad swaths of the population together and assigning them a pithy list of traits seen as so universal that all members of the group may as well be the same person, just with different haircuts and outfits.

What made "Psychology of Gen X" slightly different than the other profiles that I've come across now and again was that it didn't simply list random traits... it attempted to explain them. It was all very surface-level; the video is, after all, only eight minutes long, and so there wasn't much room for specifics.

But even with that, I quickly realized that the video was really seeking to explain the White, middle-class, urban/suburbanites that I grew up around. Very little of the video seemed relevant to the lives of my cousins who lived in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago. It was taking the kids from Stranger Things and extrapolating out from them to all of the millions of people born in a 15-year period.

And realizing that gave me a bit of insight into the Trumpist/Make America Great Again movement: of course they see themselves as the legitimate Americans, they see themselves in the broad generalizations that people make about the United States. Sure, Psychology of Gen X did as much to leave out rural Americans from Appalachia as it did Native Americans, but its viewpoint was very much White and male, and there was no indication that it even understood that other people existed, let alone had something worth mentioning to contribute to the experience of being "Generation X." (And that leaves aside the fact that the age cohorts are often taken as worldwide phenomena.)

Part of it seemed to stem from the fact that it was short, and the fact that the channels seems based in the United Kingdom could also play a part, but a lot of just seemed perfunctory. If you've seen one video claiming to explain the psychology of a given age cohort, you've seen them all, and this one was no exception. The stills that played in the background to illustrate the narration were of the bland, generative automation-created style that's come to typify artwork that needs to be done, as opposed to illustration that really adds to the experience.

And a quickly-made, short video about a group of people is going to focus on the mainstream, because that's what there's time to do. And this wasn't a video for Gen X, to lay out the breadth of the cohort... It's a video for today's young people, to offer an easily digestible explanation of their parents, and other older people they encounter at work and in other aspects of their lives. The fact that it only deals with a minority of the overall group would be lost on many of them.

Not that I expect that the target audience would be fooled into thinking they had the complete picture. They likely understand as well as anyone else the difficulties of cramming decades of people's lived experiences into 8 minutes. But it's one thing to understand that one is seeing snippets of the lives of a certain group versus seeing a slice of nearly everyone's lives. That important distinction struck me as missing, and when it did, I realized how many other times it hadn't been made.

While much has been made of the fact that so much of American history is focused on the White middle and upper classes, I'm not convinced that the idea that this means there should be a greater focus on other people has really sunk in. I doubt that the person or people behind this particular Psychology Simplified channel set out to ignore the lived experiences of most of Gen X. When one's making short videos on an every-other-day basis, there likely isn't a lot of time for deep research without a fairly extensive team; and while the video does cite references, there aren't a lot of them, and nothing about any cultural differences in the experience. (Okay, granted, I don't often have a lot of citations here, but Nobody In Particular is intended to be about the United States as I experience it, personally.) So it's understandable that for someone like me, who lived through the time period in question, a lot would seem to be missing. But there are people for whom the narrow focus reinforces an understanding of themselves as the center of the world.

Panic Button

Participant homophobia was found to be the driving force behind their willingness to accept the gay panic defense as legitimate. Higher levels of homophobia and religious fundamentalism were found to predict more leniency in verdict decisions when the gay panic defense was presented. This study furthers the understanding of decision making in cases involving the gay panic defense and highlights the need for more research to be conducted to help understand and combat LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) prejudice in the courtroom.
When Is "Gay Panic" Accepted? Exploring Juror Characteristics and Case Type as Predictors of a Successful Gay Panic Defense

There is, of course, no "straight panic" defense that attorneys generally deploy when seeking to defend people against charges of violence. Because one suspects that it would be open season on stalkers, jackasses and abusers if juries could be counted on to decide that women being targeted, being bothered "over and over and over again" and having unwanted sexual advances made to them justified killing their tormentors.

But given the fact that homophobia and religious fundamentalism are positive predictors of leniency in such cases, it's not surprising... In such circles, the crime is treating a man as one would a woman, rather than a lack of respect for other people as a whole. I would guess that women have to find it extremely frustrating, understanding that there are people who feel that the sort of behavior that many of them put up with on a regular basis justifies violence based on sexual orientation, and that lawyers are willing to play on that in order to help their clients; and that with the right juries, it works. If straight men have a right to expect gay men to take "no" for an answer, why don't women have a right to expect the same from gay men?

The "obvious" answer is that sexually-aggressive straight men are a norm, and sometimes, an expectation. A perhaps less-obvious answer is the overall fragility of many standards of masculinity. If men are so tough, and so able to withstand hardship, why are they given a pass in this way? Simply because having a gay man come on to them risks their self-image as men?

But I guess it's easy for me to say... I'm not staring down the barrel of life in prison because someone threatened my sense of myself as a man, and I responded with lethal violence. Were never setting foot outside of a prison again a real possibility, maybe I'd be all in favor of my lawyers looking to use the jury's deep-seated prejudices in my favor. I like to think that I'd be adult enough to own up to what I'd done, though.

Not that I can see myself doing it. And I guess that's the paradox that rubs at me. I'm not "man enough" to want to kill someone for making an unwanted pass at me, and that's what allows me to be "man enough" to not want to use unjustified prejudices to bail me out. Maybe that's not the correct framing of the issue at hand. Maybe linking those two things, expecting that a masculinity that permits the use of violence over relative trivialities should also demand taking ownership of one's actions (or loss of self-control) is simply playing into a different set of prejudices; one that's just as limiting and unjustified?

Masculinity is a box, one that many segments of American society have decreed that men shall not leave. I don't find it terribly stifling, because I'm not really at all motivated to move any farther from the center of the box than I already am. But I'm also not in a place in that box that compels me to need to defend the actions I take (or don't take) to maintain that place. My tendency towards crankiness prevents me from having much sympathy for those who do, and maybe that makes me part of the problem, as well.

Sloganeering

On a recent episode of "The Opinions" podcast from The New York Times, host Michelle Cottle was discussing whether adopting "Abolish ICE" as a slogan, was, in effect, simply asking for the Republicans to take it and turn it against them. Which, in the wake of "Defund the Police" is a rational way of looking at it, but the idea that a different slogan could be proofed against a conservative-lead backlash, I believe, mistakes the forces in play.

In short, it's never about the actual slogan. It's about the people who identify with it. The problem with "Critical Race Theory" or "Woke" wasn't that there was some built-in negative connotation to either of them. It's that they are associated with Black people and Liberals; two groups that, on the whole, Conservative White Americans feel are unjustly resentful of and hostile towards them. And so it was easy for Conservative activists, like Christopher Rufo, to convince them that these terms were code for all sorts of terrible things.

So declining to chant "Abolish ICE" in favor of the more anodyne "Smarter Immigration Policy," for example, wouldn't prevent Republicans from branding it as code for "open borders," because their target audiences already believe that the American Left wants open borders, and is willing to allow them to be victimized by non-White immigrants in exchange for votes from Black and Hispanic communities. Just was with Critical Race Theory, Conservative activists would be able to attach "Smarter Immigration Policy," or whatever else someone decided the slogan should be, to anxieties around immigration via anxieties around people who understand ideal immigration policy differently that they do.

Accordingly, as long as the anxieties are present, there is no slogan that one can imagine couldn't be linked to them. I think that Ms. Cottle doesn't really grasp this part of the equation. And given the general lack of understanding that the American Left has for the American Right (which, I would submit, is not completely mutual), she's not the only person whose fingers it slips through.

Reminders

The first of the large postcards had a picture on the front; a stock photograph of a man typing into a calculator with bills in his other hand. In the out-of-focus background, a woman played with two small children, a bright pink toy in her lap.

"Politicians in Olympia are proposing new taxes to make our vacations more expensive," it read, bold yellow text with white underlining on a blue background.

The second postcard was more austere, but more strident, "Why Are Legislators In Olympia Raising Taxes On Washington Families Already Struggling To Make Ends Meet?" There was no picture this time; just stark black text on a yellow field. The underlining, again, was in white.

Both had the same message at the bottom:

Paid for by Airbnb Helps Our State Thrive (HOST) PAC, 2350 Kerner Blvd., Ste. 250, San Rafael, CA 94901, Top Five Contributors: Airbnb, Inc.

The back of the first postcard, the one with the picture of the family on the front, lead off with an interesting message on the back. "We're already paying more for housing, groceries and gas. Now, politicians in Olympia are looking to raise the cost of our vacations, too."

But it's understood that some small part of why "we" are paying more for housing is people using homes for short-term rentals, rather than long-term residences. Will a tax on short-term rentals change that? Probably not by much. Are there better solutions? Likely. But Airbnb isn't proposing any. Instead, they're looking to trigger financial anxiety in voters, to enlist them in looking out for Airbnb's interests.

Because it is somewhat likely that a tax on short-term rentals will take some of them off the market, at least for a time, and that cuts into Airbnb's revenues. Airbnb matches the supply of homes available to be rented with people looking to rent homes for short periods, and takes a cut of the asking price... they're a middleman, and as such, they're sensitive to dips on either side of their two-sided marketplace. Accordingly, they're acting to protect the supply of short-term rental properties... the cost of living for people here in Washington isn't really their concern.

And there's nothing wrong that. Corporations are as entitled to look out for number 1 as people are. But I'm not a fan of looking to people's anxieties to enlist them in one's own cause. In part because it's disingenuous. And in part because economic anxiety can last much longer than the debate over a single bill or policy. Whether or not short-term rentals are taxed is unlikely to make a significant difference in most people's broader economic outlook. And if Airbnb gets its way, the company is simply going to go back to minding its other interests, rather than having its Airbnb HOST PAC continue to advocate for the public. Airbnb doesn't need the problems it claims to care about to be solved. And that allows it to claim that solving its problems is the best thing for everyone.