Yo Ho Ho

The United States has apparently seized a tanker ship carrying oil from Venezuela to Cuba. The stated rationale for this is that the ship has been sanctioned for, at some point in the past, carrying oil from Iran, when that nation was barred from exporting.

I hadn't realized that vehicles could be sanctioned this way. Until now, I'd been under the impression that sanctioned were always leveled against individuals and organizations, whether those were businesses, governments or other entities. I looked at a United Nations page on sanctioned vessels, and it seems the main penalty there is that such ships are to be barred from ports. Which, honestly, seems kind of toothless to me. After all, if someone is sending goods into North Korea, it makes sense that they would simply use ships that had the range to make it all the way there without needing to make any stops along the way.

So in this sense, the Trump Administration seizing the ship makes a certain amount of sense. What I'm a bit dubious about is the fate of the cargo.

Asked what would happen with the oil, Trump said: "We keep it, I guess."

US seizes sanctioned oil tanker off coast of Venezuela, Trump says

Maybe it's just me, but this seems like it's making the United States Coast Guard into commerce raiders at best, and privateers at worse. But maybe there's some rule that says that people ship things on sanctioned vessels at their own risk.

Still, it creates a perverse incentive for President Trump, at least, to wait for sanctioned vessels to load up on cargoes and then seize them, if the cargo is then free for the taking. This is an act that I can see other nations getting in on. Although President Trump does seem to have a real soft spot for anything having to do with petroleum.

But I wonder about the real goal here. It seems fairly clear that this is a means of putting pressure on the Maduro Administration, although knowing President Trump, I'm doubtful that much thought has gone into what happens if it works. There may be an attempt to set up a pro-Washington client government in Caracas, but I'd be willing to bet that any such effort would be doomed to failure, especially if it seemed that the United States was hoping to set up the sort of cheap resource hub that the Bush Administration supposedly had in mind for Iraq. I suspect that Russia and China already have accounts set up to bankroll and anti-American insurgency if President Maduro loses his grip on power.

The United States playing pirate as a way of throwing its weight around will, of course, have consequences. But not for the President or Congressional Republicans. The rest of us will have to wait and see what this most recent act of international bullying costs us. This could be a very expensive tanker's worth of crude, when it's all said and done. 

Crackers

I somewhat understand the drive for "representation" in holiday nutcrackers. Black people are going to walk past the display, and they're going to want to see themselves shown there. But for me, what this really demonstrates is a lack of basically Black stories. And so the Black community winds up having to attach itself to other people's stories.

And I understand that this, in part, is what Kwanzaa is for. It's a Winter Solstice-adjacent holiday for Black people. But I don't know that it really does the job. It has a Hallmark Holiday feel to it, and I've never met a Black person who actually celebrates it. In my own family, it never rated a mention.

And maybe that's the real problem. There isn't a push for something genuinely Black (whatever that would end up meaning) to mark this time of the year. 

Watching

Data Protection Commission Ireland has posted a video online, titled "Pause Before You Post." This was brought to my attention on LinkedIn, which noted its use of AI. The implication was that "Pause Before You Post" was created entirely with AI, but I'm not sure.

In any event, "Pause Before You Post" is a stereotypical "stranger danger" public service announcement. It show a young girl, Ava, and her parents in a shopping mall, while random adults make comments that demonstrate they understand some of the details of Ava's life. The soundtrack could have come from a slasher movie, and Ava spends most of the video looking suitably frightened of the people who address her. And, of course, it's hinted that one of those adults might be a pedophile.

The root cause, of course, is shown to be the parents' social media posts. They've been sharing random details online, and creepy strangers have been reading them. And since these strangers are creepy, they've been speaking to Ava with a familiarity reserved for friends and family members.

I get it, but I wonder if there wasn't a better way to go about it. "Pause before you post" is sound advice, but the underlying message seems to be "treat the details of your child's life as state secrets," rather than "understand who you're sharing things with." Of course, almost anything shared online can become public. After all, someone can simply take it and repost it publicly. But while public posting may be the default, for many platforms, it's not a requirement. If a parent wants to share a self-deprecating post about being late to pick their daughter up from soccer practice, they can simply choose to only share it with online "friends"/contacts. But it's easier to get a message that everyone one doesn't know might be dangerous, or have designs on one's children, into a 40-second video spot. Nuance often takes more time than people feel they have to communicate.

As far as the "AI-ness" of it all, the only thing that really stood out for me was the fact that Ava was the only visible child in the spot. Maybe it's just how modern malls are, but the place seemed really sparsely populated in general. There's nothing odd about that, in and of itself; extras can be expensive, too, and the idea that Ava and her parents are alone in this situation adds to the overall sense of creepiness, but it was something of a reminder that generative automation isn't ready to replace people wholesale yet.

I rate it a "C," for being an effective vehicle for a too-simplistic message. I have a dislike for scare tactics, especially when there are better means of reaching the same goals, but perhaps this is why I'm not in advertising.

Believing is Seeing

I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight. The first strike, the second strike, and the third and fourth strike on September 2 were entirely lawful and needful and they were exactly what we would expect our military commanders to do.
Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.)
Pentagon leaders brief lawmakers on U.S. boat strikes, fueling debate over legality

I understand Senator Cotton's viewpoint on this. The Trump Administration has to be in the right, and so his perception of events has to align with that, even if, to an observer, it doesn't seem to make much sense. The original video of the September 2nd strike against an alleged group of drug smugglers shows a small boat, but still fairly large for two people in the water to manage, that doesn't have any obvious weapons on it. What fight were they attempting to stay in? One with a naval force that could strike them at will and that was invulnerable to anything they may have done in reprisal?

This is part of the problem with modern politics. Senator Cotton's statements seem more driven by partisanship and/or loyalty to the President than anything else.

In what seems like yet another in a long series of misguided efforts to prosecute the War on Drugs by going after the supply of narcotics, the Trump Administration has declared open season on boats that it determines have drugs aboard. Why anyone things that a tactic that has failed time and again will suddenly start working now is beyond me. But a lot of the reaction to it is necessarily partisan. Republicans have to line up behind the policy and Democrats have to be vocal in their opposition to it, independently of its merits. And this means the "debate" over the legality of what certainly carries at least the appearance of extrajudicial murder, is really just another political shouting match, the outcome of which is more closely tied to the President's approval ratings than to the actual events that are supposedly under consideration.

And at the bottom of it all is the public, and its various factions.

As long as the Trumpist corps of voters understand the drug trade to be a hateful scheme to victimize them, being perpetrated by South Americans who unjustly resent them, they're likely to be more or less in favor of the strikes. And the members of Congress who rely on their votes, like Senator Cotton, are going to have to mirror their viewpoint back to them, or be replaced by someone who will. Likewise, as long as Democratic voters understand this to be a racist persecution of poor people in Latin America, their members on Congress are going to have to speak out against it. And as long as each faction views the other's viewpoint as proof of their wrong thinking, the conflict will persist.

Unquiet

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And here I thought the quiet part was that companies openly discriminate in their recruiting based on factors completely unrelated to job performance.

One can blame this on some sort of biological imperative to discount that which is more easily available (unless, it seems that money is involved; people always seemingly grab the easy bucks), but maybe what it's really about is feeling justified in one's prejudices, and the willingness of, well, many of us, to bow to that.

Being Black, I've been told to not have a profile picture on LinkedIn. Being a Gen Xer, I've been told to expunge my early work history from my profile and résumé. I know people who profiles photos are black-and-white so that they appear to be fair-haired, rather than gray. People use different names in in order to seem more employable. And now there's an endless line of people telling us that the green "Open to Work" banner is really an enormous red flag.

Not because these things are somehow disqualifying; none of them are supposed to matter once one makes it to an interview. But because the gatekeepers of the employment world are supposedly graded (by themselves or others) on how well they make the process of recruiting new employees into a status game.

Prospective employees are treated like Labubus, Stanley tumblers or the Power Nine. If they don't lend the company an air of exclusivity, or make it feel somehow special, the fact that they can do the work, and do it well, doesn't matter. But when was the last time you saw a company crowing about how awesome and unique their new Product Manager was? When was the last time anyone made a purchasing decision based on how much work the seller's Talent Acquisition people needed to do to hire a middle manager from another company?

This would make sense if it showed up in the bottom line, or in stock prices. But literally no-one cares if someone builds a team by hiring a dozen long-term unemployed people. There's absolutely zero riding on this.

But we play the game anyway. Well, I do, at least. There are jobs that I've done, and done well, but there are no traces of in my professional history, because I'm supposed to be pretending that I'm younger than I am until I get in front of someone who can afford not to care.

It's a strange game, because no-one receives anything for winning. It's a pretense that often simply adds work to the process for everyone involved, supposedly because the appearance of doing more work is the valuable part.

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