O brave new world!

I've been buoyed by reading that Gen Zers - although they don't seem to have any problems letting ChatGPT read the books they're assigned and write their papers (affording them more time to build their careers as influencers) - harbor increasingly negative attitudes towards AI.

They're concerned about the environmental impacts - all that thirst for the water supply! all that energy sucking! 

They're concerned about their job prospects. (Even influencers are being replaced by AIs.)

They're angry about the poor quality, the rampant errors, in the content it produces. Maybe even those papers on Moby Dick or The Great War that took 5 minutes for AI to concoct. 

And they're fed up with the techlords who have made their kabillions by destroying any opportunities for Gen Z to make their kabillions. 

Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo! The kids are alright, amirite?

And if we needed another reason to get all sus about AI, there was this recent occurrence:

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said [on July 22] that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media.

AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.

“We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent,” Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a statement. "Turns out it did!” (Source: WCVB)

Delangue said that he doesn't believe that OpenAI wasn't acting with any "malicious intent."

Because how can an AI have "malicious intent" any more than it can have a sense of humor, or empathy, or a conscience, or anything resembling a heart or soul? Not yet, anyway.

Nope, OpenAI just stole some credentials and found a way to get in there and munge around with Hugging Face's servers. Nothing to see here! Move along folks! No malicious intent!

OpenAI said they're learned an important lesson:

"...model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities."

Does no shit, Sherlock apply here? Think I'll head on over and ask the nearest AI.

O brave new world that has such technology in it. 

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Image Source: Wikipedia

Why not just exile them to Australia?

One of the best tourista things to do in Dublin is to pay a visit to Kilmainham Gaol. Although many people know of Kilmainham for the role it played in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, as it was the site of the execution of a number of the Rebellion's leaders the prison was in business from the late 18th century on. 

During the Great Famine (late 1840s) it housed many - including women and children - who were thrown in jail for stealing a loaf of bread to ward off starvation. In an early version of the three strikes rule, those who were repeat petty theft offenders could be shipped off to the penal colonies of Australia.

I thought of those poor Irish folks when I read about the Ford workers who were fired a couple of months back after being accused of stealing snacks by not checking out through the automated scanning system. 

The first to be let go was Kurt Kromm (age 60), a long-term worker hustled into a kangaroo court after the alleged incidence of theft, and accused of swiping a $1.95 package of Grandma's Chocolate Chip Cookies. 

Kromm said two supervisors summoned him to the labor office, where they showed him surveillance footage that appeared to show a failed debit card transaction and informed him Ford intended to fire him for allegedly taking the cookie without paying. (Source: Daily Mail)

Kromm was pretty sure his transaction had gone through when he swiped his debit card the second time. Tough cookies to Mr. Kromm. He was fired - marched out without even being allowed to retrieve his personal belongings.

It took him a while to muster his proof - proof from his bank that he had paid $1.95 at the exact time of the incident: 

The charge appeared as the first transaction on his credit card statement, timestamped at 3.38am.

Kromm said he immediately emailed screenshots of the transaction to Ford labor executives and union officials

After they demanded a notarized bank statement, they then invited him to return to work.

The back and forth - notarized bank statement! for $1.95! - took several weeks, but Kromm was eventually told that he was getting his job back with full backpay, which by this point had amounted to a hefty $33K.

He refused the offer to return to work and, last I read, was considering taking legal action against the company. 

'Most companies would just ask you to pay for the cookie,' [Kromm] said.

'I can't come back to a company that fired me like this without giving me any opportunity to prove I paid,' Kromm told the New York Post. 'It was just ridiculous. I can't.' (Source: A different Daily Mail article)

I hope he does sue. And I hope he wins big. Imagine the mental anguish of losing a job you loved, a job you'd had for a long while, a well-paid job you hoped to retire from.

There are a handful of other workers at several different Ford plants who were fired for similar auto-checkout mishaps. (Some - not sure if all of them - have been reinstated.) One Ford employee said that "workers have long raised concerns about the Aramark-operated kiosks, citing problems including failed transactions, duplicate charges, frozen screens and missing receipts."

While Ford declined to comment on specifics, a spokesperson told the Daily Mail that they are reviewing the 'limited instances where Aramark kiosk issues have been raised.'

'We have invested significantly to upgrade our workplaces, including self-serve kiosks operated by Aramark to provide 24/7 convenience for our employees,' the spokesperson said.

'We are aware there have been some issues raised regarding the kiosk functionality in some limited cases, and we are working with Aramark to review these situations.'

An Aramark spokesperson also told the Daily Mail that they understand the concerns the reports have raised and are working with Ford to review each instance.

'We remain focused on operating with integrity and accountability,' the spokesperson said.

Integrity and accountability? Right. Tell that to the workers fired for no reason. 

But even if they had walked out without paying for a bag of Grandma's cookies, a Milky Way, some Doritos? What of it?

I'm not advocating for petty theft or petty thieves, but should someone lose their job over this? It's not as if these employees were walking out of the plants with tools, or robots. It's not as if the were damaging company property. It's not as if they were caught on camera not doing any work.

At best, even if these fellows had lifted the Grandma's, surely a warning, a reprimand, should have sufficed.

As Kurt Krumm said: 

'Most companies would just ask you to pay for the cookie.' 

Surely, Ford could have come up with a better idea here. 

Firing someone for presuming - with faulty "evidence yet" - that they stole something of negligible value is the same mentality that put a starving kid in Kilmainham Gaol, that shipped a starving father off to Australia for stealing a few loaves of bread during a famine.

Sheesh.

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Image Source: Walmart

The Gambler

From the long list of possible vices, gambling was never going to be my vice of choice. 

Oh, I'm still capable of yelling 'wanna bet?' when some factoid is in question - and I'm 100% sure I'm right. Of course, other than the small smug satisfaction of winning the bet, nothing material ever materializes. But other than buying an occasional lottery ticket, betting has no appeal to me whatsoever.

I've been to casinos, but my limit was always a roll of quarters for the slots - or whatever the electronic equivalent is these days. But once that ten bucks is exhausted, I'm out. In my twenties, I went a couple of times to the track (Narragansett, Suffolk Downs) with friends, where I'd make a couple of two-dollar bets on some nag, based on whether I liked its name or the jockey's colors. 

But gambling to me is one big meh, and I'm about as likely to get sucked into playing one of those betting apps as I am to go skydiving. Is there a probability that's less than zero?

Gambling, however - whether micro wagers on Fan Duel or other sports betting apps, or in the 'when's the next forest fire' prediction makets - has become a huge industry. And what it's doing in the process of growing the businesses, the industry, is getting a whole lot of folks ensnared in gambling. I.e., becoming addicted. And their lives can be pretty much ruined when they go into big, hideous debt. 

One ruinee is a fellow named Terry Thompson, whose road to financial perdition was via FanDuel. 

He began innocently enough, betting on the Philadelphia Eagles to win, but soon found himself "placing microbets, which are in-game wagers on something as small as whether the next play would be a pass or run."

Soon enough, he had wagered $18.5 million on the app. This figure does not, of course, represent total losses. Thompson was making his bets, rewagering his winnings, and (mostly) covering his losses. While FanDuel was taking their cut. 

Meanwhile, having been identified as a Big Spender, Thompson started getting comped. Tickets to Eagles, Flyers, and Sixers games. A couple of fully paid for trips to the Supoer Bowl with perks like invites to swank parties and pregame field access. 

Thompson was assigned a FanDuel relationship manager, Bryttanni Morgan, his VIP host for events like the Super Bowl. She also stayed in contact with Thompson via text, pretending to be his friend - with convos about family, etc. - while always turning the encounter around to urging Thompson to place more bets. 

But the house always wins, and the losses were getting steeper. 

Thompson was losing big time, mortgaging his home. Mortgaging it again. Selling share in a business he ran. He was desperate for the funds to keep fueling his addiction.

Then, one afternoon [in November 2024], he flicked open his phone and received a FanDuel reward that momentarily distracted him from his debts: a personalized video message from Philadelphia Phillies superstar. (Source: Philadelphia Inquirer)

Bryce Harper is a very big deal. He's a future Hall of Famer, playing his way through a $300M plus multi-year contract that nets him about $25M a year. He has a ton of endorsements as well. But there's never enough money, and if you can earn some extra coin by making a bunch of personalized video calls for your fans while you're sitting around with nothing to do but Scrooge McDuck count your money, why not add to the pile o' lucre?

So Harper recorded a video that Morgan sent Thompson that name checks Thompson's son, thanks Thompson for his support (support for Harpef? for FanDuel?), and wishes him a Happy Thanksgiving. 

The video was made through Cameo, the outfit that sells celebrity greetings. You can get an Englebert Humperdinck vid for $345. (Didn't know he was still alive. He's 90, and will be performing in the Boston area in December. Who knew?)

Red Sox great (and Hall of Famer) will give you a shout out for $600. And the price for Kevin O'Leary, Shark Tank ahole supreme, starts at $1,500. 

So Harper wasn't doing directly promotional work for FanDuel. It was via Cameo. But:

Harper mentions that he was reaching out at the request of Thompson’s VIP manager, “your host Bryttanni at FanDuel.” 

So he kinda shoulda known that Thompson was a pretty big gambler to have a FanDuel "host" looking out for him.

You'd think so, no?

Anyway, Thompson ended up owing over a million bucks and spending time in "a psychiatric facility to undergo treatment for gambling addiction."

He's suing FanDuel and Morgan, and I hope he wins big (and that the winnings go into a trust that someone else manages for him). Sure, there's such a thing as free will, but these rotters knowingly prey on those who've become addicted to gambling. 

As for Harper, he's not named in the suit, but he's getting some heat for working with a betting outfit. He's blah-blah-ing about not doing anything directly with FanDuel, but since his message mentions the company, it's not as if he should be "shocked, shocked that gambling is going on in here," as Inspector Renault famously says in Casablanca, while accepting a bag of loot from the croupier at Rick's. 

Oh, FFS. Nothing he did was illegal, but we're sure on the border between ethical and unethical here, no?

I can understand the lure of doing Cameo videos. It's almost free money. And I looked on the site, and a lot of the videos are offered for lesser lights than Bryce Harper. Plenty of them are for "celebrities" I never heard of. And I can understand why fans of celebrities would get a kick out of receiving a "personal" video, even if they know it's hooey.

But especially for the rich folks making these vids, why don't they do it through a charity? Let the Make a Wish Foundation, Saint Jude's Hospital, Habitat for Humanity make some money peddling these videos. They need the money more than Bryce Harper does. 

Sheesh.

Meanwhile, if it's okay wish best of luck to a gambler, best of luck to Terry Thompson. 

As for Bryce Harper, why not pay closer attention to what you're doing in your free time to make even more money than you'll ever possibility need.

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Image Source: Fantasy Costumes

Take a nice big gulp, Zuck.

The other day, I was at my volunteer job - basically, hanging out in the expressive therapy room in a large day shelter - and we started kicking around ideas for the title one of the art works. Our brainstorm was running on empty, when a fellow volunteer - a retired businessman who's roughly my age - decided to ask ChatGPT for a suggestion.

I kiddingly yelled at him - we've worked together for years, and I really like this guy - for using AI, but damned if AI didn't come up with a pretty good name for the picture.

Still, I stand by my opposition to using AI so cavalierly. 

There are times and places for AI, but this - IMHO - isn't one of them. I keep trying to turn AI search off, but every time I think I've figured it out, Google manages to sneak it in. (It's been easier to turn of text predictions and Microsoft's odious CoPilot.)

There are a number of reasons for my (mostly) fear and (mostly) loathing of AI. Promoting teen suicides. Providing wrong information - oops, that mushroom actually is poisonous. Job elimination, often just because some C-suite is enamored of the promise of saving big bucks by getting rid of humans - damn the short term and long term implications. And, of course, the environmental depredation that these AI data centers are causing. 

AI uses too damned much energy. It sucks up water resources, and the wastewater is often a pollutant. The noise pollution is driving folks with the misfortune to live close to one of these monster AI data centers nuts. 

And to what end? So a bunch of amoral tech bros can become even more billionaire-y? So the Family Trump can keep up with their cyber-grifting?

Given the havoc AI data centers are wreaking, I really shouldn't be paying any attention to what happened when a big ol' AI data center was being built in Wyoming. Which is really not causing mega problems.

And why not Wyoming as a great location for data centers, one might well ask? It's a big state with virtually no people. So what if those data centers hum all night? And Wyoming has wind. And natural gas. And oil. So they can probably power up without raising the electric bills of the 600K or so cowpokes who live in the state. (The relative handful of tech bros and Hollywood types who live in the Jackson Hole enclave can afford to pay more, so I won't waste any of my personal, finite supply of energy worrying about them.)

But what captured my eye about this Wyoming data center is that it belongs to Meta, a company that happens to be owned by one of the tech-bro-iest of 'em all, Mark Zuckerberg. 

Meta is building a mega data center in Cheyenne, which is slated to become operative in 2027:

...but its contractor has come under fire after city officials traced wastewater containing a rare bacterium to the project.

By bacteria standards, Cupriavidus gilardii (scary name aside) isn't all that awful, but:

While harmless to most healthy people, it can cause severe pneumonia, bloodstream and lung infections, and, in rare cases, death among people with weakened immune systems.

Officials stressed that it did not contaminate the city's drinking water, but said it disrupted the municipal reclaimed water system and required months of cleanup. (Source: Daily Mail)

And Meta has now permanently lost permission "to discharge wastewater from its fill-and-flush operations into Cheyenne's treatment system, where the water is recycled and later used to irrigate parks and other public spaces."

This is by no means the worst thing that one of these data centers is going to be responsible for. Some towns are experiencing low water pressure; sediment build up the gives residents brown water - just what you want to brush your teeth and wash your hair with, let alone bathe your baby; a whining, skull-piercing noise running 24/7. (Some of the sound levels aren't just annoying, they're harmful to hearing.) Oh, and the home values for those living in a data center neighborhood are declining. Which might be offset if data centers produced high paying jobs for folks living in the hood. But once construction is finished, data centers don't require a lot of employees to keep the centers humming. (And some of their jobs are going to - you guessed it - AI.)

Not that the masters of the universe clamoring for these data centers give a damn. Frankly, my dear, they don't. 

But I sure would like to see Mark Zuckerberg and his pals spend a night in humming distance of one of their data centers. And take a nice big gulp of water from the local taps whille they're at it.

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Image Source: Red Bubble

And now, on the election fraud front...

Anne Manning Martin and Michael Walsh were both hoping to appear on the ballot in the upcoming Massachusetts primary, Martin as a candidate for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, Walsh for the Republican nomination for attorney general. 

Unfortunately, there were a number of signatures on their nominating papers that weren't quite legit. Names appeared to be "written by the same person" and were listed on the papers for both candidates in "identical order." 

Moreover, both candidates also had nomination papers that listed signatures in the order they appeared in a voter database used by the Massachusetts Republican Party to help candidates find supporters. (Source: Boston Globe)

An expert - himself a signature gatherer - determined that:

...the mathematical likelihood of this occurring is zero and that these signatures are likely fraudulent.

Oh. 

When the Globe reached out to some of those whose signatures were falsely included on the nomination papers, one voter - who no longer lives in Massachusetts - said, "'I don't trust anybody anymore. It stinks.'" Another non-signer said "'I didn't write that. I don't even vote.'"

As a result of the chicanery, Manning Martin (who was campaigning as the de facto running mate of Mike Minogue who is odds-on likely to win the Republican gubernatorial primary come electionday on September 1) was tossed off the ballot. Due to a complaint-filing technicality, Walsh is still on.   

I can't really blame the candidates here, other than for procedural carelessness in not having someone on their team take a close look - or any look - at the signatures on the nominations petitions they submitted to appear on the ballot. And not notice that an awful lot of folks had the same signature.

Now, in a state where a lot of us olds went to parochial school back in the day, it is not entirely outside the realm of possibility that a lot of John Hancocks would show up, not with John Hancock's flowing script, but with drilled-in, never-forgotten Palmer Penmanship.

And you can't blame the candidates for hiring a signature gathering outfit to collect names for them. Yes, the magic number of 10,000 signatures can be gotten via grass roots efforts, but that's a big number, especially for a Republican in Massachusetts, where D's out number R's three-to-one. (Independents, which are the majority of Massachusetts voters, can sign nomination papers for candidates in either party. Thank you, Secretary of State Bill Galvin for your very informative web site.)

But some signature gatherer Joe Bronske, who "was paid thousands of dollars by Walsh and Manning Martin’s campaigns to collect signatures on their behalf, according to state records," turned out to be. 

When confronted, Bronske took the Fifth Amendment, as is done.

Bronske, a Republican operative who has served on the Board of (Election) Registrars in his town, of all things, has also been implicated in collecting bogus signatures for Republican secretary of state wannabe Anne Brensley. Many of her signatures were tossed, and she ended up not getting enough to appear on the ballot. She's now running as a write-in candidate.

Bronske's pitch to Brensley's campaign was:

For your campaign’s 10,000-signature requirement, I can:

• Map and target registered voters to ensure every collected signature is eligible and verifiable
• Recruit, train, and coordinate circulators across required districts
• Verify signatures against official voter registration databases
• Conduct internal audits to identify duplicates, errors, or incomplete entries before filing
• Coordinate filing with local election officials and the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth
• Prepare documentation and records to defend against potential challenges by focusing only on certified voters and using a rigorous accuracy-first process, the campaign maximizes valid signatures while avoiding wasted effort or risk of disqualification. (Source: New Bedford Guide)

Which all would have been fine and dandy if Bronske had actually delivered on his proposal, which he apparently did not.

I'm quite sure that it's not easy to collect 10,000 signatures. That's a lot of spending a lot of Saturdays standing outside the Market Basket trying to get harried shoppers to stop and sign papers. People are in a rush. People are suspicious, they're wary of fraud. People don't want to be bothered.

Everytime I'm asked, I sign papers for candidates for office. It should come as no surprise that I'm a registered D, but frankly I'd be mostly okay with signing for an R, if allowed. (Or at least I would have been back in the day when Massachusetts R's were mostly palatable to this D's sensiblities.)

In any case, I feel bad for these candidates who trusted (and paid) Bronske to find the signatures they needed to get on the ballot.

I suspect that he'll be out of the signature-gathering biz. Brensley for one was considering legal action against him. There may be civil penalties for Bronske. And there's been some tiny mention of jail time. 

 What a nasty scammer he turned out to be. We really don't need any more a-holes underminng the integrity of our elections, that's for sure.

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Image Source: AAWU

I truly want this 3D house printing thing to work...

God knows, Cairo, Illinois, isn't the only community in dire need of housing. After all, I live in Boston - one of the most expensive cities in the country to rent or own in - AND I volunteer in a homeless shelter. 

The other day, I spoke with a young woman originally from Alabama who came to Boston because, she told me, there was no help for folks like her - a poor Black woman fleeing an abusive relationship - in Birmingham, Alabama, and she heard she might find some in Boston. She's been her a few weeks, and is living in her car, hoping to find a place to call home. I hope she finds what she's looking for - she's sweet and funny, and incredibly proud of her daughter, a sophomore at an HBCU - but it may not come quickly and easily. We just don't have anywhere near enough affordable housing. 

Neither does Cairo, Illinois, a rundown, poor, largely Black river town on the banks of the Mississippi. (Pronounced KAY-ro, if you're not familiar with it.)

There, two local men decided to take out a loan, invest in a 3D construction printer, and build 30 duplex houses for the city of Cairo - the first new homes built there in 30 years or so.

Sadly, things didn't quite work out. In 2024, work began, and the first duplex was kinda sorta almost done. Then cracks started to appear in the walls. The project skidded to a halt and now "the parts of a massive 3D construction printer sat disassembled on a flatbed trailer, weeds climbing the wheels."

Propublica decided to take a close look at this project gone bad, and found out that it had pretty much had fiasco written all over it from the jump. The fellows who had gotten the project off the ground were way in over their heads, and their are rumors of fraud. 

It wasn't just Propublica that started poking around the situation. The FBI is also investigating. To date, no charges/arrests. So not clear whether this is a case of the road to hell paved with good intentions - those OG guys with the 3D printer idea and others (individuals, organizations, and busineses) that got in on the action along the way - or something more nefarious or a combination of naivete and bad-acting. Not to mention governmental screw ups, of which there is no short supply of. 

The story is long and complicated, and worth a read, if you've got the time for long and complicated. 

But back to 3D printing of houses.

I truly want this concept to work out. I don't know whether it'll be able to do much for the chronic housing needs of Boston and surrounds. One of the problems with housing in older, built-out, and densely populated areas is that there's not a lot of open ground to build on. Thos of us in old-timey cities need to forget about the notion of single-familyl homes (or duplexes) as the ideal and grab that available space and build up. 

"My" shelter - Saint Francis House - has been involved in creating affordable housing for years, and is now in the process of welcoming folks into 100+ spiffy new apartments. Studios, 1BR, 2BR - they're going to some who have been homeless and to others who just need a place to live. There will here will be support services on site to help those making the transition from homeless to homed. And nice communal space I got a tour the other day, and the apartments are terrific. And so much in demand!

But I'm hopeful that where there's room to build, in places like Cairo, 3D will turn out to be a boon for housing. Decent, reliable housing that's cost-effective to build. 

The Cairo project didn't work out, but here's hoping. 

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Image Source: Crafts and Art on You Tube

Shut this startup down!

The last thing in the world I would consider doing is renting my home out as an Airbnb, VRBO, or Home Away. Even if I had a spare place to spare for transient, paying guests, I wouldn't want to be a landlord.

I'm saying this even though I've always enjoyed my short term rentals, which go back to the pre-Airbnb days, when we were finding apartments in Paris and Rome through the classified ads in Harvard Magazine. It just wouldn't be for me.

I don't want anyone nosing around my stuff. Criticizing my taste. Thumbing through my books. Swiping that cute little lemon bowl that cost four bucks at Home Goods. Trying to pry their way into the locked owners closet in an unobvious way. (Of these things, I am guilty of nosing, criticizing, and thumbing, but never of swiping or prying.)

The most interesting things I've come across were in a short term rental on the East Side of NYC. The apartment was owned by an heir to the W.R. Grace fortune. The fortune had petered out over the generations, but this particular scion had inherited a very nice small Degas ballerina painting, which they didn't bother to lock away.

Weirdly, in the same apartment, I went to put my clothes away in the dresser in the bedroom, only to find that the drawers were stuffed with the owner's clothing, or, rather, his wife's. (There was no indication that the dresser was off limits. In every other place I've stayed, there have been drawers that are empty and available.) Anyway, the drawer I opened was stuffed - and I do mean stuffed - with every color imaginable of thongs. Ewwwww. Needless to say, my clothing stayed in my suitcase for the duration.

So while I stay in them on occasion, I don't like what these short term rentals have become. And that's a big business in which some owners have multiple places that they use for transients because they can make more money than they could renting to permanent residents. In many cities, they take scarce apartments off the market for "real people," making it harder for "real people" to live in their own cities. So, a pox on a lot of these short term rentals. I don't blame cities (like NYC) where Airbnb is heavily regulated, limiting the number of days a home may be rented, limiting occupancy, limiting the type of place you can rent (e.g., must be your primary resident - not a secondary home or vacation property).

Anyway, however he does it, Sean Donovan runs an Airbnb in San Francisco (a city that does have significant regulations on Airbnb rentals, even if it's the city where Airbnb was founded and is headquartered).

He thought he was renting to a group of colleagues who needed a place to stay while on business in SF. But things were a bit mysterious from the jump. Donovan's doorbell camera captured the renters moving in large black cases. Then the security system was turned off.

Two days later, Donovan stopped by the house to take out the trash. He looked through a window and saw black cables taped to the walls. A man was typing on a laptop sitting next to what appeared to be a robot.

When his guests checked out 11 days later, the house was a mess, Donovan claims. Glasses and dishes had been removed from kitchen cabinets and left elsewhere. The dishwasher, refrigerator, and washing machine were scratched. Dishwasher racks were bent and removed. Wooden furniture was scratched and stained. Bathroom tiles were chipped. A shoe rack and several pairs of shoes were missing from a locked bedroom closet.

"What the hell is going on here?” Donovan recalled thinking. (Source: SF Standard)

What the hell, indeed.  

After a bit of detective work, Donovan was pretty sure he had solved the mystery. The renters were, indeed, colleagues. But they worked for the Bot Company, a San Francisco robotics outfit headquartered, oddly enough, on the same street as Airbnb. 

The group had, Donovan alleges, taken the place "under false pretenses." They weren't using it as their bed and breakfast They were using it to "conduct prototype testing on robots they’re training to do household chores." So Donovan's suing them for the relatively modest amount of $12,383.50, which he figures will cover the damages and lost income he would have received if the renters had been honest about wanting to use his place for commercial activity.

“The dishonesty is really what upsets me the most,” he said. “If they had come straight up, ‘Hey, we would like to rent your house for testing of our robot,’ then we could have come to an agreement. But it’s the lying and the misrepresentation that makes me feel violated.”

He's apparently not the only Airbnb host to be violated. 

...at least 12 other Airbnb hosts alleging they damaged the property and personal belongings, failed to clean up, exceeded the limit on the number of guests, or violated other house rules during their stays.

But, but, but, the Bot people are geniuses, above and beyond the rest of us.  

Our team comes from Tesla, Cruise, OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and many other great companies. (Source: bot.co)

They wouldn't even have had to mention that they come from Tesla and other genius hangouts. Just using the .co extension tells us that they're special. They're the cool kids. Using .com as your extension? How pedestrian. How boring. How yesterday. (Okay, they couldn't have used bot.com if they'd wanted to, as it's already taken by a Canadian board of trade.  Still...) 

And it goes without saying, they're a VC darling (and are currently valued at $2B).

We are backed by Greenoaks, NFDG, Spark, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and many others who share our belief that robots belong in our everyday lives.

And even if the investors really don't give a hoot if robots belong in our everyday lives, at least they're all hoping that bot.co is a unicorn that will make them all richy rich richer. (Who wants to be a millionaire billionaire trillionaire?)

But for now, the geniuses (or genius-adjacent workers) trashing these short terms rentals sure look to me like a bunch of entitled, ahole, feckless, slobs.

There is no danger, of course, of this startup getting shut down. But geez Louise, pick up after your robots, why don't you? Maybe you can find a better robot - or better yet - an actual human to take care of it for you.

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Image Source: Popular Mechanics

A note on Popular Mechanics. This magazine was founded and, until the early 1960s, was headquartered in Chicago. It's now located in NY. During the 1940s, my mother worked there as an admin/assistant editor.  In January 1945, she met my father - who was in the Navy, stationed in downtown Chicago and working out of Navy Pier - on a blind date and they hit it off. They were married in November of that year and moved to my father's home town, Worcester, Massachusetts. So she was something of an intra-country war bride. Anyway, I did get a kick out of finding an image on her magazine's website. 

Spies are everywhere. (So glad I'm out of the fray.)

A few weeks ago, my sister Trish retired. A week before her big day, she turned 67. Since she always had a part-time job in high school, and throughout college, she figures she'd been working pretty much steadily for 50+ years. She'd spent 30 of those years with the company she retired from, and might have been convinced to stay on a while longer if it had not been for the company's mean-spirited decision to totally do away with work from home a few days a week and return to a full five-days in the office mandate.

Interestingly, a number of her colleagues of similar age and tenure with the company are retiring for much the same reason - even though most employees worked fully from home without any productivity issues. 

You won't get any argument here - or from my sister Trish - that being in the office at least some of the time is important for a lot of reasons - including, for many, the desire to have the in-person camaraderie and social-life-at-work aspects. (A positive for both me and my sister during our careers.) But Trish had an onerous commute and once she got to the office (which had even done away with cubicles - let alone offices - for the masses - for a fully open concept approach) none of the members of her team were there. The people she worked most closely with were in NY, London, Atlanta...

The pay, bonus plan, and benefits were pretty good at Trish's company (where, as it happens, I had worked many years ago when it was pretty much the same entity, but as part of a much smaller corporation and with different ownership). And Trish's work over the decades had been reasonably interesting and challenging, and she had some terrific colleagues. But there were reasons beyond the WFH fatwa to want out of this company, of course. The pressure to deploy AI. The Trumpian senior management. (A former executive, who is also the spouse of the company's CEO, holds a senior position in the Trump administration.) And the creepy electronic surveillance. Badge swipe to use the bathroom, anyone?

But as far as I know, Trish's former place of employ was not using emotion AI (alternate term, affective computing) to analyze the personality types of its employees:

Some products analyze video of meetings or job interviews or focus groups; others listen to audio for pitch, tone, and word choice; still others can scan chat transcripts or emails and spit out a report about worker sentiment. Sometimes, the emotion AI is baked in as a feature in multiuse software, or sold as part of an expensive analytics package marketed to businesses. But it’s also available as a stand-alone product, and the barrier to entry is shin-high. (Source: The Atlantic)

There is nothing new about using software to monitor employees. For a long while, there have been apps that measure how many keystrokes someone sitting at a computer is making to assess whether they're working. Or at least pecking at the keys. On the emotion tracking side, call centers have long (notoriously) "listened in" on customer service reps to track tone of voice and word choice. 

What's changing is who's being monitored.

In 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow theorized about what he called the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve”: Extractive technologies, he wrote, come first to people in precarious circumstances—like, say, low-wage jobs—before they are refined and normalized and brought to people in greater positions of power. “Each disciplinary technology,” he later wrote, “starts with people way down on the ladder, then ascends the ladder, rung by rung.”

And so emotion AI is working it's way to the top, and has stepped onto the white-collar rung.  

Shitty Technlogy galore!

The Slack integration Aware advertises its ability to continuously monitor messages for “sentiment and toxicity”; Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing software, also allows employers to, theoretically, use AI to batch-analyze workers’ chat messages. MorphCast’s Zoom extension tracks, in real time, meeting participants’ attention, excitement, and positivity. The emotion-AI company Imentiv advises clients on applying emotional analysis to the job-interview process, promising employers detailed analysis of candidates’ emotional engagement, intensity, and valence, as well as personality type. A number of HR companies are turning toward AI that applies sentiment analysis to employee surveys. Framery, which makes soundproof phone pods and sells them to companies such as Microsoft and L’Oreal, has tested outfitting its chairs with biosensors capable of measuring heart rate, breathing rate, and nervousness.

Years ago, I had a colleague who was criticized by his (jerk of a) boss for his terrible body language at a meeting. What he had been doing was leaning in, nodding when he agreed with something, and offering positive input. Trouble was, the meeting was with his boss's enemy, who was presenting the plan for a new product, and she felt he should have been leaning back and glowering with his arms crossed. (Although I've had a few exchanges and, early on, a couple of lunches, with my former colleague over the years - make that decades - since we last worked together, I hadn't thought about this incident, or this idiotic boss, in years. She's still out there, only now she's out West selling insurance.) 

Of course, there's nothing new about personality typing in the workplace, either. Forty years ago, when I was working at Wang Labs - of all awful places - my team had an offsite in which we all took the Myers-Briggs assessment. (INTJ, baby.) It was supposed to help us figure out how to get along with folks with different personality types. Turns out most of us were brainy, analytical introverts, and we all got along just fine, thank you.

This was by no means the only personality-typing test I took part in over the years. It must have been a big corporate off-site dealio in the 1980's and 1990's. 

So people have been reading employee emotions for eons. But the software spying is something new.

But, blessedly, none of it was emotion AI. 

When it comes to emotion AI, there are plenty of skeptics. Unless there are safety or health reasons for it, the EU has banned workplace use of emotion AI. 

Good for the EU!

Needless to say, we won't see any similar pushback in the States anytime soon. That said, I can see some states trying to regulate it.

But it's gut wrenching to see the dignity, privacy, and autonomy of workers so eroded by the masters of the universe buying into whatever the tech bros are selling.

Spies are indeed everywhere. I'm so glad I'm out of the fray, and delighted for my sister Trish that she is, too. Who wants AI capturing every grimace and eye-roll. 

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Image Source: MadIsMadFunny

It's not that they're tone deaf. It's that they really don't care

Google. Salesforce. Oracle. Microsoft.

They've all been pinkslipping thousands of workers to help fund the buildout of the AI infrastructure they need to implement in order to get rid of everyone else in their workforce.

Unlike its confreres, Apple supposedly hasn't done any major AI-related layoffs. But I learned that from an AI search overview, which I thought I had disabled. (AI has a pernicious way of sneaking back in. I guess when you  ask Ask Gemini how to turn Ask Gemini off, it just has its inhuman little old self good little laugh.)

By comparison with what some of the other big techs have been doing in terms of the numbers of heads being chopped off, Meta's May announced number of 8,000 seems rather paltry. Unless of course, you're among the riffed.

And unless you were among the 1,400 Seattle-area Meta workers riffed, you may not have been aware that on the very same day in May that the latest round of layoffs was announced - impacting 20% of Seattle's Meta workforce - Mark Zuckerberg's $300M, 387 foot long (or is it $387M, 300 foot long?) superyacht, Launchpad, docked in Seattle's Lake Union. (Lake Union is a "renowned hub for high-end vessel servicing.")

Zuck was elsewhere at the time, but just the thought of Launchpad's presence - apparently right outside the office windows of a number of those who'll be losing their paychecks, perks, and badges come July...What could be more symbolic of the company's attitude towards its workers? Let 'em swab decks on my superyacht instead of Let 'em eat cake.

According to an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg from Meta Chief People Officer Janelle Gale, the aggressive restructuring is part of an ongoing effort to maximize company efficiency and balance the massive costs of new technological investments.

"This is not an easy tradeoff and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here," Gale wrote. (Source:Fox13 Seattle)

First off, if there were ever a job title that needs to be retired it's Chief People Officer. CPO implies - or a naive worker might infer - that the company actually gives a) a damn; b) a rat's arse; c) a flying fuck; d) all of the above, about the actual humans who work there. Maybe we can ask ChatGPT to come up with a new title. Corporate Personnel Henchman? C-Suite Stooge?

OK, Janelle Gale is probably a perfectly nice person if you meet her IRL. I'm sure she volunteers. I'm sure she sits on boards. She's a PhD psychologist. I'm sure she's empathetic AF.

But at the end of the day, she's working for the man.

And the man, in this case Mark Zuckerberg, is one of the cadre - I almost wrote caldron, which also works - of super-brainiac tech bros enamored of emergent technology (whatever the cost in dollars or human terms), enamored with their own exceptional intelligence, and enamored of the idea of becoming trillionaires. Because billionaire is so, so, so, so very yesterday, and these bros, if nothing else, are forward thinking. For themselves, anyway.

Forget about Emotional Intelligence, which for a while there was a trait that was somewhat valued in the workplace. Exceptional Intelligence - you heard it here - is the new EQ. And that EQ is focused on perfecting the algo, and on grabbing as much power, glory, and money as you can.

And these EQ-ers do not appear in the least troubled by any of what they're doing, any of the human, humane, or environmental implications of AI-ing the world.

If Exceptional Intelligence is the new EQ, then amorality is the new humanity. Caring? Concern? Democracy? Fairness? Sissy-stuff! Real men swan around in superyachts. Real men lay off tens of thousands of workers because they've got to keep their eyes on their prize.

Last month, I was fortunate to get to Bruce Springsteen's brilliant and humane Hope and Dreams concert. On the setlist was "Badlands," with its famous lyrics:

Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king And a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything.

I read recently that, with AI, American GDP may well continue to grow, and that by using GDP as a measure, the economy will look healthy. But how healthy is an economy going to be with 8-10% (or more) unemployment?

So let's remember the opening lines to "Badlands."

Light's out tonight
Trouble in the heartland

Zuckerberg didn't sail his ship into Lake Union to taunt the laid-off workers. Hell, he probably didn't even know where Launchpad was. He's got plenty of somebodies to see to the details of his lfe. (Maybe someday those somebodies will be AIs.)

But it's not that they're tone deaf. It's that, like Melania Trump, they really don't care. (Do you?)

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This post is a shoutout to my sister Trish, who tomorrow begins her well-earned, well-deserved retirement.

First saw this story referenced by Dom Ervolina on BlueSky, who was referencing Ben Kershner (I think on Insta). Thanks, fellows.

Image Source: Amazon where the jacket goes by "Womens Melania Lady The United State I Really Don’t Care Do U Green Jacket Trump Coat"

Data Labelers Unite! (LFG!)

It will come as no surprise to anyone that AI, along with its tremendous potential to (along with the occasional good thing) wreck the environment, break all and every social compact, destroy the economy, and out and out kill people (e.g., encouraging young people to kill themselves; identifying deadly mushrooms as edible (oops!); mistakenly targeting schools for bombing (collateral damage, anyone?) is also responsible for worker exploitation in Africa.

AI work is a major part of the Kenyan economy, where many Kenyans labor as content moderators and data labelers. 

Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.  (Souroce: 404 Media)

A lot of this data labeling involves "annotating what [is] happening in every frame" of a porn video. Kenyan workers are also helping train up AI sexbots, providing the human element in raunchy and just-plain-sad talk sessions with all the lonely people who rely on the Internet for sex and companionship. The actual human workers are, of course, putting themselves out of business, given that the goal is to improve the verisimilitude of sexbots, obviating the need for any human involvement. More money for the AI tech bro masters of the universe! Yay!

It will come as no surprise that the work that the data labelers and other AI-adjacent workers are ill-paid and work under dreadful conditions. Given the content of their work, which involves "horrific content," many end up suffering from insomnia, PTSD, and sexual dysfunction in their actual human-to-human, skin-to-skin, honest-to-god real human lives. 

But those Kenyan workers now have an organization behind them, the Data Labelers Association, which works:

...to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.

It will come as no surprise that the treatment of Kenyan workers is seen as an updated, teched-up version of the exploitation of African laborers by the imperialist companies that pillaged (and continue to pillage) the continent for its wealth of natural resources. Move over DeBeers and Exxon-Mobil. Today they've got company: "it's Apple, it's Meta, it's Gemini." It's Sam Altman. It's Elon Musk. 

All part of the AI hype cycle:

...the promotional messaging and institutional ideology that casts artificial intelligence—particularly so-called “superintelligence”—as “inevitable” and destined to bring historic “transformation.”...

AI hype is the next chapter in the colonial playbook. It reframes the exploitation of African digital workers as “innovation” and is a tool of power wielded by profiteers of colonial extractivism in the digital age. It functions as a carefully crafted cover story by disguising appropriation in the language of “progress.” (Source: Tech Policy)

The Tech Policy article linked above is worth a full read. Sure it's lefty-ish, but it raises important issues around AI.

Declaring AI inevitable is how hype becomes colonial power. The rhetoric of inevitability, in particular, stages hype as a manifest destiny, stripping away the possibility of refusal or alternative futures. 

All the hype about AI's transformative capabilities and its inevitability, with some occasional kneejerk BS thrown in on how AI is going to benefit everybody, is creating an environment where AI will be seen as inevitable and not worth resisting. We'll passively just sit here and let the tsunami wash over us and only then will we realize that it didn't exactly benefit everybody.

Will our coin-operated polity ever be able to hit the pause button, take a deep breath, and figure out how to get our hands around the AI beast? 

I pinball around between 'God help us!,' 'Glad I'll be dead," and 'LFG.'

Today I'm feeling pretty Let's Fucking Go. Don't exactly know what this will entail, but it's got to be before it's too late. 

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Image Source: Tech Policy

Colonel Mustard Did It

Is it just me, or do certain things confer an aura of value and goodness?

I observed this in business, when I realized that if you priced your product above the competition, purchasers - at least some of them, at least some of the time, at least for a while - assumed is was better than the competition.

In much the same way, I have found that it's harder to figure out whether an actor with a posh British accent is any good or not than it is to figure out an American bad actor.

And speaking of bad actors, it's always a bit surprising to me when someone with a severe disability turns out to be a criminal. C.f., the quadriplegic cornhole champion who's facing murder charges in Maryland. (He's claiming self-defense.)

Thanks to a similar halo effect, it goes against my grain when someone running an offbeat, homespun sort of business engages in bad business behavior. So I just don't expect the owner of New Hampshire's Old Dutch Mustard Co., a small family-owned business that's been around more than 80 years, to be a river-polluting lout and no-goodnik.

But last month, having pled guilty in February 2025, Charles Santich was sentended to 18 months in a federal stir "for knowingly polluting the Souhegan River." He was also hit with a $250K fine, and his company was levied an additional $1.5M.

That's a lot of mustard and vinegar...

Anyway, Old Dutch has been skirting environmental requirements since the 1980's, and their bad behavior finally caught up with them.

“Throughout years of repeated civil and administrative attempts to encourage Santich and his company to follow the law, Santich lied to state and federal authorities and even purposefully built the illegal infrastructure needed to pump his manufacturing waste into New Hampshire’s waterways, pushing his employees to help him violate the law,” [US Attorney Erin] Creegan said in a statement.

She said the pollution left waterways with fewer fish and impacted homeowners and people who use the river for recreation. (Source: Boston Globe)

Santich ordered employees "to pump acidic waste water and stormwater through an underground pipe leading to the Souhegan River so he could save on shipping costs," and threatened to fire them if they didn't comply. Santich regularly submitted false documents to regulators, blocked the EPA from getting info on his company's practices, and directly lied to inspectors. When NH state folks found that waste water from Old Dutch smelled suspiciously like vinegar. Inspectors got a search warrant and sleuthed out the illegal discharge pipe.

Shame on Charles Santich, ya bum ya! And his company has the (vinegar and) gall to brag about their environmental bona fides:

A tree farm continues to be planted on the [company] property. Old Dutch maintains the tree farm as a way to show care for the environment.

Some care for the environment! 

To my knowledge, I haven't used any Old Dutch products. My vinegar - white and apple cider - is Heinz. My mustard is French's (yell0w), Gulden's (brown), or Maille (whole grain pommery). But Old Dutch products are often private labeled or used by food services, so I may have consumed their wares somewhere along the line. I like to support small local companies, but not this one. You best believes I'll be BOLO-ing. 

Meanwhile, all I have to say is:

It Was Old Dutch Mustard,With an Illegal Discharge Pipe, in the Souhegan River.

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Image Source: Reddit Boardgames forum