Both Ways

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

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

Allied

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fractured

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There Are Only Us

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

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

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

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

Breezy, With a Chance of Blackouts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sign Off

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

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

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

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

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

Telephone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A "Them" Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

Action Required

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fire In The Hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justification

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

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

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

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

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

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

Payoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Score and Five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence

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

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

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

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

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

Out and About

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

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

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

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

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

Newsbait

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

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

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

One More Time?

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

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

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

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

House Democrats fume about GOP's anti-socialism bill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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