Businessy

Someone posted a picture of a sign on LinkedIn that read: "Skilled labor isn't cheap; cheap labor isn't skilled." I was immediately reminded of a man I'd encountered panhandling near an expressway off-ramp who was offering his decades of experience in construction for what seemed like a pittance. Years of experience and consummate skill do not, by themselves, repeal the laws of economics. While it may require years to create a skilled worker, that doesn't mean that those skills are also rare, in comparison to the demand for them.

But as LinkedIn has drifted towards becoming a more general-purpose social-media site, as opposed to strictly business networking, these sorts of vaguely affirming postings have become more common. Posts exhorting people to stand up and hold out until they find someone who "sees their true worth" are so common as to be clichés. But I guess they count as "engagement" these days, and that's what matters to the site.

It's interesting to watch people who should understand enough about business to know better reduced to posting bland aphorisms to farm reactions from the site's general audience. It's a side-effect of modern society, I suppose, but for all of that it's still an interesting phenomenon to observe the process of wringing the complexity out of life. I understand the world to be a complex place, and therefore I tend to credit complex answers to questions as being more likely to be accurate than simple ones. I also understand, however, that this puts me at odds with a lot of the people around me, who may be looking for a less complicated worldview. In this sense, the shift in LinkedIn was perhaps inevitable, as people began to spend more time on the site and methods and styles honed in other parts of the Internet were imported. If nothing else, it's allowed the site to remain relevant.

Bulletproof

There's a story on National Public Radio's website that uses the young daughter of reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, as the entry point to an exploration of why some children may have managed to ward off being infected with SARS-CoV-2. The story explores the effects of being exposed to other coronaviruses, the protections that the retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) receptors offer in children and makes passing mention of the fact that children, for all that they tend to come across to adults as self-propelled bio-warfare agents, are fairly good at dealing with diseases (otherwise, there likely wouldn't be very many of them, with predictable results for the species as a whole).

But the whole thing started from the premise that given the young Miss Doucleff had been in a room with someone who was later found to be infectious on more than one occasion, she should have contracted the virus and become ill at some point. While this is taken for granted however, it's never really backed up.

It's understood that the many variants of SARS-CoV-2 have varying levels of virulence and some of them are quite transmissible. But even the Omicron variant, which was considered highly contagious, didn't manage to infect everyone that a carrier might come into contact with. R0, which, remember, presumes no precautions and a completely naïve population, never rises to infinity. An estimated R0 for the Omicron BA.2 variant of about 12 is pretty high, but measles still beats it out at 16. And it's understood that not everyone who comes into contact with someone who has the measles will contract the disease.

So why treat a child managing to avoid becoming sick as if it were some sort of unique event? I suspect that part of the answer is that this is an NPR story, and the political dimension to the coverage of, and public reaction to, the disease outbreak has to be taken into account. NPR's audience, like most of the American Left seems to have a heightened perception of risk from the virus, and NPR's coverage both reflects and validates that risk. Who has the greater influence on whom is open to debate, but I think of it as something of a symbiotic relationship, with NPR both reacting to, and calibrating, the expectations of the audience. It's the nature of the news business, and news is, after all, a business.

The idea that people are poor at evaluating risk has become a cliché. And while the idea that "perception is reality" is also something of a cliché, it's also very (if not perhaps completely) true. And so coverage of events, including the pandemic, generally has to start somewhere that is recognizable to the audience. And to the degree that left-leaning audiences view the threat of SARS-CoV-2 as ever-present, the story needed to present it that way.

The Knowledge

I think, therefore I am.

Beyond that, it's all subject to debate. While I don't think that I'm seriously mentally ill, I am aware of the fact that I don't have much of a genuine means of proving, or falsifying, what I believe that I know about the world. After all, the vast majority of it is secondhand.

I understand the general knock against that form of skepticism. It does, after all, call into question the idea of absolute knowledge, and absolute truth, and, as such plays into the hands of people who would cynically claim that neither exists. But for me, the fact of the matter is that most knowledge comes down to trust, either in sources or in one's senses. After all, I recently developed a mild, if ongoing, case of tinnitus. The near-constant tone that sounds in my ear is not "real" in the sense that it has an external cause... there are no sound waves involved. Rather, it's closer to a form of auditory hallucination. I understand this, and have learned to discount the noise. At least, I think that I understand it. After all, were you to ask me to prove that there was no noisemaker, I couldn't... at least, not without doing quite a bit of research into how sound works, and is detected, and putting together (or otherwise sourcing) a machine to search for (and presumably not find) the sound. But then, how would I know the machine were operating properly? At some point, I would simply have to trust that what I thought to be true was, in fact, true, and would have to ask that you do the same.

If case you hadn't guessed where I was going with all of this, the same idea is at work with the reports of Russian atrocities in the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian and other outlets show pictures, and the Kremlin, along with some segment of people within Russia, claim that it's all fakery. What's the truth of the matter? Technically, I have no idea. I am, after all, on the other side of the planet, more or less, from the events in question. I have seen none of the evidence for myself; I have to take the word of people who claim to have been there. Could they, as the Russian government claims, be lying? Yes. Hoaxes are a thing. And in this sense the question is less about what to believe than it is about who to believe. And from where I sit, it's a low-stakes proposition. No matter who I choose to credit with the truth, I still have to go to work tomorrow, as I still have bills to pay. A certain degree of allegiance to one side or the other is about all that's really at issue for me.

For many Russian citizens, there is a certain level of pride in their home nation at stake, but overall, the consequences are minimal for them, too. So I'm unclear on the utility of looking for them to make a different choice, outside of the faint hope that some sort of popular uprising would depose President Putin. Accordingly, I think that news coverage would be better served being less incredulous that Russians would be so quick to believe their government and dismiss the evidence that sways others. A greater focus on and understanding of how people deal with information that can't personally validate might be a more useful journalistic tack. 

Business as Usual

Ukrainian President Zelensky spoke to the United Nations Security Council today, and from what I understand from what I've read, basically told them to either change the rules of how they operate, or pack it in.

Grandstanding, even when people agree with one's cause, is still grandstanding. The United Nations is incapable of holding the major powers of the world, and those they choose to shield, accountable, because that was a primary condition of it existing in the first place. Smaller nations could be forced to surrender some sovereignty to an international body; the major international players could not, and without them, their would be no effective United Nations in the first place. And so the decision was made that half a loaf was better than none, and the relatively toothless and ineffective body we have today was created.

Because this is the nature of accountability. Accountability always requires power to enforce it, and there is always a source of that power that is, therefore, more or less above accountability when it chooses to be so. The exact nature of how this works varies depending on the circumstances, but it's a nearly invariable constant.

I've always been of the opinion that sanctions are, generally speaking, somewhere between shouting "Stop! Or I'll shout 'Stop!' again" and a way of pressuring smaller nations that aren't in a position to really be either independent of global trade or severely impact it by their absence. The Russian government is not a position that it is forced to care what the rest of the world thinks of it. Once the threat of force to maintain the status quo was off the table, it seems likely that President Putin and his advisors felt that once they could change the facts on the ground (a.k.a., the borders and/or government of Ukraine) that the rest of the world would learn to live with the fait accompli. While the war doesn't seem to be going as well as the Russian government (and a lot of other people, for that matter) thought that it would, the fact remains that it's highly unlikely that the war ends before the Kremlin decides that it will end.

And it's likely that when the initial plan for the United Nations was drawn up, that the authors of that document understood that there would be days like this. They may have even intended it to be the case. Such is the nature of compromise, and the United Nations is a creation of compromise. President Zelensky can attempt to shame member nations with that understanding all he wants, but if such a tactic were viable, it likely wouldn't have been needed in the first place.

Missed Out

Well, it's that time of the year again, when some yahoo puts up sketchy signs all around the local area, advertising an auction of high-end items for sale. Generally speaking, the items are either unavailable by the time the auction rolls around or are reproductions. The reproductions aren't explicitly claimed to be the real thing, it's just that one has to actual buy the item before the paperwork explaining it is handed over.

What's interesting about these is that the supposed auctioneer has been moving around the country now for several years, hosting these things. Boston, Washington D.C., Tulsa, Chicago; the list goes on. The signs change every so often, but the method of operation remains the same. The dishonest preying on the hopeful is nothing new; there is a long list of shady dealings that depend to one degree or another on people's hopes that someone will part with something valuable for a fraction of it's value, and offer a stepping stone to a more affluent appearance or a quick buck via arbitrage.

I find these signs interesting when they appear, but I had better things to do today than go and investigate what the supposed auction was actually selling this time. I suppose, however, that I'll have other opportunities. I suspect the signs will be back next year.