The Colorful Season

 

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

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

More of the Same

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

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

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

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

Collared

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

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

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

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

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

Mystery

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

Imagine, If You Will...

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

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

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

Duped

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

Not really XKCD

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

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

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

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

Rejected

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fabulous

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Another, And Another

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Menswork

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Again

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

You don't say...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cornered

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

But Not For Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the Dam Breaks

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

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

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

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

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

Roam Around the World

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

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

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

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

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

Guess Which

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Determinative

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

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

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

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

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