Columnists Megan McArdle, Jim Geraghty and Shadi Hamid discuss “what to make of political violence today” at the Washington Post. I thought that some of their observations were worth noting. Here’s Megan’s preamble:

Last week’s fatal shooting of conservative media personality Charlie Kirk has sparked conversations about the escalation of partisan disagreement into political violence. The podcaster’s slaying follows a trend of targeted attacks on political figures in recent years, including the killing of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump.

What can be done, if anything, to curb political violence? I’m joined by my colleagues Jim Geraghty and Shadi Hamid to discuss.

From Megan and Jim Geraghty:

Megan: That’s a good point, Jim. Every time one of these events happens, the political incentive is to mine it for partisan advantage by suggesting that this is somehow emblematic of the other half of the country rather than the act of a violent fringe. We’ve seen that on the left, which often blames right-wing extremism or hateful rhetoric for the actions of deranged loners — and that’s what the White House is doing too, with Trumpian fervor.

Jim: Yup. Just about every Democratic lawmaker has said the right things after the assassination. Plenty of left-of-center folks I know were shocked and horrified. And yet at the same time, we’ve seen leftists posting the equivalent of touchdown dances celebrating Kirk’s death.

That’s why I think that, rather than making anodyne general public pronouncements, it is incumbent on Democratic leaders to address their supporters specifically and for Republican leaders to address their. Generalized statements against violence will always be interpreted as only applying to the other guy.

I think this exchange among Shadi, Jim, and Megan is worth repeating:

Shadi: My worry is that because Democrats are so feckless as an opposition party, more disgruntled young men (and women) will give up on the political process. When people give up on legitimate politics, they’re more likely to resort to extralegal means to express their grievances.

Jim: That’s right. Ten or 11 consecutive “the most important election of our lifetime”s has convinced some people that the other side of the aisle wants to bring about the apocalypse.

Megan: It’s also convinced a lot of people they need to bring about a preemptive apocalypse for the other side — it’s much more thrilling to imagine you’re in the French Resistance or standing with the Minutemen at Concord. Are we LARPing our way into a civil war?

I also think that Jim’s mistaken here:

Jim: I’m hoping those in the enraged minority have people who care about them. Concerned friends or family who are willing to listen but say: “Dude, this is crazy talk. You’re not making the world a better place by shooting somebody because you hate what they believe in.”

Maybe things are different on the East Coast but here in Chicago Lauri Dann’s parents stopped short of trying to get involuntary commitment for her despite their daughter’s violent tendencies and Robert Crimo’s parents actually assisted him in obtaining a firearm. In other words the “people who care about them” can be part of the problem.

The film actor, producer, director, and promoter of “indie” films Robert Redford has died. Variety’s obit by Steve Chagollan is pretty good:

Robert Redford, the leading man with the golden-boy looks who won an Oscar for directing “Ordinary People” and later became a godfather for independent film as founder of the Sundance Film Institute, died Tuesday in Utah. He was 89.

Cindi Berger, chief executive of the publicity firm Rogers & Cowan PMK, confirmed the news to Variety.

“Robert Redford passed away on September 16, 2025, at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” Berger said in a statement. “He will be missed greatly. The family requests privacy.”

After a litany of his film credits Mr. Chagollan gets to the meat of the obit:

In addition to Redford’s status as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men through much of the ’70s and ’80s, the Sundance Film Institute and the festival that bears its name may be considered an equally significant legacy.

Redford belied expectations when he founded the organization in the mountains of Utah in 1981, still flush from winning the Oscar for directing “Ordinary People” (1980). The effort effectively put his own career on hold for at least three years.

What started out as a modest filmmakers lab became synonymous with the independent film revolution, while its namesake festival would morph into the most important film event in the U.S. for both burgeoning filmmakers and acquisition execs.

In a different piece in Variety Brent Lang is spot on:

“He was an artist who was trapped in this incredibly handsome body,” says Phil Alden Robinson, who directed Redford in 1992’s “Sneakers.” “It can be hard to be taken seriously when you’re that good-looking.”

Redford, who died Sept. 16 at the age of 89, didn’t allow himself to be defined by Hollywood. Instead, he subverted his squeaky-clean persona in films like “The Candidate,” “Downhill Racer” and “All the President’s Men,” which looked critically at the media, celebrity and politics. In the 1970s, when Redford was at his most bankable, he wasn’t interested in making populist crowd-pleasers. Instead, he wanted to hold a mirror up to America at a time when its institutions were crumbling.

and

Yet Redford hoped his greatest legacy wouldn’t be the movies he starred in or directed, but the film festival he established in the mountains of Utah. Sundance, which Redford founded in 1978, was intended to serve as a showcase for emerging artists.

“He helped so many new voices get their big break,” says John Sloss, the veteran agent and manager. “And it wasn’t just auteurs. Sundance was the launching pad for lots of Marvel and tentpole film directors.”

The list of filmmakers who had their first brush with success at Sundance is a who’s who of the most influential directors of the past five decades. From Ava DuVernay (“Middle of Nowhere”) to Steven Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies, and Videotape”), Quentin Tarantino (“Reservoir Dogs”) to Ryan Coogler (“Fruitvale Station”), so many distinguished careers trace their origins to Park City.

If there’s any actor of the second half of the 20th century for whom the monicker “matinee idol” would be appropriate, it would be Robert Redford. He was not really an actor’s actor. I suspect that in the years to come he will be most remembered for promoting new, fresh talent through the Sundance festival. And I think he would be proud of that.

Yesterday I was doing a little research into the detention of 475 South Korean nationals working at a Hyundai battery plant being built in Georgia a couple of weeks ago. I was a bit shocked to learn that even two weeks later it’s basically a “he said, she said”. Hyundai says the workers were specialized workers it needed to build the plant; the federal government (and union leaders) say the workers included bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, and pipefitters. I wasn’t able to find a breakdown of how many of the detained workers were doing what. The best I could find was that “a majority” of the workers were engineers and specialized workers with skills unavailable in the United States. That could mean anything from 238 of them to 474 of them. It could also mean that the reporters didn’t know but that’s what Hyundai spokespeople told them.

Just for context foreign companies have been abusing the U. S. visa system for 50 years (at least). I know this first hand. Fifty years ago I worked for a German company which routinely sent Germans here to work on L-1 visas who did things that people on L-1 visas shouldn’t be doing. I doubt that’s changed since then. Just a few years ago I worked for a (basically) South Asian outsourcing company that routinely used people on student, tourist, etc. visas in addition to people on H-1B visas that should never have been on H-1B visas. I worked for them for seven years. That company never gave a single individual a raise during that entire period.

My basic question is what has happened to reporting? There doesn’t appear to be much. Mostly rewriting of press releases.

Just today in the daily briefing I get from Time there was a headline “Colombia-U.S. Relations Fray Over Drug War” with the following lede:

Relations between the U.S. and Colombia—longtime security allies—have frayed after Trump said the Latin American country has failed to crack down on cocaine production.

Now I’m not a Trump fan; I think he’s a clumsy international negotiator at best. But there is more than one way to report a story. One way is the way above, that Trump is complaining that Colombia has not “cracked down” on cocaine production. Here’s another way. Based on UNODC data Colombia’s cocaine production has been growing rapidly over the last ten years:

If the U. S. is the primary customer for that coke, it looks like something worth complaining about to me.

Again, I don’t know what the truth of the matter is. I just recognize that the reporting is lacking.

This article at Futurism by Joe Wilkins caught my eye. Mr. Wilkins observes:

With so many wild predictions flying around about the future AI, it’s important to occasionally take a step back and check in on what came true — and what hasn’t come to pass.

Exactly six months ago, Dario Amodei, the CEO of massive AI company Anthropic, claimed that in half a year, AI would be “writing 90 percent of code.” And that was the worst-case scenario; in just three months, he predicted, we could hit a place where “essentially all” code is written by AI.

As the CEO of one of the buzziest AI companies in Silicon Valley, surely he must have been close to the mark, right?

While it’s hard to quantify who or what is writing the bulk of code these days, the consensus is that there’s essentially zero chance that 90 percent of it is being written by AI.

Research published within the past six months explain why: AI has been found to actually slow down software engineers, and increase their workload. Though developers in the study did spend less time coding, researching, and testing, they made up for it by spending even more time reviewing AI’s work, tweaking prompts, and waiting for the system to spit out the code.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wilkins does not actually answer the question that forms the title of this post: why was Dario Amodei wrong? Will none of his predictions come to pass?

I’ve been experimenting with large language model artificial intelligence (LLM AI) models for two years now. Based on my limited experience there are several inherent problems with their use.

The first is that applications created using AI aren’t designed. They’re just implemented. When features are added or bugs identified and reported, the applications are re-implemented with run-on effects. I’m seeing this in the software updates on my smartphone and tablet. They are being “improved” rapidly to the point of becoming unusable.

While that’s okay for simple tools only used occasionally, it can be disastrous for mission-critical applications or those that have financial aspects.

The second is that human beings just aren’t very good at explaining what they want and/or need. They leave things out. They include extraneous things. They may not recognize the run-on effects of a decision. It takes considerable skill and experience to explain things properly and completely and there are fewer people who can do those things than can grind out code.

The third is that there has been what might called “title inflation”. Seniors aren’t seniors any more. Forty years ago a senior developer had eight years or more of experience. Now five years is considered senior. It isn’t but that’s what businesses are saying these days. Also, as a past colleague of mine once observed, senior here in the U. S. and senior in another country are two different things.

Another is that you can’t rely on AI to test your applications for you. LLM AI models don’t understand anything. They just do what they’ve been trained to do (best case). The implication of that is that only human beings can determine whether something is suitable to task which in turn suggests that human beings need to do the testing. Good testing is harder than coding.

Sadly, none of this makes any difference. All that matters is that a senior developer plus 3 junior developers costs more than a junior prompt writer and a subscription to several AI models Note: there are no senior AI prompt writers because they haven’t been around long enough and such creatures may never exist because of the rapid pace at which they evolve. That’s all that will show up in the quarterly report and whatever President Trump says short term thinking is here to stay. Goosing stock value at the expense of long term risks to the enterprise is too easy a decision to make for modern managers.

This is another observation I’ve wanted to make for some time. It is my practice to avoid expressing opinions about state and local politics except in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois. However, since the apparently impending election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York does touch tangentially on me, I wanted to make one comment.

I honestly don’t care who New Yorkers elect as their mayor. They are entitled to elect whomever they chose. I think it is worthwhile to recall that in 1975 New York City became the only city that the federal government has ever bailed out of its financial problems by extending the city a multi-billion dollar loan.

Mr. Mamdani has proposed a number of policies, e.g. extended rent control, increasing the minimum wage to $30 per hour, government-run grocery stores, free bus service, etc., that are likely to have adverse economic and fiscal effects. New Yorkers are entitled to support such policies if they care to.

However, the federal government should absolutely, positively not bail New York City out of self-inflicted economic and fiscal problems. If the city goes bankrupt, it goes bankrupt. Once is enough.

BTW, I think the same about Chicago. The city is digging a fiscal hole for itself. It should stop digging. I have no idea what Brandon Johnson’s supporters expected when they elected him mayor. Throughout his term he has done pretty much what I expected him to do. IMO he marks the second consecutive incompetent mayor of Chicago.

The federal government shouldn’t bail Chicago out, either.

There are articles in both the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times about the individual who was shot and killed by ICE officers after he struck and injured another ICE officer as he tried to evade arrest. Leah Hope reports at ABC 7 Chicago.

There have since been demonstrations in Franklin Park “demanding justice”.

My question is what is justice in this case?

My understanding is that vehicular assault against a federal law enforcement officer who is in the course of his duty while trying to evade arrest is a severely aggravated felony.

I don’t do this very often but I’m going to quote a lengthy chunk of Gerard Baker’s most recent Wall Street Journal column:

It is almost quaint the way some try to play by old rules. Traditional news organizations (like this one) carefully edited the video so that it faded to black before the fatal moment. It was a decent but wholly obsolescent act of restraint in an age of moral destitution and rancid self-indulgence. It was a little like watching someone trying to enforce those old movie-studio rules about no nudity while millions of viewers peer into their smartphones to access the most explicit sexual content the human imagination has ever conjured.

Then of course there are the helpfully tendentious political interpretations of Kirk’s murder, neatly unfolded for us in the universe of X and its imitators. The stomach-churning celebrations from one side by human degenerates insisting he somehow deserved it. The subtler, nuanced “commentary” that carefully clears its throat with a ritual condemnation of violence but quickly expatiates at length on Kirk’s allegedly wicked contributions to political debate.

From the other side, the eager attribution of this and other acts of political violence to a vast dark army of forces committed to the erasure of all those who oppose their ideology. The unarticulated but clearly identified “they” who are out to kill “you” or “us.”

We could have a proper debate about the extent to which there has been a dangerous escalation of rhetoric—and sporadic acts of violence—against those of us who seek to roll back the progressive tide. Or we could ascribe all murders like that of Kirk to the amorphous nearly-half-the-country conspiracy of Democrats, mainstream media, left-wing academics and transgender militants roaming the country picking off their critics.

What hurts especially hard in the wake of such a terrible event is the grifting quality to all this: the rapacious, unending hunt for clicks and likes and donations and descriptions kicks into a frenzy as a young man lies dying.

This reflects a paradox of our newly democratized digital media. The overwhelming majority of Americans are decent people, appalled by violence, eager to respond with a constructive determination to do what we can to root it out. But the discourse is led by a small minority of opportunistic ghouls (not to mention, I suspect, a significant number of foreign enemies, successfully promoting bitter division among Americans).

And we can be sure of the recycling effect of all this on the climate of political violence itself—the way this hate and gore and menace is recycled in the minds of the young men who then go out motivated to commit acts of murder.

A historian will object that alarms about the contemporary media landscape are ahistorical. The modern web is only the latest forum in which the appetite for the worst of humanity has played out. The Romans had their gladiatorial combats in packed arenas; the medieval British their public disemboweling and executions. There was no social media to blame for what went on in the minds of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

True. But it isn’t much of a consolation. The current public American temper is getting more and more like that of the French Revolutionary terror of the 1790s—a civilization at war with itself ever more willing to justify internal violence. If we don’t change course soon, I fear we will become a nation of latter-day tricoteuses, spellbound by the roll of the tumbrils and the swoosh of the guillotine.

Inspired by that I want to make some observations and suggest some action items.

Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. Full stop. It doesn’t make any difference what he said, what he believed, whether it was hateful, or whether it hurt your (or somebody else’s) feelings. Words are not violence. Beliefs are not violence. Violence is violence.

The Democrats did not kill Charlie Kirk. Neither did “the left”. An individual did. They’re fuzzy right now but we’ll gain some better notion of his motives and state of mind in due course. Our political parties are not at war with each other.

Calling Republicans “Nazis” or “fascists” has been a staple among fringe elements loosely supportive of the Democrats for almost 70 years. Before Trump Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush were all called “Nazis” or compared with Hitler by somebody at one time or another. That is a practice not becoming of public figures. That includes entertainers, media figures, and politicians. It needs to stop.

Republicans calling Democrats “communists” or Trump calling his political opponents “scum” are not equivalents to that. Here’s how we treated Nazis:

Dresden, Teilansicht des zerstörten Stadtzentrums über die Elbe nach der Neustadt. In der Bildmitte der Neumarkt und die Ruine der Frauenkirche.

Here’s how we treated communists:

and

We went to war against the Soviets once, a century ago, and that was a half-hearted expeditionary force. We never went to war directly against Mao’s China. The closest was in Korea and we didn’t bomb either Beijing or Moscow.

Calling someone a “Nazi” or “fascist” is an urgent call to action, including violent action. Calling someone a “communist” or “scum” is not.

Democratic leaders need to address their supporters, telling them we are not at war.

Republican leaders need to address their supporters, telling them we are not at war.

These statements need to come from the leaders to their own supporters, not generally as “we all”. It needs to be more specific than that.

I just figured out something that would be fun to build. An application that used publicly available satellite photography to analyze the amount of vacant space in Chicago and report it on a daily basis.

I figure it would take me a couple of days to build. Before I do that I would need to check if somebody’s already done it.

I had originally intended for this post to be more detailed but I’ll just limit myself to a few basic observations.

During the Biden Administration the U. S. population increased by between 5.5 and 7 million people. That includes the “natural increase” of about 1.5 million + people admitted to the U. S. with legal visas + people seeking asylum + people apprehended at the border and released into the country. During the same period the number of housing units increased by about 4 million. Most of those statistics are from the Census Bureau, HUD, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Under the circumstances all else equal you would expect the price of housing to increase.

Unfortunately, all else was not equal and the price of housing increased a lot, by most accounts between 25% and 30% over that period. A number of factors could explain that including inflation, increased taxes, pent up demand (following the COVID lockdowns), and a tendency by builders to build larger homes. We can see that right in my neighborhood. A small, nondescript house a block from here was upgraded to a large, ugly sore thumb of a McMansion. The house that the developers bought for $500,000 is now being sold at an asking price of $1.25 million. We’ll see how long it takes to sell. In this neighborhood the time between initial listing and sale tends to be extremely small, occasionally just hours (like the house I’m sitting in).

Clearly, there is a mismatch in public policy. Either the population needs to increase more slowly or more houses need to be built more quickly. And those new housing units need to be places that people can afford to live in.

I’ve already expressed my preference: I think we need to limit immigration to those with skills plus a small number of asylum seekers (using the legal definition of “asylum” from the Immigration and Naturalization Act). And those admitted should not merely be replacing workers already in the country at a lower cost as has too frequently been the case over the last 30 years.

The irony, of course, is that the mismatch is greatest in places that have designated themselves as “sanctuary cities”.