Linkage

In calls with more than 200 organizations Gownder said researchers found that some of last year’s large-scale job cuts were belt-tightening decisions, not the result of shifting work to AI.

“So then that's not losing a job to AI. That is a financial decision masquerading as an AI job loss. They're just saying: ‘Well, we're hoping we'll fill it with AI at some point.’ So that is a very different proposition than AI is actively stealing all these jobs.”

There is a real phenomenon of a frozen white collar job market in which corporations are not hiring for open roles as a hedge to see if jobs can be duplicated with AI, he said.

“But let's face it, when you have work to do, it's got to get done at some point,” Gownder said. “If the AI doesn't work out, they're either going to have to hire or they're going to have to find some other solution.”

Gownder said historically, the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs in the USA’s “rust belt” was driven by globalization not robotics, and he sees a similar scenario playing out now with AI.

“Outsourcing is a very popular one,” he said. “They’re firing people because of AI, and then three weeks later they hire a team in India because the labour is so much cheaper.”

Too often, mainstream journalists treated Project 2025 as a claim to be adjudicated rather than a document to be analyzed. They asked whether it was “Trump’s plan” instead of examining how likely its proposals were to be implemented by a Trump administration staffed with its authors.

CNN published a “fact check” pushing back on claims from Harris’ campaign, stating in September 2024 that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative,” even while acknowledging Trump’s extensive ties to it. USA Today went further, rating a statement that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan” as “false” on the grounds that the project belonged to the Heritage Foundation, not Trump. After Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 during their only debate, the newspaper published yet another piece insisting, “That’s still not right.” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler emphasized in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document,” as if the absence of a campaign logo somehow negated the document’s authorship, intent or utility. On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Norah O’Donnell cut Harris off during an interview to remind viewers that Trump had “disavowed Project 2025.”

Now, over a year later, the administration’s systematic assault on the press reads like a direct transcription of Project 2025’s media section.

A new Justice Department memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi instructs the FBI to create a “cash reward system” to incentivize providing information against domestic terrorists. However, it also makes it clear that the targets of such domestic terrorist investigations will be “Antifa-aligned extremists,” including those promoting “radical gender ideology.”

“The FBI shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organizations,” the memo reads. The memo, dated December 5, was leaked.

Bondi’s memo cites multiple laws that might be used to target domestic terrorism, but also lays out a clear vision for the priorities of the FBI in targeting suspected terrorists. Primary examples given are not the mass shootings and white supremacist actions that have plagued the nation; rather, the document names the “doxing of law enforcement” or the “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement.”

While it raises the specter of extreme viewpoints, they are not the ones that previous studies have linked most domestic terrorism to. Bondi’s memo suggests that the perpetrators are “certain Antifa-aligned extremists” and that their “animating principle is adherence to the types of extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.”

A long but informative read:

According to the scholar Naomi Alizah Cohen, modern antisemitism and transmisogyny overlap in profound ways. It is no coincidence, Cohen suggests, that TERFs are so frequently to be found in the vicinity of podcasts touting Jewish “transhumanism” conspiracies. For National Socialists, she writes, the figure of the trans woman represented “the Jew’s most abhorrent creation.” Superficially, of course, all things Semitic were aligned within Nazism with Weimar-era Berlin’s demimonde of mollies, dolls, feminine faggotry, transsexuality, and transvestism.

But transfeminine people, specifically, were the figures that German fascism regarded as Jew-like because they are formed against nature — unholy mutants, like Frankenstein’s monster — and Cohen argues that the foundations of transmisogyny and antisemitism were constructed together in this era: On the one hand, there is the “natural” body of the organic, autochthonous Aryan (good), and on the other, there is the “artificial” specter of the wandering, dissimulating “alien” (bad). Trans women and Jews alike, here, belong to the domain of trickery, usury, dysgenics, placelessness, amorphousness, degeneracy, and the demonic. Aryans and cissexuals, conversely, belong to the domain of truth, earth, primal purpose, clean outlines, and palpable borders. 

Excellent summary in the wake of the UK Supreme Court interpretation of the Equality Act:

If you have strong feelings about what a woman is, that’s fine – whatever they are, this judgement isn’t asking you to change them. The court has stressed that it is not its role “to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex.” Instead, its job was to try to figure out what politicians and the lawyers they worked with meant by the term when they drew up the Equality Act (2010).

[…]

Part of the difficulty with this area of law is that when the Equality Act was written, there was very little public awareness of trans people, and that ignorance extended to the people working on the bill. Although cases of trans men getting pregnant already existed, they dismissed these as anomalous and unlikely to become relevant. Although LGBT groups such as the Equality Network advised them of the existence of non-binary people, they felt that this was a tiny minority not worth worrying about. They were similarly quick to ignore concerns raised by intersex people, and they adopted a binary definition of sex. This would inevitably lead to difficulties as public attitudes and behaviours changed, and as gaps between the law and lived reality emerged.

In the judgement released today, the judges defined ‘biological sex’ as “the sex of a person at birth.” This is, in fact, far from a watertight definition, but, helpfully, they also referenced For Women Scotland’s rather clearer “biological sex as recorded on their birth certificate.” The judges, however, are experts in law, not in medicine or biology, and they did not take evidence from anyone in that category. They therefore make statements such as “as a matter of biology, only biological women can become pregnant,” which might seem reasonable to the average person but which overlook the fact that intersex people sometimes find themselves with inaccurate birth certificates.

Paywalled, unfortunately. Overview from the Guardian here.

Planning and transportation policies aim to promote wellbeing and people’s quality of life. One policy implication of our study that stems from the negative association between high levels of car dependence and life satisfaction involves promoting multimodality. One of our measures of objective car dependence (i.e., the share of car trips out of out-of-home trips) captures to some extent multimodality. The results indicate that using a car for more than 50 % of the time in a typical week, which indicates low levels of multimodality, is associated with a decrease in life satisfaction. Thus, planners and policymakers should continue to implement diverse transportation systems that integrate
alternative modes of travel such as biking, transit, ride-sharing, and micro-mobilities. Our results do not necessarily warrant the conclusion that there is a need for a complete shift away from car use; cars undoubtedly offer numerous benefits, especially given the characteristics of the U.S. transportation infrastructure and travel behaviors of American adults. Instead, our research implies the importance of travel mode diversity, which would facilitate mobility based on needs and preferences therefore reducing car dependence and mitigating its potential negative effects on life satisfaction.

Land use changes are also key strategies that would help reduce car dependence and its negative externalities on wellbeing. While many travel by car because of their positive attitudes toward this mode of transportation, not all Americans drive because of a true choice or personal preference. Some are car-dependent due to land use patterns that favor car-based mobility, which may have negative implications on life satisfaction. Policies that may address this issue include compact development patterns, transit-oriented developments, car-free neighborhoods, and mixed-used urban environments.

This:

Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised. In some cases, Trump’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism.

The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.

The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.

An email was mistakenly sent to a junior doctor who allegedly spoke up about being rostered on for 10 night shifts in a row, a practice which has been deemed unsafe for staff and their patients.

The message from a manager stated, “I wonder if any of them realise that they are a doctor and that this is what happens.

“Oh, that’s right… I forgot.

“Life style before career.

“God help us in the future.

“We are going to have a workforce of clinical marshmellows.”

Doctors Union President Dr Nicholas Spooner said the email was not an isolated incident at one hospital.

“It is a symptom of the broader crisis within our public hospitals that is playing out across NSW,” he said.

“Hospitals are severely understaffed and can’t meet patient demand. We have a toxic workplace culture that demands doctors risk their own health and safety to fill rosters.

Home ownership is falling fast among poorer Australians who are approaching retirement. Between 1981 and 2021, home ownership rates among the poorest 40 per cent of 45-54 year-olds fell from 68 per cent to just 54 per cent.

Most older working Australians who rent do not have sufficient savings to keep paying rent in retirement. The poorest 40 per cent of renting households aged 55-64 have less than $40,000 in net financial wealth.

Commonwealth Rent Assistance, which supplements the Age Pension for poorer retirees who rent, is far too low.

The government has lifted the maximum rate of Rent Assistance by 27 per cent – over and above inflation – in the past two budgets. But even after these increases, a single retiree who relies solely on income support can afford to rent just 4 per cent of one-bedroom homes in Sydney, 13 per cent in Brisbane, and 14 per cent in Melbourne.

And the rents paid by people who get Rent Assistance have increased nearly 1.5 times faster than the maximum rate of the payment since 2001.

Sounds familiar, in practical effect at least.

Most Vancouver renters were long ago priced out of the detached home market. Then they were priced out of the condo market. And now, the city’s zoning laws mandate that most new rental housing gets built in undesirable locations, unfairly exposing apartment-dwellers to the increased health risks that come from living on busy, arterial roads.

One of the legitimate purposes of zoning is to separate incompatible uses: to keep noxious factories and their emissions as far away from people’s homes and lungs as possible, for example. But zoning that bans apartments anywhere except busy streets does the opposite: it boosts the number of people exposed to health risks. On top of that, because renters typically have lower-incomes than owners, those increased risks fall disproportionately on those with less.

There’s a deeper political dynamic here, one that former Vancouver City Councilor Gordon Price has called The Grand Bargain:

From Expo 86 to the 2010 Olympics [Vancouver] has accommodated growth pressures on a small fraction of the city’s land, while avoiding the political unpleasantness of significant rezonings in built-out neighbourhoods, whether on the West Side, the East Side or even the West End.

Under this Grand Bargain, new housing is concentrated on busy streets, or on old industrial sites, while little to no change is permitted in neighborhoods of detached homes