mental-health

It’s a Special Hell

I feel like it’s a special hell to be stuck in a democracy with people who are so fickle and easily manipulated. Frankly, the best thing that could happen is that we walk away from social media and instead start walking toward places where we meet other people, like a bowling league, bar, maker space, library, or whatever. Sure, some places will code right-wing, but people don’t like blowhards and usually just want to bowl, or have a couple of beers, or work on a project, or find a good book. At the end of the day, in spaces with people, blow-hards have their moment and flash out. You find your people. The people who you look forward to seeing the next time you go there.

But we aren’t doing that as much as we should. We just scroll through phones and social media posts. Like, share, re-share, or maybe even re-mix if you’re bored. And before you know it, another hour or two has gone by. That happens for most of the week and you lose days worth of time before you know it. You look and see things aren’t going so well in other areas, so you jump back on social media. Its a combination of an escapism factory and a dopamine dispenser. How should you feel about something? How did you react to that meme? Did you re-share it? Or did it change your gut reaction to a story? Did you switch teams on that one? Did it make you feel smarter? You’re not a sheep. You think for yourself! Except, did you?

It’s a special hell to be stuck making decisions with people whose frontal cortices have shriveled and are driven by their amygdala and limbic system. Feed enough of the right trash into the chum-bucket that is their media diet and a president trying to become a dictator is romanticized as a Tony Soprano, having the guts to go for what he wants. Not pausing to think that it’s against the basic idea of American democracy. Reaching that conclusion requires logical thought. Having an instant reaction to a meme, an image, a video that has to be shortened to seconds to deal with a decaying attention span, requires no thought. Feed enough of those images and you get powerful reactions.

All the while the people that are making money by monetizing your eyeballs are entering into a new and dangerous relationship with a dictatorship-coded regime. One of patronage. Special privileges, tax breaks, or rewards for being a swell pall. The people who decide what to feed your atrophied brain have an interest in feeding the message the dictatorship wants. What Orwell missed about dictatorship was not that government ministries had the ability to sway citizens. It would be the private companies, beholden to the state, that would do the state’s bidding to pursue personal wealth. It wouldn’t be faceless bureaucrats. It would be opaque content policies that might decide which image to feed you, based on careful targeting.

And with all the noise about the Blue Wave, I imagine we have yet to see the content that will be pushed to fire up fear, resentment, and anger to counter that Blue Wave. Whether it’s voter suppression by making people feel their vote is meaningless to stem the authoritarian tide, and they should just protest, or drowning them in emotional counter-narrative, the push back is coming. They don’t have to hire an army of content creators. They just have to push what ever is working and amplify that. That is the same tactic Russia uses to push its narratives in the West. Don’t push all at once. Seed it. See what works. Amplify that.

In addition we have the novelty of AI to prod the narrative. Imagine an Open AI signaling they need government investment to be profitable, and the only condition is they inject some additional prompting. If someone searches about specific topics, inject a small push to the government’s position. Not overt. Not blaring. Just a nudge. Offer content from a set of friendly sites to back up the claim. Not Fox News, just friendly sites. It can’t be obvious they’re being nudged. Maybe let Google and Meta know that a government ready to invest asks that they just treat sensitive subjects in a way the government desires.

Oh, but won’t they fear the Democrat’s backlash? What backlash? Backlash from people who are making their platform “we follow the law?” The Trump platform is “if you can’t help me – I’ll keep you out of jail and make you rich.” That’s why he’s pardoning scammers who now no longer have to provide restitution to their victims. And if he’s willing to bail out a scammer, he’ll definitely cover for a big-tech CEO. And they have no problem lying, even under oath. If anyone ever asks, it never happened. As we get past labor day, expect your feeds to get a little ‘odd.’ Nothing big, but … wow …. you did not know that Islamic terrorists were among the Minnesota protestors. I wonder what else those people with whistles lied about?

This is truly a special hell. I stay off social media not because I’m immune to manipulation (no one is, regardless of their self-image), but because I am just as susceptible as the next person. I had the misfortune to hop on today and was reminded how addictive scrolling the feed can be. Especially when people react to a comment or re-post. But millions of voters hook themselves to it, willingly reshaping their minds to big tech’s content.

[Note] I originally used the phrase “Red Wave”, when I meant “Blue Wave.”

I Am Exhausted

Maybe it’s the string of cold weather we’ve been “enjoying,” although I don’t mind it. But everything feels exhausting. On the markets side, it feels like we’re one or two events away from something breaking. It could be that the expected revenue from AI for hyper-scalers comes in well below the 1.1 trillion, or 650 billion, or whatever number is currently bandied about. It’s exhausting that no one else sees that as unsustainable and ridiculous. It’s exhausting to see grown people who should be grounded in reality tout the benefits of burning mountains of wealth to build something that isn’t working, but if it did, could lead to existential threats and mass unemployment. But if we accept the fantasy it does work, they become very rich. It’s exhausting to hear we “don’t have the money” for problems such as affordable health care. It’s exhausting to watch someone take seriously the idea that humanoid robots will be a many trillions of dollar industry. It’s exhausting to watch the great big ball of money slosh around, slowly grind away the wealth of retail investors. It’s exhausting to see those investors fail to see the difference between investment and gambling.

On the technology side it’s exhausting to talk about AI and the marginal improvements in each new model. It’s exhausting to see the same lazy, uneducated arguments that it will replace workers, made by people who have little to no idea what those workers do. It’s exhausting to see tech leaders who may be seeing the limits of AI suddenly start to re-hash other technologies to spark a new bubble. It’s exhausting to see formerly reliable products and services suddenly break in strange ways and wonder if someone had vibe-coded that feature. It’s exhausting to spend good money on products that can only be discarded if anything breaks. It’s exhausting to go on the web and realize it’s become more of a data harvesting, surveillance, addiction, and manipulation tool rather than an information sharing tool. It’s exhausting to look at the web, where anyone could create anything they wanted, reduced to four or five destinations for decent people and truly awful places for the rest. It’s exhausting to hear people twist speech to avoid “demonetizing” their content with perfectly normal words, while truly vile people are allowed to spew their hate with impunity.

It’s exhausting to deal with mandates to return to the office, when the office is a room with six-foot wide desks and equally glum co-workers trying to focus by sandwiching their head in noise canceling head-phones, while their dual-monitors serve as blinders to the surrounding motion. It’s exhausting to constantly get prodded with notifications and alerts to pay attention to something that wasn’t important. It’s exhausting to wonder if the next re-org will require me to report to an office thousands of miles away, while the company offers no relocation assistance. It’s exhausting to think about what I’ll do when the bubble bursts and I will lose a job I like. It’s exhausting to look at the options for lunch and realize it’s all various types of slop food where you take a bowl of whatever back to your office break area. It’s exhausting to pass by the well equipped home office you have to leave commute to work, realizing that you are still expected to return to that home office when not at the actual office. It’s exhausting to have your managers start tracking metrics for AI usage, even when you don’t feel like it makes you any more productive.

It’s exhausting to see half the country is happy to be on the way to a racist, authoritarian hell-hole, where the corrupt leader, his corrupt family, and corrupt patrons grossly enrich themselves. It’s exhausting to hear people talk about the constitution that have never read it. It’s exhausting to listen to a court eviscerate the independence of independent agencies, by try to find a carve out for the Federal Reserve (because money must be protected). It’s exhausting to watch law enforcement turned into paramilitaries that intentionally start confrontations, eagerly letting loose tear gas and flash-bang grenades, while arresting people with the intent to subjugate rather than protect. It’s exhausting to see those paramilitaries execute their fellow citizens in the street. It’s exhausting to see Federal law enforcement cover it up and our leaders lie when there’s plenty of contradictory video. It’s exhausting to watch LAPD’s finest, who have judgement after judgement against them from civil rights and abuse suits, unleash a rubber bullet into a woman’s abdomen and laugh. It’s exhausting to see the press and the media white-wash the issue or see it in the leas of traditional politics. It’s exhausting to realize that so many people want a racist ethnic cleansing of the country.

It’s exhausting to watch people abandon reality and honesty, passing around memes and clips that are known to be lies. It’s exhausting to watch people we’ve elevated with massive audiences repeat lies. It’s exhausting to watch the “new media” just regurgitate the facts from “legacy media”, eliding anything that doesn’t fit their narrative, and injecting their own lies. It’s exhausting to have a president who parrots racist, AI generated, slop we know to be lies. It’s exhausting to see the flood of these brainless bits of digital garbage wash up on our shore with the intend to poison our minds, so we don’t know what’s true from what’s a lie. It’s exhausting to know medical professionals who voted for this, because they can’t stand “all the laws and rules” from the “federal government”, but who know that the administration’s vaccination advice is a dangerous lie. It’s exhausting because so many of these people have stopped caring about truth.

Five paragraphs on why I sometimes think this can’t be reality. It can’t be the world we live in. That the real world has to be better than this. The real world can’t be this self destructive, greedy, self-serving, and stupid. That obviously none of this is real. But it is real. It is the daily gristle of our lives we are forced to chew and can’t spit out. It tastes bitter and revolting. We are just forced to quietly to chew and chew because every else sits quietly and chews. Our political leaders, who we trust to voice our concerns, tell us that sitting quietly and chewing makes better people because we want the system to work. And there’s plenty of people on the other side who, off the record, behind closed doors, and very discretely tell us that they also think this gruel tastes awful. They wring their hands in consternation about it all the time. Our leaders say they can work with these people and get real things done. So if we site and quietly chew, don’t disrupt too much, and everything will be okay.

But sometimes go stand on the side of the road with signs and some cars honk at our clever, home-made signs. Other cars give us the finger. I’ve tried understanding the person behind that upturned middle finger, but I’m beginning to think the good I try to find isn’t there. That we are dealing with an irreconcilable vision of the country in which we want to live. That it’s not about taxes, the price of eggs, traditional roles, or their religious conscience. It’s about subjugation, humiliation, and a self-centered disregard for others. It’s dirty, it’s filthy, and it’s twisted. The idea there’s no set of shared values with those people is exhausting.

First Time Claims Make Less and Less Sense

The number of first time jobless claims (a weekly statistic measuring the number of folks filing their first claim for unemployment insurance when they become unemployed) has been bouncing around 250,000 for the last year and change.

A related number, the continuing claims, which measures the number of unemployment claimants who are continuing to file for benefits has also been remarkably steady.

While it looks like there was a big jump in May, it was a change from 1,800,00 to about 1,940,000, of about 7-8%. And then it stayed steady. Meanwhile, unemployment has been slowly creeping back up over the last two years.

Meanwhile, we see a definite softening of new jobs created. The change in non-farm employment shows a degree of cooling in the economy.

What would we expect to see, if job creation is slowing, along with an up-tick in the unemployment rate? We’d expect to see more claimants for unemployment insurance. Fewer jobs, more layoffs, and lots of stories about graduates that can’t find jobs (who cannot apply for unemployment insurance), indicate a soft labor market. We see the average weeks of unemployment (how hard it is to find a job once you lose your job), tick up slightly but not decisively, by about 2 weeks, but still within statistical noise.

With today’s CPI coming in a lot softer than expected, this will give the Fed a green light to cut. But as much as we see evidence of a slowing job market, we don’t see more and more people applying for unemployment, what gives? Is this just what a more normal employment market looks like after the go-go job markets of 2021 to 2023? When there were many times more jobs open than there were candidates?

First, we have to remember a few things that may be complicating the first time claims picture. First is that the new graduate cannot claim unemployment. If a new high-school or college graduate cannot find a job, they cannot claim benefits because they haven’t worked for an employer that paid into the insurance pool. If you quit because your commute would be 2 hours (after you moved because even your boss was saying WFH would be the new normal), you are not eligible. If your employer claims it was for cause, you are not eligible. That’s why many employers will try to cite ’cause’ as the termination reason, even though they’re firing dozens or hundreds of people at the same time. Nor are independent contractors. if you were an independent IT contractor at US AID and your contract was terminated, you are not eligible. You basically have to work on a “W-2” basis for an employer that terminates you for non-performance (or criminal) reasons.

Then there are other reasons, such as deciding not to claim benefits, because you can make more money driving for Uber. (Or at least you think you can make more money driving for Uber). If you make more money than your benefit check at a part time job, you can’t claim benefits. Some people won’t claim it out of principle. And some people live in states that felt too many workers were getting cushy at home instead of returning to the workforce and made it harder to claim benefits.

Does an increase in first time claims (or continuing claims) predict a recession? No. It is a trailing indicator. Generally corporate profits fall, along with Wall Street’s expectations of future profits, as the economy slows. At that point corporations realize revenue won’t grow, so they have to cut costs to keep their margins. One quick way is to lay off staff. Often, this is a time for the company to prune their deadwood projects. These are projects they’re putting money into because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but no one seems to be able to kill it now that it’s shown to be a dud. Managers are human, too, and subject to biases like the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy. This is the push that management needed. But sometimes they just reduce head-count to the point of pain, because they can coast on their accumulating inventory until business improves. Only after output falls (a recession begins) does employment really contract.

But it is still striking there’s been so little movement in first time claims. It feels like you could place bets on it being between 220,000 and 240,000 next week and the week after. Do I think it’s being manipulated? No. While it was popular among the right to say Biden’s numbers were all fake and made up, I never thought that claim was based in reality and I don’t think there’s any skulduggery now. Did Trump send a worrying signal by firing statisticians? Yes, but I believe the core of the process is still very much intact. Are the numbers massaged? Yes, sometimes seasonality needs to be taken into account, otherwise the increase or decrease would be overstated and the period to period changes are harder to compare. And if you think that’s an issue, most numbers are also released without seasonal adjustment. So, go look for yourself. Are numbers revised? Yes – because sometimes data doesn’t come in on time. This is especially true of the employment survey, with some employers submitting data weeks after the data was due.

What we may be seeing is a change, or a beginning of a change, in the relevance of this number. Due to a variety of factors, it’s becoming less sensitive to changes in the health of the labor market. If you lose your job, your ability to access smaller benefits may be reduced. And employers may be getting better at incentivizing you to quit and unable to access your benefits. For example, we need you to report to work 3 states away and we won’t help you move. The first time claims may be very slow to move, if at all. Like we are seeing unemployment hit 4.6% but little to no change in the first time claims.

Toxic Masculinity is not Hard

I’ve watched the debate on “toxic masculinity” and people discussing that topic seem to fall on the far sides of a dividing line. On one side you have folks that see any “masculine” behaviors as toxic and on the other side people loath to call any specific behavior as toxic. The former are the well known crowd that is stunned when little boys are given dolls to play with and immediately bend them in half to work as imaginary guns. The latter are a new lot that is bent on alerting us to the collective failure of so many young men to mature. Neither one seems to have a definition of toxic masculinity which seems accurate or particularly descriptive. I think that is by design, although to what end I can not really say.

What they both agree on (and I think is not controversial beyond people who argue just to argue) is that some behaviors are more likely to be exercised by men and others by women. Men can be extremely nurturing and women can be vicious competitors. But, if you pulled a BoG standard man and woman out of a bag, you’d likely find that men are more likely to apply competition where it’s not wanted and women to nurture when it’s not warranted. These are differences of degree more than kind. You’ll find examples of both traits in each subject, but their application and inclination toward those traits will vary along sex lines. Much like a sheep herding dog will unwittingly and inappropriately start herding anything by nipping at the heels, including children, men and women are bred toward some behaviors more than others. It is no more remarkable than the mating dances bred into even the simplest animal.

What is toxic masculinity? It is the application of a gender stereotypical masculine behavior outside the bounds of healthy utility. For example, not asking of directions when you are clearly lost. Or competing with your spouse or children with the same vigor you compete against your great nemesis in business. It’s that simple. When a father comes home and plays basketball with his 11 year old son with the same physicality, aggression, and assertiveness he would use against other men his age, we find that completely inappropriate. If the excuse is to ‘teach a life lesson,’ we have to wonder what that lesson might be? As his son limps into the house, whimpering, abrased, and defeated, with his father crowing, few would see that as healthy. There is only great risk in the child learning to bully who they can.

That display of unhinged aggression and competition is different from winning against your child because you are taller, stronger, and faster, but doing so with moderation. Tuning back the unbridled aggression to teach both a sense of competition and how to play a good, clean game of basketball, is a nurturing, fatherly act. To understand you play the best game you can, even if you think you might lose, and to acquit yourself well, both in victory and defeat, is part of raising a good man. And to let your boy win when he plays well to enjoy the feeling, cultivating the behavior you expect when he does take the day. It also teaches him there are more important things than winning this round, like teaching and nurturing the good in people over a lifetime. It is possible to have both a competitive spirit and a nurturing soul.

It is also worth learning that more controversial tendencies have their place and time. Aggression, applied poorly, benefits no one. But sometimes aggression is needed. In the extreme example, the Ukrainians are aggressively and forcefully resisting decimation by Russia. Like competitiveness, aggression does not need to be taught to boys, their normal hormones will provide it. But it’s correct and proscribed uses need to be taught. Be aggressive when playing sports, but not boundlessly aggressive outside the rules of the game. Be aggressive when trying to win against a business competitor, but within the confines of the law.

One crowd will demonize any form of aggression as a negative trait a pathological “society” instills in males. (“Society” does no such thing and likely provides bounds for their aggression). The other side will see completely inappropriate aggression as something we should be afraid to censure, lest the lads continue smoking cannabis while playing Call of Duty in their basements. It is their choice to do so. At the end of the day, the best lesson we can teach is they are responsible for their choices. We need to find that middle ground where boys are raised to be good men. Because the other options, of either over-restraining or under-restraining their impulses will not be toxic – they will be radioactive. It will poison not only the current generation but deform the subsequent ones.