Un Populi

The latest "unpopular opinion" trend seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of criticizing Blue Origin flight 31 for Likes and other social media attention. Because of course it is. Genuinely unpopular opinions, when expressed on social media, earn crickets at best, and commonly attract reams of negative commentary of their own.

I, for my part, don't really have much of an opinion on space tourism. If Jeff Bezos wants to launch his fiancée and a bevy of celebrity women into sub-orbital space, it's his money. I think that attempting to cast it as a sort of "one giant leap for womankind" was a bad idea; but the online bickering over whether any or all of the women count as "astronauts," if the flight was "inspiring" or the degree to which misogyny is playing a role in the teapot tempest this has stirred up has faded into so much dueling virtue signalling.

And I think that this is where the "unpopular opinion" trend has gone. As noted, in a venue where the goal is to gain social credit, genuinely unpopular opinions have no place; being the odd person out on a topic that people sincerely care about tends to be a one-way ticket to vitriol, if not death threats. Even on a platform like LinkedIn, where most users are commenting under their real names and their profiles include enough information to uniquely identify them, they'll unload, without a second thought, on others who say things they don't appreciate.

Being just another among many to say what others are thinking doesn't carry the same sense of courage and free-thinking that pushing back against an imagined consensus does. But maybe it should. People cast their circles' conventional wisdom as unpopular opinions because jumping on the bandwagon has a negative connotation. But if people clearly appreciate the 50th, or 5,000th, person posting the same thought online, why maintain the pretense that there's something bold and iconoclastic there? Why create the idea that there's a legion of wrong-thinking sheeple that one is rising above, when instead there's an entire audience whose egos are clearly being stroked?

The list of virtues and vices people may have should be allowed to keep up with the times. If conformity to ideological viewpoints is seen as virtuous, then let people be open about the fact that they're publicly conforming, and that they're rewarding people for that conformity. It's the only way for honesty to also be a public virtue.

All The Same

As part of making the case that Kilmar Ábrego García should not be brought back to the United States, the White House held a press briefing with one Patty Morin, who made the case that "We need to protect our families, our borders, our children." Mrs. Morin's daughter was murdered, and a Salvadoran immigrant named Victor Martinez-Hernandez was convicted of the crime.

But what do Messrs. Ábrego García and Martinez-Hernandez have do with one another, other than have come to the United States from El Salvador without authorization? Why should the crimes that Victor Martinez-Hernandez was convicted of have any bearing on whether Kilmar Ábrego García should receive due process prior to being deported?

While critics of President Trump are quick to point to things like this when they call him a racist, whether Donald Trump actually harbors racial animosities is beside the point. When Donald Trump, his father and their management company was sued for racial discrimination in 1973 for refusing to rent to Black people, one of the rationales given was the White tenants that lived in Trump buildings didn't want Black neighbors. And it's much the same today; President Trump doesn't need to be a racist; as long as he understands his primary constituency to be racists, he'll be willing to cater to that.

It's an important distinction, because the Trump Administration's current actions aren't being driven solely by the President; like most performers, he caters to his audience. And to the degree that he understands that people who hold, in this case, anti-Hispanic views are part of the voting electorate and more likely to be Republicans than Democrats, he's willing to take actions that show he's on their side. And it's unlikely that Donald Trump is the only person who is willing to behave in this way.

The United States has never been a genuinely unified nation, and clever politicians have always been able to find ways to capitalize on the fault lines. Blaming them for those fault lines simply obscures the underlying problem, which allows it to persist.

If You Can Keep It

My father was of the opinion that redistributing wealth wouldn't, for the most part, work. The problem, as he saw it, wasn't that most people didn't have money, it's they didn't know how to keep it. And I think that I agree with him on that. Not in the sense that Americans spend too much on random crap, or that they're too easily manipulated into poor financial decisions, but in the sense that many people fail to understand how the broader economy works, and the (admittedly minor) impacts of their choices on it.

A lot has been made of the Trump Administration cutting federal programs that places rely on, but that's also starting to lay bare just how often states and localities have shifted their costs to the federal government, in order to keep their own taxes low. Promising people high-quality services and low tax rates only works for a time, and if the Trump Administration manages to make all of the cuts in funding to things that it wants to, that time is likely up.

At some point, one has to bite the bullet and align what one wants with what one is willing to pay for; and really understand how much things cost. The Trump Administration has been taking heat from commentators who cannot believe that the Administration honestly thinks that a) large-scale manufacturing can be re-shored in anything under a decade or two and b) Americans would be willing to pay what domestic citizen labor would cost, but the Trump Administration doesn't have to believe any of it. The Republican voter base appears to think that it's true, and that is what drives statements from the political class. As long as there are young men out there with high-school diplomas who think that if Apple would only give them a job assembling iPhones that they'd be set for life, Commerce Secretary Lutnick can proclaim that, "Our high school educated Americans- the core to our workforce, is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America," without actually needing to believe a word of it.

If people really wanted to pay more for things, simply because they were made in the United States, they would. But they don't. Because in the end, it's inefficient. To be sure, sometimes, efficiency isn't the best thing, but it can be hard to get people to see the value of resiliency, when it can be a waste until something bad actually happens. And now, one can make the case that something bad is happening.

Fraudspotting

Employment frauds are rife when the number of job seekers is high. The more people need to find work, the more it's possible that they'll take chances on people and companies that they aren't familiar with. And so one sees things like this, where someone has created a profile pretending to be someone else, looking to lure people in. (It's since been taken down.) It's not an exact copy, by any means, but if one hadn't interacted with the real profile, it could be convincing. But, there are some telltales, which I've outlined with a red box. And since knowing what one should be looking for can help combat a more generalized suspicion, consider this a public service announcement.

Name redacted.

When looking at a LinkedIn profile, the number of connections a person has is only a link in two circumstances that I've been able to find. 1) A person is looking at their own profile. 2) A person is looking at a profile of someone who is a) a first-level (or direct) contact of theirs, and b) that person has enabled allowing others to see their direct connections. I'm not directly connected to the real person being impersonated here, so there shouldn't have been a link there.

And note the little box with the diagonal arrow pointing up and away; which indicates that the link goes to an external website... if there is a link for a contact, it will always be an internal LinkedIn link (it's a search that returns that person's direct contacts), so that marker, which is an explicit indicator that following it will take you to a different site, will not be there. Also, as 500 > 1, "connections" should be plural. The singular in the link gives away that something is amiss, along with the fact that while the link claims "500+ connection," the text below it very clearly says: "1 connection."

While the faked profile page is mostly a copy of the real thing, these telltales make it stand out as not genuine. Often the difference between being taken in and not is understanding the little things to look for.

Totes Manipulative

Here's a retail hack that you may not have heard of. It works like this:

1. Find an inexpensive, but useful, item, like the $3.99 Trader Joe's miniature tote bags, that's going viral.

2. Put one (yes, just one, not the set of all four colors) up on an eBay store for $49,890.00.

I can't imagine anyone having that much more money than sense.

3. Wait for the news media to post a link to the listing, as being supposedly indicative of the crazy prices the viral item is going for, despite the fact that no rational person would pay that, given that they can see what other people are actually paying (which is maybe $15 - $20 or so a bag) just below the listing.

4. Profit, apparently.

I get the appeal of a good hype story, but anyone can list something on eBay for literally any amount of money that the site will allow them to. The $1,000.00+ listings seem to be bids to be picked up in the media, who will bite because irrationally high "prices" will drive clicks. And for a few people, they work; the media coverage is, effectively, a free advertisement for their eBay store.

It's the attention economy starting to bite its own tail. Although I wouldn't rule out an attempt to fleece the unwary. It's possible for the inattentive to mistake $49,890.00 for $49.89, although that's still a very high price to pay for one of the bags, given the other eBay listings. But in times of economic uncertainty, people are even more likely to look to take advantage of one another than they are usually.