Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis

Matthew Rose, an Opinion editorial director, hosted an online conversation with three Opinion columnists.

Matthew Rose: On Saturday, agents from the border patrol in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an American citizen. We don’t have a full accounting of what happened, but the available video evidence shows he was filming the agents with his phone, as many locals have done since the full weight of federal immigration enforcement descended on the city.

Lydia, you’ve been to Minneapolis recently. Tell us what you saw and give us some context for what just happened.

Lydia Polgreen: I have never been a fan of the conceit of American journalists covering the United States as if it were a backwater foreign nation, but in Minneapolis last week I could not shake the impulse to compare my experiences in a city I know so well (I spent a chunk of my childhood in the Twin Cities, and my father is from Minneapolis) with my experiences covering civil wars in places like Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka and more. Watching the video of Pretti’s killing, I thought: If this was happening on the streets of any of those places, I would not hesitate to call it an extrajudicial execution by security forces. This is where we are: armed agents of the state killing civilians with an apparent belief in their total impunity.

I left before Pretti was gunned down, apparently in the back while he was on his knees. What I saw was so reminiscent of other conflicts — civilians doing their very best to protect themselves and their neighbors from seemingly random violence meted out by state agents. Those agents, masked and heavily armed, are roaming the streets and picking up and assaulting people for having the wrong skin color or accent, or being engaged in the constitutionally protected acts of filming, observing or protesting their presence. Anyone who knows me knows that I am allergic to hyperbole, but sometimes you need to simply call a spade a spade. This is a lawless operation.

David French: We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials. The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States. The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption.

We’re tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies, to be sure, but it’s worse than that. He’s exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability. It’s as if we engineered a legal system premised on the idea that federal officials are almost always honest, and the citizens who critique them are almost always wrong. We’ve tilted the legal playing field against citizens and in favor of the government.

The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law. The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic.

Michelle Goldberg: The administration is very consciously reinforcing that sense of impunity. First there was Stephen Miller addressing the security forces after one of them killed Renee Good: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” On Sunday, Greg Bovino, the self-consciously villainous border patrol commander, praised the agents who executed Pretti.

I wish people weren’t allowed to carry guns in public. But they are, and after watching Republicans bring semiautomatic weapons to protest Covid closures and make a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s wild to hear the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, say, on Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want.” The point here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s them nakedly asserting that constitutional rights are for us, not you.

Rose: David, I wanted to pick up on your description of the federal government as lawless. As you’ve written, we seem to be in the world described by the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel and what he called “the dual state.” There is one we live in, where we pay taxes and go to work, and life seems to work according to common rules, and the other where the rules no longer apply. Is this what we’re experiencing?

French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.

One of the saddest things about the killings of Good and Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.

Good and Pretti both had calm demeanors. They may have been annoying federal officers, but nothing about their posture indicated the slightest threat. Good even said, “I’m not mad” to the man who would gun her down seconds later. Pretti was filming with his phone in one hand and he had the other hand in the air as he was pepper-sprayed and tackled.

The officers, however, were in that different state, what Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” where the government is a law unto itself. The officers acted violently, with impunity, and the government immediately acted to defend them and slander their victims. As the prerogative state expands, the normative state shrinks, and our lives often change before we can grasp what happened. (...)

Rose: With immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, we have a quasi-military force, backed by more funding than most countries give their actual militaries, deployed for the most part to enforce civil, not criminal law. Should we instead think about this as spectacle? Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, interviewed by our colleague Ezra Klein, argued that immigration enforcement under Trump is being implemented for maximum visual impact.

Goldberg: That’s increasingly the critique of conservatives who don’t want to break with Trump, but also are having a hard time rationalizing ICE’s violence in Minneapolis. Erick Erickson blames what’s happening in Minnesota on the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, marginalizing Tom Homan, the border czar, in favor of Greg Bovino from Customs and Border Protection, who clearly relishes street-level confrontation.

And the administration obviously wants to make a spectacle. We don’t know why the guy who shot Renee Good was filming, but it could well have been to feed their insatiable demand for content, which in turn is feeding their recruiting efforts. Did any of you see the clip where one of the agents shooting tear gas at protesters can be heard saying, “It’s like ‘Call of Duty.’ So cool, huh?”

I’m glad that some people on the right have at least concluded that this looks bad for their side, since it could create political pressure on Trump to pull back. At the same time, I don’t think you can divorce the policy from the spectacle. Both are meant to terrorize their enemies.

Polgreen: There is no question that spectacle is the goal here. Michelle just mentioned Bovino — he has been swanning about Minnesota in a long, green wool coat that lends him a distinctly fascist look. The way these officers are kitted out is nuts. Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, described it to me as “full battle rattle.” There is also a cartoonish aspect to the whole thing — social media is replete with videos of agents slipping on ice and falling, ass over teakettle, onto the frozen ground. You look at the videos of the shootings and there is an air of incompetence to the whole thing, even amid the horror. It is almost as if you can’t believe how amateurish and unprofessional these guys are.

Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told me about one encounter with an agent armed with a Taser. The guy held it sideways, like some kind of gangbanger, menacing Payne and other city officials as they tried to ask questions about why a man at a bus stop was being detained. Payne told me it was something out of a bad movie. No trained law enforcement officer would ever hold a weapon that way. It would be comical if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. (...)

Rose: ... when people ask you what they can do, what’s your advice?

French: This is a crucial moment in American history. I think about it like this: When we learn about our family histories, we often ask what our ancestors were doing. Did they serve in World War II? Did they serve in Vietnam? Where did they stand during the civil rights movement?

This is a moment important enough that our grandchildren and even great-grandchildren might ask: What did you know? What did you do? Think hard about what you want your answer to be. Think hard about what you can do that will stand the test of time — whether it be peacefully protesting (including peaceful civil disobedience), volunteering for a political campaign, providing meals and clothing for immigrant families or anything else that protects the vulnerable and defends human dignity.

One of the worst answers, however, would be to look a curious grandchild in the face and say: Well, I posted a lot on social media.

Polgreen: I read so much about how we live in an atomized society, glued to our phones and social media but untethered from our communities and neighbors. Minnesota is demonstrating how quickly and fearlessly communities can come together in spite of the political and technological forces seeking to keep us divided. They also built on their past experience — many of these networks of support began during the George Floyd protests. Some were groups that wanted to march against the Minneapolis cops, and others wanted to protect neighborhoods from property damage. Now they have been reactivated to work together to help one another. A lot of us formed these kinds of networks during Covid. This would be a great time to reconnect with them. Be prepared to protect the people around you. (...)

French: I’ll be completely honest. It’s a little harder for me to have hope when I know that the core political support for Trump’s aggression is coming from my own community. Without the lock step (and seemingly unconditional) support of so many millions of evangelicals, Trump’s administration would crumble overnight. So I keep looking for signs of softening hearts and opening minds in Trump’s base — among the people who helped raise me, who taught me about faith, and who told me in no uncertain terms that politicians must demonstrate high character before they can earn your support. I feel a pervasive sadness about this moment.

That’s what is so grievous about civil strife. You often find yourself in opposition not to some hated, distant foe, but rather in opposition to people you’ve loved your whole life — whom you still love.

But there is hope. It’s a mistake to believe that the G.O.P. and its Christian supporters have crossed a Rubicon, never to return. And it’s a mistake to believe — even for the most hardhearted — that their aggression is a sign of their strength. They are masking weakness, and courage is their kryptonite.

by Matthew Rose, Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson/Redux

AI: Practical Advice for the Worried

A Word On Thinking For Yourself

There are good reasons to worry about AI. This includes good reasons to worry about AI wiping out all value in the universe, or AI killing everyone, or other similar very bad outcomes.

There are also good reasons that AGI, or otherwise transformational AI, might not come to pass for a long time.

As I say in the Q&A section later, I do not consider imminent transformational AI inevitable in our lifetimes: Some combination of ‘we run out of training data and ways to improve the systems, and AI systems max out at not that much more powerful than current ones’ and ‘turns out there are regulatory and other barriers that prevent AI from impacting that much of life or the economy that much’ could mean that things during our lifetimes turn out to be not that strange. These are definitely world types my model says you should consider plausible.

There is also the highly disputed question of how likely it is that if we did create an AGI reasonably soon, it would wipe out all value in the universe. There are what I consider very good arguments that this is what happens unless we solve extremely difficult problems to prevent it, and that we are unlikely to solve those problems in time. Thus I believe this is very likely, although there are some (such as Eliezer Yudkowsky) who consider it more likely still.

That does not mean you should adapt my position, or anyone else’s position, or mostly use social cognition from those around you, on such questions, no matter what those methods would tell you. If this is something that is going to impact your major life decisions, or keep you up at night, you need to develop your own understanding and model, and decide for yourself what you predict. (...)

Overview

There is some probability that humanity will create transformational AI soon, for various definitions of soon. You can and should decide what you think that probability is, and conditional on that happening, your probability of various outcomes.

Many of these outcomes, both good and bad, will radically alter the payoffs of various life decisions you might make now. Some such changes are predictable. Others not.

None of this is new. We have long lived under the very real threat of potential nuclear annihilation. The employees of the RAND corporation, in charge of nuclear strategic planning, famously did not contribute to their retirement accounts because they did not expect to live long enough to need them. Given what we know now about the close calls of the cold war, and what they knew at the time, perhaps this was not so crazy a perspective.

Should this imminent small but very real risk radically change your actions? I think the answer here is a clear no, unless your actions are relevant to nuclear war risks, either personally or globally, in some way, in which case one can shut up and multiply.

This goes back far longer. For much longer than that, various religious folks have expected Judgment Day to arrive soon, often with a date attached. Often they made poor decisions in response to this, even given their beliefs.

There are some people that talk or feel this same way about climate change, as an impending inevitable extinction event for humanity.

Under such circumstances, I would center my position on a simple claim: Normal Life is Worth Living, even if you think P(doom) relatively soon is very high. (...)

More generally, in terms of helping: Burning yourself out, stressing yourself out, tying yourself up in existential angst all are not helpful. It would be better to keep yourself sane and healthy and financially intact, in case you are later offered leverage. Fighting the good fight, however doomed it might be, because it is a far, far better thing to do, is also a fine response, if you keep in mind how easy it is to end up not helping that fight. But do that while also living a normal life, even if that might seem indulgent. You will be more effective for it, especially over time. (...)

On to individual questions to flesh all this out.

Q&A

Q: Should I still save for retirement?
Short Answer: Yes.
Long Answer: Yes, to most (but not all) of the extent that this would otherwise be a concern and action of yours in the ‘normal’ world. It would be better to say ‘build up asset value over time’ than ‘save for retirement’ in my model. Building up assets gives you resources to influence the future on all scales, whether or not retirement is even involved. I wouldn’t get too attached to labels.

Remember that while it is not something one should do lightly, none of this is lightly, and you can raid retirement accounts with what in context is a modest penalty, in an extreme enough ‘endgame’ situation - it does not even take that many years for the expected value of the compounded tax advantages to exceed the withdraw penalty - the cost of emptying the account, should you need to do that, is only 10% of funds and about a week in the United States (plus now having to pay taxes on it). And that in some extreme future situations, having that cash would be highly valuable, none of which suggests now is the time to empty it, or to not build it up.

The case for saving money does not depend on expecting a future ‘normal’ world. Which is good, because even without AI the future world is likely to not be all that ‘normal.

Q: Should I take on a ton of debt intending to never have to pay it back?

Short Answer: No, except for a mortgage.

Long Answer: Mostly no, except for a mortgage. Save your powder. See my post On AI and Interest Rates for an extended treatment of this question - I feel that is a definitive answer to the supposed ‘gotcha’ question of why doomers don’t take on lots of debt. Taking on a bunch of debt is a limited resource, and good ways to do it are even more limited for most of us. Yes, where you get the opportunity it would be good to lock in long borrow periods at fixed rates if you think things are about to get super weird. But if your plan is ‘the market will realize what is happening and adjust the value of my debt in time for me to profit’ that does not seem, to me, like a good plan. Nor does borrowing now much change your actual constraints on where you run out of money.

Does borrowing money that you have to pay back in 2033 mean you have more money to spend? That depends. What is your intention if 2033 rolls around and the world hasn’t ended? Are you going to pay it back? If so then you need to prepare now to be able to do that. So you didn’t accomplish all that much.

You need very high confidence in High Weirdness Real Soon Now before you can expect to get net rewarded for putting your financial future on quicksand, where you are in real trouble if you get the timing wrong. You also need a good way to spend that money to change the outcome.

Yes, there is a level of confidence in both speed and magnitude, combined with a good way to spend, that would change that, and that I do not believe is warranted. One must notice that you need vastly less certainty than this to be shouting about these issues from the rooftops, or devoting your time to working on them.

Eliezer’s position, as per his most recent podcast is something like ‘AGI could come very soon, seems inevitable by 2050 barring civilizational collapse, and if it happens we almost certainly all die.’ Suppose you really actually believed that. It’s still not enough to do much with debt unless you have a great use of money - there’s still a lot of probability mass that the money is due back while you’re still alive, potentially right before it might matter.

Yes, also, this changes if you think you can actually change the outcome for the better by spending money now, money loses impact over time, so your discount factor should be high. That however does not seem to be the case that I see being made.

Q: Does buying a house make sense?

A: Maybe. It is an opportunity to borrow money at low interest rates with good tax treatment. It also potentially ties up capital and ties you down to a particular location, and is not as liquid as some other forms of capital. So ask yourself how psychologically hard it would be to undo that. In terms of whether it looks like a good investment in a world with useful but non-transformational AI, an AI could figure out how to more efficiently build housing, but would that cause more houses to be built?

Q: Does it make sense to start a business?

A: Yes, although not because of AI. It is good to start a business. Of course, if the business is going to involve AI, carefully consider whether you are making the situation worse.

Q: Does It Still Make Sense to Try and Have Kids?

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer: Yes. Kids are valuable and make the world and your own world better, even if the world then ends. I would much rather exist for a bit than never exist at all. Kids give you hope for the future and something to protect, get you to step up. They get others to take you more seriously. Kids teach you many things that help one think better about AI. You think they take away your free time, but there is a limit to how much creative work one can do in a day. This is what life is all about. Missing out on this is deeply sad. Don’t let it pass you by.

Is there a level of working directly on the problem, or being uniquely positioned to help with the problem, where I would consider changing this advice? Yes, there are a few names where I think this is not so clear, but I am thinking of a very small number of names right now, and yours is not one of them.

You can guess how I would answer most other similar questions. I do not agree with Buffy Summers that the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. I do think she knows better than any of us that not living in this world is not the way to save it.

Q: Should I talk to my kids about how there’s a substantial chance they won’t get to grow up?

A: I would not (and will not) hide this information from my kids, any more than I would hide the risk from nuclear war, but ‘you may not get to grow up’ is not a helpful thing to say to (or to emphasize to) kids. Talking to your kids about this (in the sense of ‘talk to your kids about drugs’) is only going to distress them to no purpose. While I don’t believe in hiding stuff from kids, I also don’t think this is something it is useful to hammer into them. Kids should still get to be and enjoy being kids. (...)

Q: Should I just try to have a good time while I can?

A: No, because my model says that this doesn’t work. It is empty. You can have fun for a day, a week, a month, perhaps a year, but after a while it rings hollow, feels empty, and your future will fill you with dread. Certainly it makes sense to shift this on the margin, get your key bucket list items in early, put a higher marginal priority on fun - even more so than you should have been doing anyway. But I don’t think my day-to-day life experience would improve for very long by taking this kind of path. Then again, each of us is different.

That all assumes you have ruled out attempting to improve our chances. Personally, even if I had to go down, I’d rather go down fighting. Insert rousing speech here.

Q: How Long Do We Have? What is the Timeline?

Short Answer: Unknown. Look at the arguments and evidence. Form your own opinion.

Long Answer: High uncertainty about when this will happen if it happens, whether or not one has high uncertainty about whether it happens at all within our lifetimes. Eliezer’s answer was that he would be very surprised if it didn’t happen by 2050, but that within that range little would surprise him and he has low confidence. Others have longer or shorter means and medians in their timelines. Mine are substantially longer and less confident than Eliezer’s. This is a question you must decide for yourself. The key is that there is uncertainty, so lots of difference scenarios matter.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: via Linkedin Image Generator

[ed. See also: The AI doomers feel undeterred (MIT).]

It's Not Normal

Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.
Mrs Krabappel: It'll take you about six weeks, dear. 

-The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," S3E23, May 7, 1992

We are living through weird times, and they've persisted for so long that you probably don't even notice it. But these times are not normal.

Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.

6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).

Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.

But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an "access control" that you have to work around in order to make a modification.

For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you're only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with "unauthorized bread":

If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn't walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion "cooking robots" that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven't really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):

But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you'd embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful "System on a Chip" (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an "access control" that satisfies DMCA 1201.

Likewise, in 1998, "access controls" (also called "DRM," "technical protection measures," etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:

But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a "complementary good" that improves on it.

It's even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What's more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.

Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a "subscription":

A thing that keeps happening:

And happening:

And happening:

In fact, it happens so often I've coined a term for it, "The Darth Vader MBA" (as in, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further"):

Here's what this all means: any manufacturer who devotes a small amount of engineering work and incurs a small hardware expense can extinguish private property rights altogether.

What do I mean by private property? Well, we can look to Blackstone's 1753 treatise:

The right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

You can't own your iPhone. If you take your iPhone to Apple and they tell you that it is beyond repair, you have to throw it away. If the repair your phone needs involves "parts pairing" (where a new part won't be recognized until an Apple technician "initializes" it through a DMCA-protected access control), then it's a felony to get that phone fixed somewhere else. If Apple tells you your phone is no longer supported because they've updated their OS, then it's a felony to wipe the phone and put a different OS on it (because installing a new OS involves bypassing an "access control" in the phone's bootloader). If Apple tells you that you can't have a piece of software – like ICE Block, an app that warns you if there are nearby ICE killers who might shoot you in the head through your windshield, which Apple has barred from its App Store on the grounds that ICE is a "protected class" – then you can't install it, because installing software that isn't delivered via the App Store involves bypassing an "access control" that checks software to ensure that it's authorized (just like the toaster with its unauthorized bread).

It's not just iPhones: versions of this play out in your medical implants (hearing aid, insulin pump, etc); appliances (stoves, fridges, washing machines); cars and ebikes; set-top boxes and game consoles; ebooks and streaming videos; small appliances (toothbrushes, TVs, speakers), and more.

Increasingly, things that you actually own are the exception, not the rule.

And this is not normal. The end of ownership represents an overturn of a foundation of modern civilization. The fact that the only "people" who can truly own something are the transhuman, immortal colony organisms we call "Limited Liability Corporations" is an absolutely surreal reversal of the normal order of things.

It's a reversal with deep implications: for one thing, it means that you can't protect yourself from raids on your private data or ready cash by adding privacy blockers to your device, which would make it impossible for airlines or ecommerce sites to guess about how rich/desperate you are before quoting you a "personalized price":

It also means you can't stop your device from leaking information about your movements, or even your conversations – Microsoft has announced that it will gather all of your private communications and ship them to its servers for use by "agentic AI": (...)

Microsoft has also confirmed that it provides US authorities with warrantless, secret access to your data:

This is deeply abnormal. Sure, greedy corporate control freaks weren't invented in the 21st century, but the laws that let those sociopaths put you in prison for failing to arrange your affairs to their benefit – and your own detriment – are.

But because computers got faster and cheaper over decades, the end of ownership has had an incremental rollout, and we've barely noticed that it's happened. Sure, we get irritated when our garage-door opener suddenly requires us to look at seven ads every time we use the app that makes it open or close:

But societally, we haven't connected that incident to this wider phenomenon. It stinks here, but we're all used to it.

It's not normal to buy a book and then not be able to lend it, sell it, or give it away. Lending, selling and giving away books is older than copyright. It's older than publishing. It's older than printing. It's older than paper. It is fucking weird (and also terrible) (obviously) that there's a new kind of very popular book that you can go to prison for lending, selling or giving away.

We're just a few cycles away from a pair of shoes that can figure out which shoelaces you're using, or a dishwasher that can block you from using third-party dishes:

It's not normal, and it has profound implications for our security, our privacy, and our society. It makes us easy pickings for corporate vampires who drain our wallets through the gadgets and tools we rely on. It makes us easy pickings for fascists and authoritarians who ally themselves with corporate vampires by promising them tax breaks in exchange for collusion in the destruction of a free society.

I know that these problems are more important than whether or not we think this is normal. But still. It. Is. Just. Not. Normal.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Anything labeled 'smart' is usually suspect. What's particularly dangerous is if successive generations fall prey to what conservation biology calls shifting baseline syndrome (forgetting or never really missing something that's been lost, so we don't grieve or fight to restore it). For a deep dive into why everything keeps getting worse see Mr. Doctorow's new book: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025.]

The Great Replacement

“What if you knew her and/ Found her dead on the ground/ How can you run when you know” — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

I am neither a forensic expert nor a jury member, but it sure looks to me like an ICE agent shot and killed a woman who wasn’t threatening his life. We have video of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7th, and the Washington Post has a detailed blow-by-blow analysis of the video: [...]

The Vice President’s claim that the shots were fired from the front of the car is pretty clearly false. He also repeatedly talked about ICE agents “going door to door” to deport illegal immigrants — pretty clearly ignoring the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures”.

Vance’s reception on social media — even from the kind of “tech right” types that are usually his fans — was largely negative.

 
Two days is probably far too early for the killing of Good to have shifted national opinion radically. The negative drift in views toward ICE is probably due to their consistent record of brutality, aggression, dubious legality, and unprofessionalism in Trump’s second term.

Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.

These are all things I noticed on X within just the last two days. There has been a pretty constant stream of these for months. Here’s a roundup of some others, by Jeremiah Johnson:

For the past year, ICE has been involved in a series of escalating incidents that rarely result in repercussions for anyone involved. ICE agents have recklessly caused traffic accidents and then, in one incident, arrested the person whose car they hit. They’ve tear-gassed a veteran, arrested him, and denied him access to medical care and an attorney. They have attacked protesters merely for filming them in public. They’ve pepper-sprayed a fleeing onlooker in the eyes from a foot away. They’ve pointed guns at a 6-year-old. They’ve knelt on top of a pregnant woman while they arrested her. They have arrested another pregnant woman, then kept her separated from her newborn while she languished in custody. They have repeatedly arrested American citizens, and they’ve even reportedly deported a citizen, directly contradicting court orders.

These are anecdotes, but there have also been careful, systematic reports about ICE arrests and mistreatment of U.S. citizens and poor conditions in ICE detention centers.

The Wall Street Journal also reviewed some other videos and other records of ICE shootings, and found a similar pattern to the Renee Good killing:

The Wall Street Journal has identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead…The Journal reviewed public records—court documents, agency press releases and gun-violence databases—of vehicle shootings involving immigration agents, though video is only publicly available for four of them…The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire.

Instead of causing ICE agents to pause in consternation, the killing of Renee Good appears to have made many even more aggressive. Here’s a video of an ICE agent in Minnesota telling a protester “Have y’all not learned from the past coupla days?”. Here’s a video of an ICE agent kicking over candles at a memorial for Renee Good.

Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the ultra-low standards for recruitment and training of ICE agents under Trump:

A deadly shooting in Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration officer comes weeks after a bombshell report on President Donald Trump’s desperate drive to rush 10,000 deportation officers onto the payroll by the end of 2025.

The explosive Daily Mail report found that the administration's $50,000 signing bonus attracted droves of unqualified recruits — high school grads who can "barely read or write," overweight candidates with doctor's notes saying they're unfit, and even applicants with pending criminal charges…[O]ne Department of Homeland Security official [said]: "We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English."

Jeremiah Johnson has more:

Reporting shows that ICE is filled with substandard agents. Its aggressive push to hire more agents uses charged rhetoric that appeals to far-right groups, but the agency has run into problems with recruits unable to pass background checks or meet minimum standards for academic background, personal fitness, or drug usage. One career ICE agent called new recruits “pathetic,” according to The Atlantic, and a current Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” and being inadvertently hired.

It’s worth noting, though, that Jonathan Ross himself is well-trained, with plenty of experience in law enforcement and military combat operations. So it’s not always a matter of poor training.

A number of Republican politicians have defended ICE’s actions with rhetoric that sounds downright authoritarian. Texas Representative Wesley Hunt said: “The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” Florida Representative Randy Fine said: “If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re going to end up just like that lady did.”

Is this America now? A country where unaccountable and poorly trained government agents go door to door, arresting and beating people on pure suspicion, and shooting people who don’t obey their every order or who try to get away? “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life” is a perfect description of an authoritarian police state. None of this is Constitutional, every bit of it is deeply antithetical to the American values we grew up taking for granted.

This tweet really seems to sum it up:

Why is this happening? Part of it is because of the mistakes of the Biden administration. For the first three years of his presidency, Biden allowed a massive, disorderly flood of border-hopping asylum seekers and quasi-legal migrants of all types to pour into the country, and as a result, Americans got really, really mad. That made immigration into a major issue in the 2024 election, helped Trump get elected, and provided political cover for a dramatic expansion of deportations. Now, probably thanks to ICE’s brutality and the administration’s lawlessness, support for immigrants and disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies are rising again. But the administration still has what it considers a mandate to act with impunity.

The deeper reason, though, is the ideology of the MAGA movement. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most Trump supporters view immigration as a literal invasion of the United States — not a figurative “invasion”, but a literal attempted conquest of America by foreigners.

And a substantial percentage of these folks believe that the purpose of this “invasion” is to “replace” the existing American population. This is from a PRRI poll from late 2024:

One-third of Americans (33%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” or the idea that immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background. The majority of Americans (62%) disagree with this theory. Agreement with this theory has decreased by 3 percentage points from 36% in 2019…Six in ten Republicans (60%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” compared with 30% of independents and 14% of Democrats. Among Republicans, those who hold a favorable view of Trump are more likely than those who hold an unfavorable view to agree that immigrants are invading our country (68% vs. 32%).

Perhaps some think that this “Great Replacement” is only cultural or partisan/political — the DHS recruits agents with a call to “Defend your culture!” — but many clearly think it’s racial in nature. The DHS recently posted this image:

100 million is far more than the total number of immigrants in the United States (which is estimated at around 52 million). Instead, it’s close to the total number of nonwhite people in the country. So the idea of “100 million deportations” clearly goes well beyond the idea of deporting illegal immigrants, and well beyond the idea of deporting all immigrants, into the territory of ethnic cleansing.

The DHS is posting these memes as a recruitment tactic, and polls about the “Great Replacement” show that there’s a large pool of potential recruits to whom this rhetoric is likely to appeal. In other words, many of the ICE agents now going around kicking in doors, beating up and threatening protesters, arresting citizens on pure suspicion, and occasionally shooting people believe that they are engaged in a race war. [...]

To be fair, the Great Replacement ideology didn’t arise out of nowhere. It’s an irrational and panicky overreaction that will lead America down the road to disaster — it’s full of hate and lies, it’s inherently divisive, it’s associated with some of history’s most horrible regimes, and it’s being promoted by some very bad actors. But it has also been egged on by a progressive movement that has made anti-white discrimination in hiring a pillar of its approach to racial equity, and has normalized anti-white rhetoric in the public sphere. This was an unforced error by the left — one of many over the past decade.

But whoever started America’s stupid race war, the real question is who will stand up and end it. The GOP, and the MAGA movement specifically, was offered a golden off-ramp from this dark path. In 2020 and 2024, Hispanic Americans, along with some Asian and Black Americans, shifted strongly toward Trump and the GOP. This was a perfect opportunity for the GOP to make itself, in the words of Marco Rubio, a “multiracial working-class” party. This would have been similar to how Nixon and Reagan expanded the GOP coalition to include “white ethnics” that the GOP had spurned in the early 20th century. But instead, MAGA took the victory handed to them by nonwhite voters and used it to act like exactly the kind of white-nationalist race warriors that liberals had always insisted they were. [...]

But Trump is an old man, and the younger generation was raised not on mid-20th-century nationalist rhetoric but on right-wing social media and memes. When Trump is gone, the MAGA movement will cease to be defined by his personal charisma, and will start being defined by the ideology of the Great Replacement — the same ideology that is now motivating many of the ICE agents acting like thugs in the streets of America.

And it’s increasingly clear that JD Vance, understanding that he lacks Trump’s cult of personality, has decided to make himself the leader, voice, and avatar of the “Great Replacement” movement — even if this arouses the disgust of many traditional conservatives and some figures in the tech right. With the disarray of the Democrats and the weakness of other GOP factions, Vance’s move may be a smart political bet, even if it comes at the expense of American freedom and stability.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: X/DHS

[ed. Oh for simpler times when a political break-in was considered the height of lawless government. Never thought I'd say this, but these days, and with this government, I'd vote for Nixon in a heartbeat:]

***

He covertly aided Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and ended American combat involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and the military draft the same year. His visit to China in 1972 led to diplomatic relations between the two nations, and he finalized the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. During the course of his first term, he enacted many progressive environmental policy shifts, such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency and passing laws, including the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts. In addition to implementing the Twenty-sixth Amendment that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, he ended the direct international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold in 1971, effectively taking the United States off the gold standard. He also imposed wage and price controls for 90 days, launched the Wars on Cancer and Drugs, passed the Controlled Substances Act, and presided over the end of the Space Race by overseeing the Apollo 11 Moon landing. ~ Wikipedia

Fascism in America

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”

by US Army/War Department/Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: US Army

[ed. Dictators are gonna dictate, it's what they do. The real blame lies with supporters who give them their power, willingly. The people who think their personal fortunes or the country's will be enhanced by standing in the shadow of a strongman. And others: tuned out and oblivious, who "just aren't into politics" or rely on "talking points" to tell them what to think. It's all here. Now. See also: January 10, 2026:]

***

Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone. (...)

What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”

In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking b*tch” after he killed her. (...) [ed. Probably the same way they reacted to the storming of Capitol Building...] 

Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.

On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim. (...)

When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”

Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Blame and Claim

A public adjuster on insuring a burning world

Just off a hiking trail, not far from where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea, a fuel and an oxidant combine and combust. The underbrush is dry and dusty, and within an hour flames engulf your home. Smoke fills your kitchen and your garage. Flecks of wallpaper from your children’s bedroom float down onto a nearby parking lot. Your wedding photos melt, as does your car battery. The glass windows of your dining room shatter and temperatures reach a thousand degrees. The root cause might have been a mountaineer who burned his toilet paper at dawn, a spark at a faulty transmission line in the foothills, a discarded cigarette fanned by the Santa Anas, or, simply, arson.

But it is too early to assign blame. Your attention is elsewhere. You are not home and you cannot get there, as the fire department has evacuated your neighborhood, the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. Your mind races, and you reach for your phone to ensure your family is safe even if you have already heard from them. Maybe you call the police, even though you hear the sirens throughout your neighborhood and see the caravans of emergency vehicles filling the streets.

When you do manage to get home, you stand on the sidewalk watching your rafters collapse and, covering your mouth with a shirtsleeve, you make your next call, to your insurance company to file a claim. You don’t know what this process entails. You have never filed a homeowner’s or business insurance claim, you have never read your policy, and you do not know if your policy covers what has happened, since you do not know what has happened or what caused it.

You are unaware that the insurance industry has been, in recent years, denying more claims and more coverage, exiting major markets, and raising premiums. As governments and corporations continue to enable fossil fuels, throttle renewable-energy sources, and deny long-established climate science, the related catastrophes (fires, floods, droughts, storms) and social effects (mass migration, war over natural resources, economic and demographic stratification) are increasingly commonplace and metastasizing. This new world order transfers the risk and harm of the disaster business by way of the insurance industry onto you, the consumer. On an episode of the climate science podcast A Matter of Degrees, Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner who is now the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley, said, “For many Americans, the single biggest financial asset you have is your home. If you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford enough insurance and that home is destroyed, then you’re left with basically nothing. Insurance is the climate crisis canary in the coal mine, and the canary is just about dead.”

Days later, as embers still burn and you begin to accept that not one object will be recovered or salvaged from your home, your insurance company sends one of its employees or contractors, called an adjuster, to assess the damage, value what is or was, and (hopefully) make an offer of payment. While insurance companies defend their adjusters as necessary agents who help them evaluate claims, critics label them as conflicted loyalists who will undervalue losses, delay settlements, and pressure policy holders to settle quickly.

But as you stand there, a man in business-casual attire emerges from the smoke and approaches you apprehensively. He introduces himself as someone who can help. His title, too, is adjuster, but if you are able to focus enough on his pitch, he tells you he is not an employee of your insurance company or of a roofing company or a general contractor. If you would like help navigating the ashes of your new life, he will help you rebuild: independently value your losses, handle communications and negotiations with your insurer, draft paperwork, and take care of the settlement of the claims. He is part private detective, part lawyer, part psychologist. All of this sounds reasonable, so you take his card and tell him you’ll be in touch.

That evening, as you make plans for your family to sleep at a nearby friend’s house or in a hotel, some quick internet research teaches you this “public” adjuster is indeed part of a legitimate industry (although sometimes public adjusters, you discover, are known as “private” adjusters). Staff adjusters, you learn, are the ones that work for insurance companies, and independent adjusters are contracted for certain projects by insurance companies.

This ecosystem of adjusters is baffling, but you decide to retain the public adjuster. As you sign his contract, he informs you that he will take a significant cut of any claim settlement he negotiates. Your calculation is that outsourcing the administration of the recovery of your life is worth the cost—so long as the insurance company agrees to write a check.

I recently spoke with the president of a large public adjuster firm in California that represented victims of the Palisades and Eaton fires that broke out in early 2025 and destroyed about sixteen thousand buildings on nearly forty thousand acres, causing tens of billions of dollars in damages. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

***

Tyler Maroney: How many claims does the average public adjuster typically handle in a year?

Adjuster: It depends on the size of the claim, but some will do a hundred claims a year, mostly smaller—$10,000 claims or $50,000 claims. But if you’re talking about somebody who’s handling complicated claims, I’d say an average load for an adjuster is somewhere between twenty and fifty a year.

TM: And you handle more than just massive disasters, right?

Adjuster: We respond to disasters every day, 365 days a year. Some of them are disasters that affect a hundred people or a thousand people. Those are big events. But there are buildings that burn down every single day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Minnesota or if you’re in New York, there’s water damage, there’s flooding, there are fires, there are robberies. It doesn’t require a hurricane or a wildfire for there to be a need for our service.

TM: I’ve read that clients don’t really know that public adjusters exist until they are desperate. Is part of your job getting the word out that this is an industry?

Adjuster: We’re luckier now in today’s world of technology because people can search for things online. I’ve been doing this thirty-three or thirty-four years, when there was no internet to search. If you had an insurance claim, you only had the connections you had, but today people can type into Google, “Can I get any help with my insurance claim?”

TM: I presume you go out into the field to attract clients?

Adjuster: Yes, part of the job is to be out there when an event happens or shortly after an event is over, to let people know that we exist.

TM: When a large fire like in the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles breaks out, you go as quickly as possible to the scene?

Adjuster: Yes. When you show up at somebody’s house and the family is in the front yard crying and trying to save things that aren’t savable, it’s sad. Sometimes it’s total loss, and you find people sifting through the rubble, lining up bits of pottery.

TM: And when you approach these suffering people, how do they respond?

Adjuster: You get a wide range of emotional responses, from “Get the fuck off my property, you ambulance-chasing vulture” to “Oh my God, we’re so lost. We don’t know what to do. Thank you so much for being here. Can you help us?”

TM: That must be a difficult emotional minefield to wade into.

Adjuster: Yes, and when you’re walking up to meet these people, most of the time they’ve never heard of a public adjuster. They have no idea who we are or what we do or that it’s a licensed profession. It can look like we’re trying to prey on people when they’re at this vulnerable point. The reality is that’s when they need help the most, because often they do whatever the insurance company tells them to do. That puts them in the worst spot they could be in.

TM: Worst spot?

Adjuster: So, say someone calls us six months after a fire. They have been arguing with their insurance company about the value of a claim and then, out of nowhere, they get a $65,000 bill from the restoration company [a third-party, for-profit vendor] and they want us to deal with that too. We have to say: You already agreed in writing and signed for them to do that work. That money’s gone, you spent it. We can’t take that back because it was an agreement you made before we were involved.

Most people just know they have an insurance agent that sold them some insurance, and they do what they’re told. Often that results in mistakes.

TM: What kinds of mistakes?

Adjuster: I’ll give you the easiest one. There is a fire in your house, but it burns only part of your house down. There’s still stuff in it. It’s not like a wildfire where it burns all the way to the ground. So the insurance company comes out, and they bring a restoration contractor. He’s going to help you get your stuff out of the house, store it, and get it cleaned up. Seems like an incredibly important service. He says it’s going to get worse if we don’t get your stuff out of the environment. Just sign here.

TM: Okay.

Adjuster: If the owner asks, “Who pays for this?,” the automatic response is “Oh, don’t worry about it, the insurance company pays for it, it’s part of your policy.” It makes perfect sense at the time. What they don’t share is that it erodes your contents limit [which means it reduces how much money the insurance company is likely to pay out]. You have given them carte blanche, and they can bill the insurance company directly. They charge not only for clean-up but for storage. And there’s no language that protects the homeowner if they’re not happy with the service.

TM: The homeowner is vulnerable at this point.

Adjuster: What they don’t understand is that six months from now, their stuff has all been cleaned, and the restoration company charged maybe a thousand dollars to clean something that was worth four hundred dollars and they don’t even want anymore. They could have just said, “Oh, a thousand dollars to clean that item? I don’t care about that anymore. Give me the thousand dollars.”

TM: And what can you do as an adjuster to prevent this?

Adjuster: You can say to the insurance company that our client wants to select items that have intrinsic value or that we believe are valuable enough to save and restore. We can advise that often the cost to clean something is more than its value or that it’s too damaged to properly restore it. Otherwise, a homeowner will find out that the restoration company has charged $65,000 when they have $300,000 of coverage for their contents, and that $65,000 is coming right off the top, and the cleaning costs reduces the amount of insurance they have for the things that they’ve completely lost.

TM: Back to the field, is the pitch as simple as “Hi, this might be awkward, but my name is x and I’m a public adjuster, which means I help people like you”?

Adjuster: Yeah. Often it’s “Your insurance company’s going to come out here, they’re going to assign an adjuster. That adjuster works for the insurance company. They don’t work for you. You have the opportunity and you have the right to hire your own public adjusting team that counterbalances the insurance company’s team so that you have an advocate who’s a true advocate for you to level the playing field.” That’s the pitch.

TM: Do you have a sense for what percentage of people who’ve been victimized by a catastrophe are able to engage public adjusters? I assume that most people, when they’ve gone through something like that, call their insurance company, right?

Adjuster: That’s traditionally what happens, yes. They either call their agent, if their insurance agent is somebody who they’re close with, or they call the insurance company and give notice that they have a claim. And some agents will refer clients to us in a secretive way. Some brokers [who work for policy holders, not insurance companies] think that if the carriers see that they’re recommending a public adjuster, that will be bad for their reputation with the insurance carriers. Some brokers don’t care.

TM: So how does that work?

Adjuster: Some brokers say, “Hey, don’t tell anybody I told you this, but you should talk to x public adjuster.” Or sometimes it’s more open, like, “Hey, [this public adjuster company] helped a lot of my clients, so you might want to talk to them.”

TM: So how do the brokers respond to you?

Adjuster: There are insurance brokers who haven’t worked with us or don’t know us. Or they feel threatened because they were hired to do this job, and by bringing or inviting you in as a public adjuster, they’re admitting that they don’t know what they’re doing. If you’re a salesperson and you’re selling insurance policies and you’re a credible person, you want to believe that what you’re selling is the best product available. You want to hold your head up high and say, “I represent x insurance company and they’re great insurance.” So for some insurance brokers, saying “Maybe you need help getting money” is saying something negative about the insurance company. For some insurance agents, that doesn’t feel right.

TM: Do you feel you are adversarial to insurance companies?

Adjuster: We are advocating for the policy holder, not the insurance company. The insurance companies like to say, “Why do you need a public adjuster? We’re going to pay you all the money you’re owed anyway.” But if that was true, then why would they care? Why would they even have that discussion if they’re going to pay the same benefits regardless of whether somebody has somebody helping them put it together? The reality is that they’re going to pay as little as they can. So are we adversarial, or are we just taking the workload off the policy holder? It’s an arduous process. Imagine a family where everything is gone, disappeared into the smoke, and you have the burden of sharing with the insurance company everything that you lost. Where would you start?

by Tyler Maroney, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Norman Wilson.

[ed. Public service post. Reminds me that I need to do an annual homeowner's insurance review. Been wondering how premiums and coverage have changed in the wake of increasingly common climate-related disasters. Unfortunately, no detail is provided on what these services are likely to cost (other than a "significant cut" of any negotiated claim settlement).]

The Online Scam That Hits Travelers When They're Most Distracted

When an actual human being answered an airline customer-service hotline after a single ring, I probably should have known I was being scammed.

At the time, I wasn’t exactly thinking critically. It was three days before Thanksgiving, and my family was about to miss our flight to Berlin, stuck in traffic en route to the airport in Newark, N.J. Blame a combination of poor planning, construction on I-95 and five consecutive canceled Ubers.

So when an empathetic-sounding man identified himself as a United Airlines agent named Sheldon and immediately asked for my phone number in case we got disconnected, I felt nothing but an overwhelming sense of relief. Sheldon told me not to worry. He’d get my family to Berlin. “Sheldon, you are an angel,” I said through tears, explaining that my father had died in July and this was to be our family’s first Thanksgiving without him.

Sheldon told me, with what seemed like genuine emotion, that he was terribly sorry for my loss. The good news was he could get us on a Lufthansa flight later that night, going through Munich. All I had to do was cover the price difference between the tickets: $1,415.97 for the three of us. I sighed and gave Sheldon my American Express card number.

That’s when I became the latest victim of what the Federal Trade Commission calls a business-impostor or business-impersonator scam. Like 396,227 other Americans in the first nine months of this year — up 18% from the same period last year — I fell for this increasingly sophisticated deception, in which someone claims to represent a trusted company to extract money and personal data from an unsuspecting victim...

The specific techniques the scammers use vary: Some pose as airlines on social media and respond to consumer complaints. Others use texts or emails claiming to be an airline reporting a delayed or canceled flight to phish for travelers’ data. But the objective is always the same: to hit a stressed out, overwhelmed traveler at their most vulnerable.

A sponsored scam

In my case, the scammer exploited weaknesses in Google’s automated ad-screening system, so that fraudulent sponsored results rose to the top. After I reported the fake “United Airlines” ad to Google, via an online form for consumers, it was taken down. But a few days later, I entered the same search terms and the identical ad featuring the same 1-888 number was back at the top of my results. I reported it again, and it was quickly removed again. (...)

In retrospect, my refusal to face reality was my biggest mistake. We were still in traffic, set to arrive at the airport just as United Flight 962 was beginning to board, with three large suitcases to check. We had zero chance of making it.

The replacement of humans with not-always-helpful AI-powered customer-service tools makes it easier for an airline scammer to lure frustrated travelers. That’s what happened to me in the back of the cab when I opened the United app on my phone and began furiously texting, first with a bot, then with an actual representative, who sent me a link for the company’s Agent on Demand service to help passengers in urgent situations.

The link didn’t work. When I tried to text the agent on the app, the connection got lost and I was back to square one, chatting with a bot. Time was running out. Exasperated, I closed the app and typed “United airlines agent on demand” into Google. The top search result on my phone said United.com, had a 1-888 number next to it and said it had had “1M+ visits in past month.” In other words, it looked legit. I tapped the number. That’s when I first connected with Sheldon.

Not a good sign

After paying for the new tickets, I received a confirmation email from an unfamiliar domain. Sheldon was still on the line with me, so I asked him what was going on. Shouldn’t the confirmation come from United.com, not some random site called Travelomile? Sheldon explained that because Lufthansa operated the new flight and the changes were so last-minute, United used the site as its payments-processing partner. This didn’t quite make sense, but I suppose I still wanted to believe in Sheldon.

It wasn’t until he asked me to upload images of my family’s passports to a janky-looking website that my head started to spin. When our cab pulled into the departures zone, I hung up on Sheldon and ran to United’s customer-service counter in tears. I showed the agent behind the counter our “boarding passes.”

“I don’t know what these are, but I will help you,” the agent said. He booked us on the next flight, through Frankfurt, at no extra cost — a holiday miracle.

When we arrived at our gate, I called American Express and contested the charge from Travelomile before canceling my credit card. I then contacted Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, to put a fraud alert on my file. Next, I filed complaint with the FTC and reported the fake ad to Google. Later, I looked up Travelomile on TrustPilot, an independent customer-review platform, and found 47 one-star ratings out 297 ratings total. Many of those one-star reviews were from people who said they had fallen for a similar scam. (...)

Stay on guard when you travel

What consumers can do to protect themselves from travel scammers, according to John Breyault of the National Consumers League:

• Save the airline’s real number in your contacts before traveling.
• If you reach out to the airline, do it through its official app.
• If you’ve been defrauded by an impostor, contact your bank or credit card company immediately.  [ed. more...]

by Rachel Dodes, Bloomberg/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Federal Government Blocks State AI Regulation

President Trump issued an executive order yesterday attempting to thwart state AI laws, saying that federal agencies must fight state laws because Congress hasn’t yet implemented a national AI standard. Trump’s executive order tells the Justice Department, Commerce Department, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and other federal agencies to take a variety of actions.

“My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard—not 50 discordant State ones. The resulting framework must forbid State laws that conflict with the policy set forth in this order… Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation,” Trump’s order said. The order claims that state laws, such as one passed in Colorado, “are increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models.”

Congressional Republicans recently decided not to include a Trump-backed plan to block state AI laws in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), although it could be included in other legislation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also failed to get congressional backing for legislation that would punish states with AI laws.

“After months of failed lobbying and two defeats in Congress, Big Tech has finally received the return on its ample investment in Donald Trump,” US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said yesterday. “With this executive order, Trump is delivering exactly what his billionaire benefactors demanded—all at the expense of our kids, our communities, our workers, and our planet.”

Markey said that “a broad, bipartisan coalition in Congress has rejected the AI moratorium again and again.” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said the “executive order’s overly broad preemption threatens states with lawsuits and funding cuts for protecting their residents from AI-powered frauds, scams, and deepfakes.”

Trump orders Bondi to sue states

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said that “preventing states from enacting common-sense regulation that protects people from the very real harms of AI is absurd and dangerous. Congress has a responsibility to get this technology right—and quickly—but states must be allowed to act in the public interest in the meantime. I’ll be working with my colleagues to introduce a full repeal of this order in the coming days.”

The Trump order includes a variation on Cruz’s proposal to prevent states with AI laws from accessing broadband grant funds. The executive order also includes a plan that Trump recently floated to have the federal government file lawsuits against states with AI laws.

Within 30 days of yesterday’s order, US Attorney General Pam Bondi is required to create an AI Litigation Task Force “whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws inconsistent with the policy set forth in section 2 of this order, including on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing Federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful in the Attorney General’s judgment.”...

It would be up to Congress to decide whether to pass the proposed legislation. But the various other components of the executive order could dissuade states from implementing AI laws even if Congress takes no action.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Kamikaze pilot WWII via:

[ed. Umm... state's rights? Whatever. The main intent of course is to do nothing, allowing AI to progress without any external oversight or regulation. This decision will go to court, lose, be appealed, lose, and then a couple years later get dumped on the Supreme Court - pretty much the same game plan we've seen over and over again on other issues. In the mean time, AI models will become so dangerous (and imbedded) that even if the Supreme Court renders a negative ruling it'll be too late.]