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”.

As of this writing a suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk has been apprehended and, indeed, it appears that his motivation was political. To the best of my ability to determine that suspect does not have a criminal history or a history of mental illness.

In reaction to Mr. Kirk’s murder the editors of the Washington Post declaim:

Too often, partisans appear eager to blame their opponents after any heinous attack — rather than straightforwardly condemning it. Studies suggest that strong public denunciations of violence from elected leaders help strengthen norms against it.

The overwhelming majority of prominent Democrats forcefully and promptly condemned the killing of Kirk, including New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who hosted Kirk on his podcast six months ago. Former president Barack Obama said that “this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.” Though Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) decried the violence, he couldn’t help himself from taking a dig at Trump. “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” he said, a disgracefully ill-timed comment.

The more effective strategy for deterring violence is when political leaders criticize their own supporters for engaging in violent conduct or inflammatory speech. That would require a degree of honesty and integrity among our elected officials I don’t believe we have seen in decades.

If you need a case in point for why I disapprove of Illinois’s governor, Gov. Pritzker’s remarks quoted above are sufficient. Note that I am not alone. The majority of Illinoisans feel the same way.

Also in the Washington Post Megan McArdle’s column on political violence:

The people who do these things are not in any sense normal. The United States does not have the kind of organized political violence you see in countries tipping into civil war. What we have, at the moment, is too many people who have been deranged by life circumstances and mental illness and whose fractured brains have been further sickened in the fever swamp of online politics. The Second Amendment makes it easy for those people to get guns that do real-world damage.

If reports are correct, there is no “reasonable gun control” that could have stopped the attack on Kirk; the shooter appears to have used a bolt-action rifle, about the last category of weapon that would be banned. The only policy option is mouth control, attempting to tamp down the cultural forces that point sick people toward this most destructive and dangerous form of violence.

The most obvious place to start is with the legions of keyboard warriors, 101st Chairborne Division, who enjoy spinning online fantasies about hurting their political opponents — or glorifying those who do, like Luigi Mangione. Almost all those people are just talking, trying to signal their ideological purity or make themselves feel tougher and more courageous than their nondescript white-collar job would otherwise suggest. But they are giving ideas to those who want to do more than talk, including the idea that hurting other people can be a shortcut to fame. So stand down and knock it off. You are not a member of the online French Resistance; you are a soft and silly adolescent engaging in performative sociopathy to compensate for your real-world deficits.

Although I think her column is pretty good, there’s one thing that I think she’s missing. For those whose livelihoods depend an ever-expanding federal government any reductions in federal spending are, indeed, existential threats. That’s true, too, of those who imagine such a career for themselves.

Deterring political violence requires either a much higher level of surveillance than we’re willing to impose or pay for or a prevailing moral code that puts such violence beyond the pale. Realistically, there is no such prevailing moral code today. We have outgrown such primitive beliefs.

In the Wall Street Journal poli sci prof Ken Wallsten laments:

Ask Americans who’s to blame for the country’s recent outbreak of political violence and you’ll get mirror-image answers. The left points to the Whitmer kidnapping plot, the bludgeoning of Paul Pelosi, the shooting of Minnesota Democrats Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman, and the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. The right points to the congressional baseball practice shooting, the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, the two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Each side sees the other as uniquely dangerous, and reactions to every new act of politically motivated violence quickly devolve into partisan score keeping.

But the biggest divide in support for political violence isn’t ideological, it’s generational.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings show that more than one-third of students now say “using violence to stop a campus speech” can be acceptable. This should set off alarm bells in the nation’s classrooms, faculty lounges and dean’s offices.

It’s tempting to blame higher education. Over the past decade, campuses have seen a steady stream of disruptive protests targeting invited speakers, all while university leaders equivocate about the importance of political tolerance. At the same time, students are steeped in orientation materials, DEI trainings, lectures and syllabi that recast speech as violence and valorize resistance in the name of social justice. Many critics have concluded that colleges and universities are “teaching intolerance.”

But support for violence aimed at shutting down speech runs much deeper than college campuses. In a national survey I conducted last year, respondents were shown a list of eight politically divisive and potentially offensive statements (e.g., “All whites are racist oppressors,” “America got what it deserved on 9/11,” “January 6th was a peaceful protest”). They were then asked to select the statement they found most offensive from the list. Following this selection, respondents were asked whether “using violence to stop a speech” advocating the idea they selected as most offensive is “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” or “always” acceptable.

The good news is that nearly 80% of Americans reject efforts to silence speech they find personally offensive, with large majorities of Democrats (77%), independents (80%) and Republicans (82%) all saying violence is never acceptable.

The bad news is that the story changes dramatically when looking across generations. While 93% of baby boomers and 86% of Generation X say violence is never acceptable, only 71% of millennials and 58% of Generation Z do. And, there’s no meaningful difference between the attitudes of 18- to 26-year-olds who are and who aren’t enrolled in college.

or, shorter, fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

On right-leaning sites I’ve been seeing a lot of complaints that President Barack Obama’s criticism of political violence is mealy-mouthed because he’s been calling President Trump a fascist. I have identified no such statements from President Obama.

Hillary Clinton is another story. She has frequently compared Trump to Hitler see here, here, and here. Are any further comments necessary to explain why I could not vote for her?

Also note the distinction between the “left” and “right” litanies of offenses with which Dr. Wallsten opens his op-ed. All of the offenses of “the left” listed by Dr. Wallsten are mortal attacks whose perpetrators appear to have been in their right minds and whose motives were explicitly political. The offenses of “the right” are either not mortal, the perpetrator was deranged, or the motives are not clearly political (or some combination).

We clearly have a problem and they both do it. It’s just “it” and “they” that are different. I don’t exculpate either Republicans or Democrats. There is, however, a matter of degree.

A story that I do not believe is receiving sufficient attention is that of the Russian drones over Poland. At the Wall Street Journal Daniel Michaels, Karolina Jeznach, and Thomas Grove report:

WARSAW—Just before midnight on Tuesday, NATO sensors scanning for hostile aircraft spotted drones infiltrating Poland’s eastern border from Ukraine and Belarus.

Fighter pilots from the military alliance were already in the air preparing to lock on and shoot them down.

What unfolded over the course of the night marked a moment in North Atlantic Treaty Organization history: the first time its warplanes engaged Russian aerial weapons over an alliance member’s territory.

“This situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told lawmakers in the hours afterward.

NATO surveillance planes and jet fighters are regularly deployed above Poland when large attacks on Ukraine threaten to spill over into allied territory, but the direct engagement marked a significant escalation in the game of cat-and-mouse between Russian drones entering alliance airspace and NATO aircraft sent to deter them.

It seems to me there’s some urgency in determining what the heck is going on. If Russian drones and/or aircraft straying into Polish airspace is a commonplace, why are the Polish reacting as they are? If that’s not a commonplace, how do the Russians think we should respond? How would they respond in a similar situation?