NEWS YOU CAN USE? So Trump nixed your bullshit DEI job.

I don’t want to sound flippant about mass layoffs. Losing your job sucks, and extirpating DEI from the government is a mission Team Trump has taken up with McCarthyite zeal. It may cut too deeply. Trump’s decree also revoked the 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson order that created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was tasked with preventing unlawful job discrimination “without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin” in the private and public sectors; ending it could have plenty of negative consequences, intended or not.

* * * * * * * *

DEI is a relatively novel bureaucratic form invented whole cloth by the enlightened liberals of the white-collar world in the summer of 2020 (who says America can’t invent anything new anymore?). After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was a dizzying moment when everyone seemed to be asking, “What can I do to stop racism”? Or more precisely: “How can the Best Buy chain of electronics stores stop racism”?

The lanyard class in board rooms, college campuses, and nongovernmental organisations all over the country responded in the only way they knew how: by creating new bullshit jobs.

The anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 coined the pithy phrase “bullshit jobs” to describe the rebirth of medieval feudalism in the modern corporate world, with the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. Bullshit jobs are the polar opposite of “shit jobs” that are disproportionately blue-collar, paid by the hour, and performed by the serfs. Bullshit jobs tend to be held by the college-educated lords. They’re salaried, sometimes generously, but have little social utility. Graeber said that they are “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.

The longer your job title is, and the harder it is to explain what you do to a stranger, the greater the chance that your job is superfluous. So it goes with DEI “experts” hired to enrich the workplace with diversity and equity — the latter is a fuzzy term that even Bernie Sanders threw up his hands when asked to define.

Exactly how full of shit are DEI jobs?

Graeber’s taxonomy places bullshit jobs into five categories: Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters. DEI jobs could fit all five conceivably.

As the honorable Gov. William J. LePetomane would say:

HOW DEMOCRATS DROVE SILICON VALLEY INTO TRUMP’S ARMS: Ross Douthat of the New York Times interviews Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, who more recently is the “co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose portfolio includes Airbnb and over 100 A.I. companies.” Andreessen was a lifelong Democrat, until the Biden administration, but he could see firsthand how radical Democrats were becoming by the last term of the Obama administration.

Ace of Spades has lengthy highlights of the interview at his blog, including when things began to really become pear-shaped from Andreessen’s point of view. The ellipses are from Ace, to tighten up the material quoted:

[Andreessen:] And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.

Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want?

Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it’s very analogous….

It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Douthat: But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.

Andreessen: Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”

So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they’re spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force.

But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there’s this big middle of “go along, get along” people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they’re just trying to follow along with the trends.

So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of “go along, get along” people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, “Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda.” What people say from the outside is, “Well, you should just fire those people.”

But as a C.E.O., you can’t fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can’t go hire kids out of college, because I’m just going to get more activists. And so that’s how these companies became captured.

Flash-forward to the Biden era; this excerpt is from the interview at the New York Times

[Andreessen:] So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.

So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.

We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.

We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”

We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”

Douthat: But that is a national security argument. That is an argument about China, right?

Andreessen: Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. Maybe I’ll give the devil his due here. I believe, in their view, they really think they’re defending democracy. I mean, they’re trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it, but I think they literally believe it when they say Trump is Hitler.

By the way, it appears Obama doesn’t believe Trump is Hitler anymore, because he was joking around with him at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

A lot of these guys, the fire’s in the eyes. And look, it’s not even just the U.S. It’s the rise of UKIP. Brexit was an equally shocking, alarming thing. The rise of Nigel Farage. The German party AfD, it’s obviously the Nazi Party 2.0. And so this superheated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just went completely bananas.

So we came in on May ’24, at the very height of that, and we said, “Oh, my God, they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill our companies. They’re going to kill open source.” By the way if you kill open-source A.I., you also kill all academic research, so the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop.

Douthat: I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of A.I., but my perception is there is a large constituency not just in Washington, D.C., but in Silicon Valley as well that regards some form of A.I. as potentially dangerous to human civilization or U.S. national defense as nuclear weapons. And during the Cold War, we obviously did not allow random start-ups to manufacture nuclear weapons in the nuclear corridor in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Andreessen: Not only did we ban them from making nuclear weapons; we also banned them from making nuclear power, which we now regret. But anyway —

Douthat: No, absolutely. No, I’m by no means arguing that this theory is correct. I’m just saying my sense is that there is presumably some version of A.I. that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government, right?

Andreessen: It depends. This is a longer conversation we need to have. But I would just tell you the national security part was not the motivator here. And by the way, the national security stuff, those arguments are still going to play out. Those arguments aren’t over. That’s still going to play out.

The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.

Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.

And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”

Nellie Bowles’ recent book, of Morning After the Revolution was all about the left’s revolutionary fever in 2020 and its aftermath. Douthat’s interview with Andreessen focuses on the years leading up to it. But what caused the flip-over among professors at Ivy League universities? At some point in the mid to late naughts, they seemingly switched en masse from understanding that they’re teaching the scions of parents paying very expensive tuitions so that their kids would learn to make money on Wall Street, or in Hollywood, Washington or Silicon Valley to, as Andreessen said, programming young radicals with the goal of “burning the system down [because you] are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Whether it’s Ace’s lengthy excerpts or the full piece at the New York Times, definitely read the whole thing.

HE’D BE CALLED A SPREADER OF “MISINFORMATION” TODAY: The obscure ‘quack’ who helped pioneer the modern clinical trial.

Francis Hauksbee the Younger, an 18th-century instrument maker and scientific lecturer, proposed a formal comparative study in 1743 to evaluate the “safety and efficacy” of his medication for venereal disease.

Published as a pamphlet “A Further Account of the Effects of Mr. Hauksbee’s Alterative Medicine,” his plan aimed to compare his treatment against others by organizing a controlled trial. The study included a detailed methodology, patient consent and it called for transparent documentation of patient outcomes.

Doctors didn’t know much back then. That said, don’t mock the “opium-laced alcohol tinctures.” They may not have cured anything, but I’m sure they made patients feel better.

GANGSTER, REDEFINED:

Does he ever slow down?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

DAMN, IT FEELS GOOD TO BE A GANGSTER:

The Babylon Bee, yesterday:

Trump on Truth social today:

In 2011, actor Don Cheadle told an interviewer regarding then-President Obama, “I think he inherited an impossible situation. I wish he had not been so much of a consensus-seeker. I just wanted to see a more ‘gangsta’ president.” The previous year, then-CNN anchor Roland Martin wrote, “Time for Obama to go ‘gangsta’ on GOP.”

Obama’s critics keep blasting him for Chicago-style politics. Fine. Channel your inner Al Capone and go gangsta against your foes. Let ’em know that if they aren’t with you, they are against you and will pay the price.

So presumably, they should be fine with the current president choosing a meme that’s already been Hollywood and DNC-MSM-approved.

(Classical reference in headline.)

A FRIEND COMMENTS: “Hoist on their own PETArd.”

WELL, THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG:

UPDATE:

So much winning, but I’m not tired of it yet.

MORE:

MORE STILL:

As Elon Musk is fond of saying, X is the global town square.

#JOURNALISM:

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON STAR TREK: SECTION 31: This is Rock Bottom (Video).

A HARD ARGUMENT TO DISMISS:

HOW IT STARTED:

How it’s going: MSNBC Faces Potential for Big Changes in Comcast Cable Spin-Off.

MSNBC fans who are disappointed in the progressive-leaning network after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election may no longer have it to kick around.

The cable-news outlet could have to consider changing its name and familiar markings under a spin-off of the bulk of the cable assets of parent company Comcast, one of the nascent company’s new top executives suggested to an assemblage of MSNBC staffers Wednesday morning, according to two people familiar with the gathering.

Mark Lazarus, who will lead the spin-off after it separates from Comcast, told an audience that included Rachel Maddow, Chris Jansing and Katy Tur that he was not sure whether MSNBC would have to change its identity as part of the transaction, which will split the cable network and its business-news sibling CNBC from NBC News and NBCUniversal. If the two networks are no longer part of the NBC corporate entity, attendees wanted to know, will they still be able to carry marks that are part of their former home?

Variety, November 20th, 2024.

ROBERT WRIGHT: The AI Wave Accelerates.

Screenwriter Paul Schrader—famous for the scripts of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and other lauded films—recently played around with ChatGPT and found himself discomposed. He called the interaction “an existential moment” that brought to mind the defeat of chess master Garry Kasparov by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997. “I just sent chatgpt a script I’d written some years ago and asked for improvements,” Schrader wrote on Facebook. “In five seconds it responded with notes as good or better than I’ve ever received [from] a film executive.”

As Schrader’s peers were quick to note, surpassing Hollywood executives in discernment is at best a minor technological advance. But it turns out there was more to the story: “I asked it for Paul Schrader script ideas,” Schrader wrote. “I[t] had better ideas than mine.”

This week brought other signs, as well, that the AI revolution may unfold faster and more momentously than many people had been assuming. A Chinese company unveiled a new large language model, DeepSeek-R1, which elicited reactions among AI watchers that, depending on their feelings about China, ranged from “Wow!” to “Oh no!”

R1 is one of the new breed of “reasoning” LLMs, engineered to engage in extended “chain-of-thought” reflection. This reflection lends particular strength to math and science skills but can also aid common sense reasoning, complex planning, and the autonomous pursuit of assigned goals. The first such model—OpenAI o1—was unveiled in September, and R1 is comparable to it in performance and much cheaper to use. What’s more, it’s an open-source (or, technically, “open-weights”) model, which means it will spur progress by other AI researchers more powerfully than OpenAI’s proprietary models do.

Seems like only yesterday people were saying AI progress would soon slow down because the “scaling laws” were losing force; the addition of more computing power and more data during the training of large language models was bringing diminishing returns. But the rapid evolution of the new “reasoning” LLMs (which demand much more computing power than conventional LLMs while being used, but not while being trained) has over the past few months marginalized that concern. OpenAI has already announced but not released a new reasoning model, o3, that is a clear improvement over o1. And Google’s reasoning model, introduced in December, has shown a sharp increase in math and science skills over the course of only a month.

Meanwhile, as the technology advances, AI potentates are working to ensure that there are enough power plants and microchip clusters to ensure rapid rollout. This week OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined President Trump at the White House to unveil a big infrastructure project that will be funded via the venture capital firm SoftBank.

The vibes were entirely upbeat. When Trump said that building and maintaining the infrastructure will create lots of jobs, Altman refrained from noting that, as he has acknowledged on other occasions, untold numbers of American workers will be displaced by AI. And he didn’t repeat his observation from two years ago that, though our AI future could be filled with wonders, the worst-case AI scenario is “lights out for all of us.”

Altman is right about the wonders—including the coming medical advances he extolled at the White House. Still:

There is a growing sense among many AI researchers that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—a threshold different people define differently, but that will by any definition have huge social impact for good and ill—is going to arrive sooner than they thought even six months ago. Maybe as soon as next year. And many in the AI community—not just hard-core doomers—are worried about this impact and the fact that so few people are talking about it. (These worriers include AI safety researchers who have recently left OpenAI.)

As Glenn warned at the start of last year: The white-collar class derided mass layoffs among the blue-collar workers. It’s about to feel their pain. “A lot of young Americans, especially males, are forgoing traditional college to enter the trades, as welders, plumbers, HVAC technicians and the like. That’s probably smart. AI won’t be able to replace those jobs. As Brian Wang notes, robots probably will, one day — but that day is nowhere near as close. So the bottom line is a lot of white-collar workers are likely to be replaced by machines soon; the fate of blue-collar workers, in a twist, will likely be better for the foreseeable future. It’s a lot more difficult to manipulate atoms than bits — good news for plumbers and auto mechanics.”

SHOCK AND AWE: Trump’s rapid changes in US government stun federal workers.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his team have acted with stunning speed to begin removing or sidelining hundreds of government workers, while he has also sought to give himself the power to fire hundreds of thousands more.

The Republican president has been in office less than a week but the wrecking ball he has already taken to parts of the U.S. government has sent shock waves through much of America’s federal bureaucracy.

At the National Security Council 160 staffers have been sent home. About 20 senior career attorneys at the Justice Department were reassigned. The heads of the U.S. Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration were fired along with other officials.

Government offices focused on workforce diversity are being permanently shuttered, the staff on leave, while a flurry of executive orders overturning Biden administration policy have left many officials uncertain about their futures, their mandate erased by a blunt stroke of Trump’s signature Sharpie marker.

Trump said on Tuesday he also plans to fire over 1,000 officials appointed by his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.

Related: Federal Workers Are ‘Terrified,’ and That’s a Good Thing.

As these workers sift through Trump’s recent executive orders looking for any clues about their job security, a staffer from the Environmental Protection Agency shared that many are already clearing out their inboxes, waiting anxiously for updates on early retirement and buyout options. “Trump version 1.0 was bad,” lamented the EPA employee, “but I’m already done with version 2.0.”

Trump, within hours of returning to power, issued a slew of executive orders seeking to overhaul how the federal government operates, from removing job protections to ending remote work to implementing a hiring freeze. The reception inside the federal government has been uneasy. But especially worrisome to some employees was the White House’s decision on Tuesday to eliminate diversity programs, subsequently placing those staffers on administrative leave.

Imagine being bent out of shape over being told you actually have to show up for work. Covid is over — is there any reason why people are still working remotely? Nevertheless, according to the report, the atmosphere in federal agencies “has been uneasy,” particularly following the order to abolish racist DEI programs, since hundreds were placed on leave.

We’re supposed to feel bad about this; I certainly don’t.

Insert Clarkson Dacia Sandero meme here:

THE AIR FORCE SEEMS TO HAVE DECIDED TO USE MALICIOUS COMPLIANCE TO FIGHT TRUMP’S DEI ORDER:

This is not new behavior by the military services. Everyone thinks Harry S. Truman desegregated the Armed Forces in 1948. He didn’t. The Army responded to desegregating infantry regiments by putting Black soldiers and officers in the regiment’s third battalions. Black officers assigned below the Mason-Dixon Line found they could not use the Officer’s Club and other off-duty facilities. It took a retired five-star general getting elected president to end this whack-a-mole. He knew the institutions of the military and how they were resisting Truman’s executive order. Integration was not achieved until 1953.

This tactic is commonly known as “malicious obedience.” You’re told to do something, and you do it in a way that will cause the most disruption to business processes and create maximum embarrassment for whoever directed it, all the while claiming you were loyally following orders.

Unless the parties involved in this stunt were totally brain-dead and oblivious to the political climate, there is no possible reason to pull those videos and then ensure the word gets out.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution to this: You need to fire people. The only reason this happened was that people were trying to sabotage Trump’s DEI order or were too stupid to realize the stink their actions would raise. In either scenario, you don’t need people like that working for you. The result helps the resisters get their minds right and teaches the remaining idiots to be more careful.

Admiral Byng to the white courtesy phone, please.