Job Hugging and the Ten-Year Trap

The Bullshit Job Is Real. Leaving It Is Almost Impossible.

The career confusion I usually write about involves people in their early twenties trying to figure out which direction to go. But there’s a different kind of confusion that sits with people who are ten or fifteen years into something. They already chose. They’ve been executing that choice for over a decade. The question now is whether to abandon the investment.

This is the person who spent twelve years qualifying for a role that might exist for five more. Who’s watching their industry consolidate, their company restructure for the third time, their colleagues get made redundant in waves. Who makes decent money, holds seniority they earned, and knows that both might evaporate in the next round of cuts.

The question sitting with them: whether the last decade was preparation for obsolescence.

The Ten-Year Trap

Ten years into anything builds three locks simultaneously.

The economic lock is straightforward. A decade of progression means a salary that supports a particular life. Mortgage, school fees, the lifestyle that assumes this income level. Your household budget depends on it. Your partner’s career decisions factor it in. Leaving means accepting a significant pay cut or starting over in a field where you’re competing with people ten years younger who cost half as much.

The psychological lock runs deeper. You’ve been a senior whatever-you-are for years. The title is how you introduce yourself, how your parents describe you, how you think about your place in the world. The identity has fused with the person. Starting over means becoming junior again, and that feels like regression even when it’s rational movement.

Then there’s the skills problem. You’ve spent ten years becoming excellent at navigating a particular regulatory framework, or marketing a channel that’s dying, or accumulating institutional knowledge of systems that won’t outlast you. The expertise might not transfer anywhere else. You won’t know until you try, and trying means leaving.

Each year adds weight to these locks. The salary increases. The identity solidifies. The skills specialise further. You’ve optimised yourself for one context, and now that context is uncertain.

Why This Hits Different

This has happened before. Miners watched pits close. Typists saw word processors arrive. Factory workers watched production move overseas. Entire industries disappeared, often rapidly, leaving people with skills that had no market.

But those were working-class jobs. The middle-class professional path was supposed to be different. University degree, graduate scheme, steady progression, pension at the end. The bargain was: get educated, specialise in something professional, and you’ll have security.

That bargain is breaking for a different class of worker now. The comfortable middle-skilled roles, the ones requiring degrees and years of training, are the ones getting automated or consolidated. People who did everything right by the old rules are discovering their expertise has an expiration date.

The decline happens fast enough that you can’t pivot gradually, but slow enough that you keep thinking you have time. Restructures happen every eighteen months. Colleagues disappear in rounds. The company says it’s about efficiency, about staying competitive, about the future. You watch the org chart shrink and know that your highly paid, highly specific role could be next.

The Recognition Point

Something specific triggers the realisation. Someone five years younger gets made redundant and you understand that seniority makes you expensive to keep. You see your exact role automated at a competitor. You’re in your third restructure in five years and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. You try explaining what you do and realise you’re describing institutional knowledge of a dying system rather than a transferable skill.

The recognition makes everything worse because now you know you’re trapped and you’re still not leaving.

The questions that follow have no good answers. How severe is the decline? Is this slow erosion over another decade or rapid collapse where half the roles disappear in three years? Industry analysis is always backwards-looking. By the time consensus forms that a sector is dying, it’s already dead.

What transfers? You’ve become excellent at something specific. Maybe it’s risk assessment and it works everywhere. Maybe it’s navigating particular regulations and it works nowhere else. You discover this in job interviews, explaining why someone should hire you for work you’ve never done, competing against people who have.

The financial calculation involves variables you can’t control. How long could you survive without income? What pay cut is survivable? These depend on your partner’s salary, your savings, your mortgage, your tolerance for uncertainty. They have to be assessed without admitting you’re considering blowing up the household finances.

Timing becomes impossible to judge. Leave now and you preserve some career momentum. You’re choosing to go rather than being pushed. But you’re walking away from salary and seniority you might keep for another three years. Wait for redundancy and you get a package, but you’re also older, in a market flooded with other redundancies, and you’ve lost time you could have spent retraining.

The worst question sits underneath everything: what if your skills are too specific and you genuinely can’t transfer? What if the last ten years made you excellent at something nobody else needs? What if you leave, burn through savings trying to pivot, and discover you’re competing for entry-level positions against twenty-five-year-olds who’ll work for half what you need?

None of these have answers because they all depend on information you don’t possess. You can’t know your skills transfer until you’ve transferred them. You can’t know when redundancies hit until they hit. You can’t know if you’ve waited too long until you’ve already waited too long.

Some people can move with incomplete information and accept they might be wrong. Most people can’t. The uncertainty paralyses, so they wait for certainty, and by the time certainty arrives, the decision has been made for them.

by Alex McCann, The Republic of Letters | Read more:
Image: istock/Getty via
[ed. ed. See also: Confessions of a job hugger: Still at my desk, still in denial (ADN):]

"Job huggers — employees clinging to roles long past their expiration date — lurk in cubicles in many workplaces. According to Monster’s 2025 Job Hugging Report, 48% of surveyed employees say they stay in their current role for comfort, security or stability.

For these employees, job hugging is the workplace version of comfort food: familiar, filling and guaranteed to leave you sluggish. They don’t love their jobs but don’t see anything better on the horizon. They stay because the devil they know offers dental coverage, even though the spark that once made them excited about their jobs wheezes for oxygen.

Behind many “grateful to have a job” smiles sits quiet dread. Sunday nights hit like sentencing hearings. Job huggers run mental marathons of justification: Maybe my boss will retire. Maybe next quarter will improve. Maybe leadership will finally hire that extra person they promised back when TikTok was new.

Spoiler: They won’t.

The truth: Job huggers don’t cling to jobs; they cling to security, identity and even social connection. Letting go of a problem job before an employee finds a new landing spot feels like jumping from a plane without a functioning parachute."

Nazaré, Portugal

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Fiiiiiiish
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The Fall of the English Department

... and rise of new stewards

A decline in public interest in reading literature corresponds to the decline of the English department. By all accounts, the state of public literacy has only gotten worse with reading for pleasure in the U.S. adult population having plummeted over the past 40 years. Fewer than half of all adults read at least one work of literature in 2015, a concerning statistic that was described as “the lowest percentage . . . since NEA surveys began in 1982.” In 2022, less than half of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year.

And yet… Even as university English departments pared back structured canonical curricula and major enrollments fell, there remain signs of renewed public appetite for serious reading and study of literature.

Looking out on the state of things in 2025, it is clear there are major changes afoot. A major cultural reorientation is underway. The 2020s promise to be a big decade for the revival of reading the classics. Online initiatives such as The Catherine Project and my Versed Community (now with 600 members) demonstrate a renewed desire for encountering works of literature in conversation and with rigor.

Where the universities have failed, some non-academic readers and self-learners are committing themselves to the life of the mind. Readers, writers, “autodidacts,” and communities of learners outside the university are preserving tradition, sharing knowledge and wisdom, improving language, experimenting creatively, and cultivating new fields of the imagination. The public commitment to literature is increasingly counter-cultural. Readers are turning to the canon out of a desire for meaning and beauty.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called these readers the “clerisy,” a class of readers that included those outside the academy (teachers, students, skilled and frontline workers, etc.) whose continued education and interest in the arts preserve and support the cultural life of a nation. The health of a nation depends upon this class, which is not a class of academics or scholars or theologians but of average readers capable of advancing learning in all branches of knowledge. He believed that some members of this clerisy would reside inside the academy but most of them would be living lives outside of the universities. In their hands was the “strongest security and the surest provision, both for the permanence and the progressive advance of whatever (laws, institutions, tenures, rights, privileges, freedoms, obligations, etc.) constitute the public weal.”

On platforms like Substack, YouTube, and public reading groups, many are studying and writing about great works of world literature more for soul-formation and cultural belonging than for credentialization.

The custodianship of literary culture has passed from institutions to the public reader, those seeking wisdom, meaning, beauty, and intellectual depth in an age of distraction. Without the promise of credentials or any external obligation, they have become the new stewards of the tradition. They’re buying classics, reading and expanding the canon, writing and reading close-reading essays and lectures online, and joining grassroots salons. Among them, the idea of “required reading” seems foreign. Reading has become instead voluntary devotion.

This isn’t optimistic guff. This is my firsthand experience, something that very few, if any, academics have. My students and friends on my Versed Community have convinced me that the relevance and vitality of literature do not depend upon the academy. It really rests on all of us. My experience teaching on Versed is actively shaping the way I think of my vocation in the world as a “professor” without an institution and the future of literature and the arts.

Communal learning, even though not “in-person,” is proving that the past works of literature are being enlarged by the present. This renewed stewardship is less bureaucratic and more intimate, less obligatory and more communal, and it may prove the stronger for it. I used to think that the decline of the English department signaled the death of literary study. I have learned that it signals a return of literature to common life and personal encounter. Reading is returning again to the way it was before it was professionalized by the academic study of it. It’s becoming the public commons.

What’s happening is a true renaissance of reading. And it’s important that this revival grows into a place of creativity. We don’t need to recover the golden age of the English department, as much as I admire a systematic approach to literature and its history. We need to create something new, a new relation to the canon. We need a revival of literature that feeds both intellect and spirit and one that is willing to encourage a productive and creative relationship to the ever-growing canon. That’s what our present circumstances offer.

by Adam Walker, Substack |  Read more:

Image: William Shakespeare, The First Folio, 1623 via

I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person

I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person.

Let me give you an example. Last quarter, I led a team of engineers on an initiative to grow my company’s artificial intelligence data centers, which use millions of gallons of water per day. My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am.

Does the leadership at my company promote a xenophobic agenda and use the wealth I help them acquire to donate directly to bigoted causes and politicians I find despicable? Yeah, sure. Did I celebrate my last birthday at Drag Brunch? Also yes. I even tipped with five-dollar bills. I contain multitudes, and would appreciate it if you focused on the brunch one.

Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should. And when you do, you’ll find that my ratio of evil hours to not evil hours is much more even, numerically.

I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans.

And besides, I don’t plan to stay at this job forever, just for my prime working years, until I can install a new state-of-the-art infinity pool in my country home. The problem is that whenever I think I’m going to leave, there’s always the potential for a promotion, and also a new upgrade for the pool, like underwater disco lights. Time really flies when you’re not thinking about the effect you have on others.

But I absolutely intend to leave at some point. And when I do, you should define me by whatever I do next, unless it’s also evil, in which case, define me by how I ultimately spend my retirement.

Because here’s the thing: It’s not me committing these acts of evil. I’m just following orders (until I get promoted; then I’ll get to give them). But until then, I do whatever my supervisor tells me to do, and that’s just how work works. Sure, I chose to be here, and yes, I could almost certainly find a job elsewhere, but redoing my résumé would take time. Also, I don’t feel like it. Besides, once a year, my company mandates all employees to help clean up a local beach, and I almost always go.

Speaking of the good we do at work, sometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact. There’s something so silly about discussing opportunities to increase profits for international arms dealers while wearing a purple button-down covered in bright hibiscus blossoms.

And when it comes to making things even, I put my money where my mouth is. I might make more than 99 percent of all Americans, but I also make sure to donate almost 1 percent of my salary to nonprofits. This way, I can wear their company tote bag to my local food coop. Did I mention I shop at a local food coop? It’s quite literally the least I could do.

by Emily Bressler, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Loco Moco

Loco Moco

This classic Hawaiian dish is similar to Japanese hambagu, a ground beef patty topped with a ketchup-based sauce, but loco moco is heartier, served atop a pile of white rice, smothered with caramelized onion gravy and topped with a fried egg. People in Hawaii enjoy it for breakfast, lunch, dinner or any time in between. This version is adapted from “Aloha Kitchen: Recipes From Hawai‘i,” by Alana Kysar, a cookbook of Hawaiian classics. - recipe:

[ed. Never thought I'd see Loco Moco in the NY Times food section. What next? Spam musubi?]

Golden Line at Twilight. 5:15 to 5:45 am. 60° F. September 10, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
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Wim Schuhmacher (1894–1986), Still life. 
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The ‘New’ Solution for the N.Y.C. Housing Crisis: Single-Room Apartments

Single-room apartments once symbolized everything wrong with New York City. They didn’t have private kitchens or bathrooms and were seen as cheap places where crime festered, drugs flourished and the poor suffered daily indignities.

Today, city officials say the solution to the housing crisis involves building a lot more of them.

Councilman Erik Bottcher, a Democrat who represents parts of Manhattan, introduced a bill on Tuesday that would allow the construction of new single-room-occupancy apartments as small as 100 square feet for the first time in decades. The legislation, backed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, would make it easier to convert office buildings into these types of homes, also known as S.R.O.s.

The apartments can resemble dormitories or suites, and could become cheaper housing options in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

“We’re trying to make housing more affordable and create more supply,” said Ahmed Tigani, the acting commissioner of the housing department.

Such apartments, where kitchens and bathrooms are often shared, can cost $1,500 or less in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, where median rents easily exceed $3,000 per month.

The push underscores how an extreme shortage of housing has led to a turnaround in attitudes toward forms of shared housing, which have long been a controversial feature of cities worldwide.

Cities like London, Zurich and Seoul, with a thirst for cheap homes, are exploring similar ideas, as are other places in America. Other cities, like Hong Kong, still struggle to make the homes livable.

Few cities, though, have their histories as intertwined with these types of homes as New York. A population boom in the first half of the 20th century led to thousands of people cramming into flophouses, boardinghouses and S.R.O.s.

There are about 30,000 to 40,000 left, down from more than 100,000 in New York City in the early 20th century, according to a 2018 study from the N.Y.U. Furman Center. But the homes became associated with poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.

The city passed laws preventing the construction of new units and the division of apartment buildings into S.R.O.s, leading to their steady decline over the decades.

“Overcrowding, overcharging and the creation of disease and crime-breeding slums have been the direct result of this conversion practice,” Mayor Robert F. Wagner said in 1954 when signing one of these bills. An adviser to a City Council committee said at the time that the growth in S.R.O.s would “reduce New York City to cubicle-room living.”

In some ways, that is now part of the idea.

The obvious benefit, city officials said, is that S.R.O.s and other shared housing would be cheap. But they might also better match the city’s changing demographics.

The number of single-person households grew almost 9 percent between 2018 and 2023, city officials said. The number of households with people living together who are not a family — for example, roommates — grew more than 11 percent over that same time period.

Because of the housing shortage, many people end up joining together to rent bigger homes better suited for families, said Michael Sandler, the housing department’s associate commissioner of neighborhood strategies. Building new shared housing might free up those apartments. (...)

The new legislation would also improve certain safety standards for shared housing, such as allowing only up to three apartments per kitchen or per bathroom, Mr. Sandler said. It would require shared housing to have sprinklers and provide enough electricity per room to run small appliances.

Allowing new shared housing could help provide new living options for young single people; people experiencing homelessness; older people and people just moving to city, city officials said.

“These are not yesterday’s S.R.O.’s,” said Mr. Bottcher, the councilman. “They’re modern, flexible, well-managed homes that can meet the needs of a diverse population.”

by Mihir Zaveri, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
[ed. These and other types of housing options should always be available. Just don't make people commit to 12 month leases (making tiny housing problems even worse). These are transitory spaces. Month to month, or six month leases should be fine, and probably more flexible for most people.]

The Silent Crowd

It is widely believed that Thomas Jefferson was terrified of public speaking. John Adams once said of him, “During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” During his eight years in the White House, Jefferson seems to have limited his speechmaking to two inaugural addresses, which he simply read out loud “in so low a tone that few heard it.”

I remember how relieved I was to learn this. To know that it was possible to succeed in life while avoiding the podium was very consoling—for about five minutes. The truth is that not even Jefferson could follow in his own footsteps today. It is now inconceivable that a person could become president of the United States through the power of his writing alone. To refuse to speak in public is to refuse a career in politics—and many other careers as well.

In fact, Jefferson would be unlikely to succeed as an author today. It used to be that a person could just write books and, if he were lucky, people would read them. Now he must stand in front of crowds of varying sizes and say that he has written these books—otherwise, no one will know that they exist. Radio and television interviews offer new venues for stage fright: Some shows put one in front of a live audience of a few hundred people and an invisible audience of millions. You cannot appear on The Daily Show holding a piece of paper and begin reading your lines like Thomas Jefferson. (...)

Fear of public speaking is also a fertile source of psychological suffering elsewhere in life. I can remember dreading any event where being asked to speak was a possibility. I have to give a toast at your wedding? Wonderful. I can now spend the entire ceremony, and much of the preceding week, feeling like a condemned man in view of the scaffold.

Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self—the very feeling we call “I”—but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous. (...)

Of course, many people have solved the problem of what to do when a thousand pairs of eyes are looking their way. And some of them, for whatever reason, are natural performers. From childhood, they have wanted nothing more than to display their talents to a crowd. Many of these people are narcissists, of course, and hollowed out in unenviable ways. Where your self-consciousness has become a dying star, theirs has become a wormhole to a parallel universe. They don’t suffer much there, perhaps, but they don’t quite make contact here either. And many natural performers are comfortable only within a certain frame. It is always interesting, for instance, to see a famous actor wracked by fear while accepting an Academy Award. Simply being oneself before an audience can be terrifying even for those who perform for a living.

Needless to say, I am not a born performer. Nor am I naturally comfortable standing in front of a group of friends or strangers to deliver a message. However, I have always been someone who had things he wanted to say. This marriage of fear and desire is an unhappy one—and many people are stuck in it.

At the end of my senior year in high school, I learned that I was to be the class valedictorian. I declined the honor. And I managed to get into my thirties without directly confronting my fear of public speaking. At the age of thirty-three, I enrolled in graduate school, where I gave a few scientific presentations while lurking in the shadows of PowerPoint. Still, it seemed that I might be able to skirt my problem with a little luck—until I began to feel as though a large pit had opened in the center of my life, and I was circling the edge. It was becoming professionally and psychologically impossible to turn away.

The reckoning finally came when I published my first book, The End of Faith. Suddenly, I was thirty-seven and faced with the prospect of a book tour. I briefly considered avoiding all public appearances and becoming a man of mystery. Had I done so, I would still be fairly mysterious, and you probably wouldn’t be reading these words.

I cannot personally attest to most forms of self-overcoming: I don’t know what it is like to recover from addiction, lose a hundred pounds, or fight in a war. I can say from experience, however, that it is possible to change one’s relationship to public speaking.

And the process need not take long. In fact, I have spoken publicly no more than fifty times in my life, and many of my earliest appearances were for fairly high stakes, being either televised, or against opponents who would have dearly loved to see me fail, or both. Given where I started, I believe that almost anyone can transcend a fear of the podium. (Whether he has something interesting to say is another matter, of course—one that he would do well to sort out before attracting a crowd.)

If you have been avoiding public speaking, I hope you find the following points helpful:

1. Admit that you have a problem

No one is likely to drag you in front of a crowd and force you to produce audible sentences. Thus, you can probably avoid speaking in public for the rest of your life. Even if you are one day put on trial for murder, you can refuse to testify in your own defense. If your mother dies and your father asks that you say a few words at the funeral, you can always retreat into your grief. Bill Clinton didn’t speak at his mother’s funeral, and he is famously at ease in front of a crowd. Everyone already knows that you loved your mother. So, yes, you can probably keep silent until you get safely into a grave of your own.

But the fear will periodically make you miserable, and it will limit your opportunities in life. Thomas Jefferson aside, the people who currently run the world were first willing to run a meeting, deliver a speech, or debate opponents in a public forum. You might feel that you haven’t paid much of a price for avoiding the crowd, but you don’t know what your life would be like if you had become a competent public speaker. If you are in college, or just beginning your career, or even somewhere near its middle, it is time to overcome your fear.

by Sam Harris |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Anthony Brault, Pots and Pans
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The Prospects For Left-Wing Populism

The prospects for left-wing populism.

The difference between Mamdani’s pitch and the Bernie/AOC line is easy to see, if one has the correct understanding of populism. In fact, the comparison provides a good example of how widespread misunderstanding of populism handicaps left-wing strategy. The crucial thing to understand about populism, and populist anger, is that it is a revolt directed against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of “common sense” against the sort of “fancy theories” defended by intellectuals and their lackeys. (...)

An easy way to distinguish a populist appeal from a technocratic one is that the populist message will restrict itself entirely to primary representations. For example, the “cost of living” is not a primary representation, it is an abstract concept. The price of groceries, on the other hand, is a primary representation – everyone can easily summon up an image of the price, on the supermarket shelf, the last time they bought orange juice or bread. This is, of course, something that Trump spent a great deal of time talking about (“groceries, such a simple word”), and that the Brahmin left in America spent a great deal of time making fun of him for (e.g. here). In so doing, they exhibited a sort of higher-order stupidity. As Stanovich observes, the thing about primary representations is that they have a “special salience” that abstract concepts will never possess. (...)

From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.) The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.

In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist.

by Joeseph Heath, In Due Course |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Sounds about right. See also: Why We Never Hear About the Countries Where Socialism Works (Amie Boakye).]

When most people hear the word socialism, the first images that flash across their minds are grim ones: long bread lines in the Soviet Union, economic collapse in Venezuela, or repression in Cuba. In popular Western discourse, socialism has been painted as synonymous with failure, inefficiency, and authoritarianism. The narrative is so ingrained that even those who’ve never studied political theory or looked closely at history reflexively think socialism equals poverty.

But here’s the paradox: many countries around the world have quietly, effectively integrated socialist principles into their political and economic systems. And they are thriving. These nations often rank among the happiest, healthiest, and most educated societies on Earth. So why don’t we hear about them? Why do their successes stay in the shadows while the failures dominate headlines?

The short answer: power, perception, and politics.

Before diving into examples, it’s important to define what socialism means in practice, because the word itself has become a linguistic battlefield. For some, socialism means full state control over production and distribution. For others, it’s a mixed economy where public services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure are guaranteed, while markets handle the rest.

In reality, modern socialism often looks less like Soviet central planning and more like a robust safety net combined with democratic governance. It’s universal healthcare in Sweden, tuition-free universities in Finland, and public housing in Vienna. It’s not the abolition of markets, but the idea that essential services should be protected from market failure.

That distinction matters. Because much of the West’s fear-mongering about socialism rests on outdated caricatures.

An Incredible Privilege and a Daunting Task

Darkness had fallen and the tide was rolling in, lapping at the heels of the team of people who were quickly disassembling the big whale, piece by piece, bone by bone.

The young humpback, 26 feet long and 20,000 pounds in all (roughly the size of a small school bus), had become entangled in crabbing gear and had beached itself along the central Oregon coast over the weekend. After two days of efforts to save the whale failed, it was euthanized. After that, it was up to the Siletz tribe to take the whale carcass apart.

Lisa Norton, who works as the chief administrative officer for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and who is also an experienced elk hunter, helped organize the harvest and has been speaking on behalf of the team who worked for nearly 12 hours on the beach Tuesday.

This was the first time in generations that the Siletz tribe has harvested a whale, she said. Nobody in the tribe had ever done it before, and nobody could remember the last time it happened. Ancestors of some of the 30 bands that make up the tribe were prolific whalers, but those cultural practices had long been suppressed by the U.S. government. The Siletz tribe has only recently regained its fishing and hunting rights (the tribe still needed a special permit to harvest the humpback).

“We recognized the importance of what could be with this,” Norton said. “I prefer to think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we can learn from.”

It was also an enormous undertaking.

“Exhausting would be an understatement,” she said.

The young humpback whale came ashore north of Yachats on Saturday afternoon. Over the next 48 hours, people flocked to the beach to help the still-living whale, despite urges from the Oregon Marine Mammal Stranding Network not to do so. Online, thousands watched a livestream of the event, pouring out their sympathies for the animal in Facebook comments.

Meanwhile, 50 miles up the coast, Siletz tribal members were gathered at the Chinook Winds Casino Resort for the tribe’s annual Restoration Powwow, which celebrates the restoration of the tribe’s federal recognition in 1977. Word about the whale spread around the powwow, where some prayed and danced for the whale, Norton said.

On Monday, when it was clear the humpback would not survive and would ultimately need to be euthanized, Oregon State Police (who had previously worked with Siletz hunters) reached out to the tribe about the possibility of harvesting the animal. The tribe rushed to secure the proper permits and assembled a team of hunters to take apart the whale.

“What an incredible privilege and a daunting task,” Norton said. “The folks that stood up and said ‘We could do this’ were very brave. And what they did was a very important piece to the next chapter of this whale.” (...)

Before anyone cut into the animal, they smudged and prayed over its body. They honored the animal for its sacrifice. They offered thanks to the bounty it provided. They asked Creator to guide their hands.

“That is what you do,” Norton said. “As experienced hunters we always give thanks to what has been provided.”

Some members of the team had stayed up late Monday night, researching the bone structure of humpback whales, which parts should be taken, how to cut into the animal. Once on the beach, they also relied on their own instinct as hunters. But the whale was very different from an elk, Norton said, and not just because it was 30 times as big.

The team already knew that unlike the tribe’s ancestors, they wouldn’t harvest any meat from the whale. Since the animal had been chemically sedated and euthanized, everyone was concerned the meat wouldn’t be safe for human consumption. But there was still plenty to harvest. The team took all the whale’s blubber, thousands of pounds of it, as well as virtually all its bones. They also separated the head so they could later harvest the baleen, the keratin structure that helps the whale filter feed in the ocean.

As they worked into the night, the tribe got a helping hand from Tru-North Construction, local contractors who were on site with heavy equipment. The contractors used an excavator to dig a trench for the whale meat and organs that wouldn’t be used and helped maneuver the animal around for the team of harvesters. The company also provided a flatbed truck so tribal members wouldn’t have to transport the blubber and bones in their own cars — a godsend, Norton said. (...)

When the sun rose over the beach the next morning, the spot where people had spent days trying to save the dying whale was now a mess of meat and skin — food for the foragers that would clean it all up.

To some, it may seem like a gruesome end to a tragic story, Norton said, but for the tribe it was a heartfelt experience that honored the life so many had tried to save.

“As we were processing and collecting these materials, folks were telling us the stories of how strong this whale was,” Norton said. “That story will stay with each of those pieces that are then put back out in the world.”

The tribe has not yet decided what, exactly, they’re going to do with the animal parts. They plan to render the blubber down to oil, but they’re first going to check to make sure it isn’t toxic. Whale bones have historically been used to make tools or art, which are possibilities, Norton said, and baleen can be used to decorate regalia. One elder told her that a large whale vertebra makes a nice stool, but she said it probably wouldn’t go with her home décor.

“We anticipate that this process is going to continue for a year or two until it’s done,” Norton said.

by Jamie Hale, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Graves via

[ed. Fortunately this whale was relatively fresh - old bloated ones can be barf-inducing. I can only imagine the frantic discussions and conflicted feelings many tribal members felt when suddenly given this opportunity and told ' have at it'. The tension between ancestral obligations and long forgotten skills, between 'hunters' and googlers, logistics. Some might have never seen a whale before. Panic at the casino!]

Rethinking Housing Design

via: Haden Clarkin (transportation engineer/planner)
Images: uncredited

[ed. Higher density/infill housing doesn't have to be just ugly rectangular boxes (bottom photo above: built in 2014). Nor is space always a problem: the urban cores of many mid-sized American cities are covered by surface parking lots (below, in red). Des Moines:]

Alfred Fernandes
via:

What You Would See During an AI Takeover

The NFL’s Most Anonymous Men Are Also the Happiest: ‘My Life’s Not Real’

To be a professional long snapper is to have your worth measured by maybe a half-dozen plays every week. A pass-fail exam each time for a brotherhood of perfectionists. But the job is also a quest. Do it well enough, and there is stability and longevity in a game not noted for either. There is general health, or better odds for it. There are multimillion-dollar contracts that buy a lot of freedom when you’re done. So maybe you get a beer named after you, or maybe you close a Tony Robbins seminar at midnight, or maybe you just drop your kid at school and hit golf balls in paradise.

At a position more or less immune to the bloodthirst of the sport — to the idea of earning a living by inflicting pain — a snapping career can be a rapture. Thirty-two lightning bolts waiting for a bottle. “We’re always working to be better so we can stay and hang out with the cool kids,” says Tennessee Titans snapper Morgan Cox, now in his 16th season. “The joke has always been that we’re all the same guy, basically. We’re just fired up to be out here.”

Show up, work hard. Sling a ball through your legs. Lastly — in the not-so-refined words of the Prince of Pittsburgh — don’t be an a–hole.

And, lo, the gates swing open to football nirvana. (...)

Beyond the self-deprecation — seems it was a collectively transcendent moment when EA Sports put long snappers into its “Madden 26” video game — lies the truth that the job matters. The most common margin of victory in NFL regular-season games for the past quarter century? Three points. A reliable kicking operation, especially given the increasingly superpowered legs of the kickers themselves, is a weapon. A faulty one opens black holes.

So these men take the trade seriously. “I don’t know if people understand how much of an art snapping is, and how much detail goes into it,” Buffalo Bills snapper Reid Ferguson says. They work by the fraction of an inch. Aim small, miss small, and hit your spot, is how a college coach long ago explained it to former Bears snapper Patrick Mannelly, who put his name on an award annually given to the nation’s best college player at the position. On field goal attempts, the laces must hit the holder’s hands such that he simply puts the ball down before the kick. What looks like a fine effort might turn a snapper salty for a week. And never mind the catastrophe of an actual bad snap.

“It’s like you’re a professional dart thrower and you’ve got seven plays a game,” says Clint Gresham, the snapper for the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl XLVIII winners. “And if one of them is not perfect, then you’re kind of a failure.”

Thanks to a rule change in 2006, teams cannot set rushers up directly over the long snapper. It’s better, but only incrementally so: The metahumans to block are now less than a foot to the right and left. Imagine hunching over, throwing a ball perfectly and then contending with, say, former No. 1 overall pick and All-Pro linebacker Mario Williams in the A-gap. “I felt like he slapped me in the head twice before I even realized the play was happening,” says Cox, a five-time Pro Bowler.

“Everyone watches us Monday through Saturday and goes, ‘That looks like an easy job,’” says J.J. Jansen, who holds the Carolina Panthers career record for most games played, at 271 and counting. “Because Monday through Saturday, it is. But on Sunday at 4:15 p.m., when you gotta hit a game-winning field goal, everyone’s on the sideline praying.”

Still, the line at the door keeps getting longer.

That a line exists, at all, isn’t new. The list of participants at long snapping guru Chris Rubio’s camps who then went on to play in college dates back two decades. What’s wild is the current starting point. San Francisco 49ers snapper Jon Weeks first attended the Rubio camp in 2004, out of high school. By the time he was a senior at Baylor, revisiting as a counselor, morning sessions began with attendees in sixth grade. Ferguson remembers coaching a fourth-grader at the camp. And that fourth-grader, Quentin Skinner, went on to snap at LSU and Troy.

“It’s something that opens doors,” Weeks says. “Parents have realized, at least at the college level, you don’t have to be this 6-foot-3 monster to get your school paid for and play football.”

The depth of training is certainly an evolution from a Duke assistant coach telling Mannelly to hone the craft by hitting a goal post, stripped of padding, 10 times in a row after practice. This is more like building bent-over androids. “I’m addicted to snapping,” says Chris Stoll, who won the Mannelly Award in 2022 and signed a three-year contract with the Seahawks out of Penn State. “We can get so much better by just moving your thumb position or, like, keeping your weight on your insteps more.”

The math is daunting: hundreds of college spots bottlenecking into 32 NFL jobs. It doesn’t stop anyone from trying to squeeze through, given what’s on the other side.

A long snapper’s value, in short, is not being a problem. In one interpretation, that is tending to business and being a good dude. (...)

Disaster prevention and peace of mind, though, are mostly what the money is for. Scoring in the NFL in 2025 is tied for the second-highest rate ever. Every point is immense. Thus, per Over the Cap, 15 long snappers are signed for more than $1 million guaranteed. “You don’t realize how important they are until you don’t got one,” says longtime Steelers special teams coach Danny Smith. It’s not avant-garde personnel management; multiyear contracts for snappers date back decades. The outlay is minimal in a sport featuring 23 players with more than $100 million in guarantees. But it’s a reasonable price for one less thing to worry about.

“If I was the (coach) at the podium, it’s something I would never want to be thinking about,” Packers kicker Brandon McManus says. “When you feel like you have someone and you’re comfortable and can turn a blind eye to it, it’s a great feeling.” (...)

This golden ratio of trust and money, both hard-earned, creates enviable stability. “Most NFL players and most athletes in general have access to a ton of money, a ton of fame,“ Jansen says, “but they’re sort of nomads.” An NFL long snapper career, on average, lasts 7.5 years. The rate for all other positions is less than half that. How refreshing, in a game where tenure can be a punch line, to establish roots. To make a plan. Jansen has lived in three houses in one city while buying a small stake in the AHL Charlotte Checkers. Ferguson, who signed a four-year, $6.5 million extension in March, has invested in a restaurant and a soccer franchise in Buffalo. No, it is not the $250 million in guarantees Josh Allen received to quarterback the Bills, but any apples-to-apples comparison sort of misses the point.

At 31, the team’s most anonymous player already has steady footing for decades. “Whenever it does end, we’ve provided ourselves enough financial security to where I don’t immediately have to look for a job to support the family,” Ferguson says. “Honestly, it’s the best.”

by Brian Hamilton, The Athletic |  Read more:
Image:

[ed. My friend Vic was one of the best snappers ever - fast, laser-like zips. Back then coaches mostly expected consistency, but he threw bullets.]

Windows Users Furious at Microsoft’s Plan to Turn It Into an “Agentic OS”

Microsoft really wants you to update to Windows 11 already, and it seemingly thinks that bragging about all the incredible ways it’s stuffing AI into every nook and cranny of its latest operating system will encourage the pesky holdovers still clutching to Windows 10 to finally let go.

Actually, saying Microsoft is merely “stuffing” AI into its product might be underselling the scope of its vision. Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences, told The Verge in a recent interview that Microsoft’s goal was to transform Windows into a “canvas for AI” — and, as if that wasn’t enough, an “agentic OS.”

No longer is it sufficient to just do stuff on your desktop. Now, there will be a bunch of AI agents you can access straight from the taskbar, perhaps the most precious area of UI real estate, that can do stuff for you, like researching in the background and accessing files and folders.

“You can hover on the taskbar icon at any time to see what the agent is doing,” Virk explained to The Verge.

Actual Windows users, however, don’t sound nearly as enthusiastic about the AI features as Microsoft execs do.

“Great, how do I disable literally all of it?” wrote one user on the r/technology subreddit.

Another had an answer: “Start with a web search for ‘which version of Linux should I run?'”

The r/Windows11 subreddit wasn’t a refuge of optimistic sentiment, either. “Hard pass,” wrote one user. “No thanks,” demurred another, while another seethed: “F**K OFF MICROSOFT!!!!” Someone even wrote a handy little summary of all the things that Microsoft is adding that Windows users don’t want.

Evidently, Microsoft hasn’t given its customers a lot to be thrilled about, and it’s been pretty in-your-face about its design overhauls. The icon to access the company’s Copilot AI assistant, for example, is now placed dead center on the taskbar. The Windows File Explorer will also be integrated with Copilot, allowing you to use features like right clicking documents and asking for a summary of them, per The Verge.

Another major design philosophy change is that Microsoft also wants you to literally talk to your AI-laden computer with various voice controls, allowing the PC to “act on your behalf,” according to Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft.

“You should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that,” Mehdi told The Verge last month.

More worryingly, some of the features sound invasive. That File Explorer integration we just mentioned, for one, will allow other AI apps to access your files. Another feature called Copilot Vision will allow the AI to view and analyze anything that happens on your desktop so it can give context-based tips. In the future, you’ll be able to use another feature, Copilot Actions, to let the AI take actions on your behalf based on the Vision-enabled tips it gave you.

Users are understandably wary about the accelerating creep of AI based on Microsoft’s poor track record with user data, like its AI-powered Recall feature —which worked by constantly taking snapshots of your desktop — accidentally capturing sensitive information such as your Social Security number, which it stored in an unencrypted folder.

by Frank Landymore, Futurism |  Read more:

Image: Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
[ed. Pretty fed up with AI being jammed down everyone's throats. Original Verge article here: Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it. See also: Scientists Discover Universal Jailbreak for Nearly Every AI, and the Way It Works Will Hurt Your Brain (Futurism).]

Marian McPartland

[ed. See also: Marian McPartland in Conversation with Steely Dan.]

What Does China Want?

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that China is a rising hegemon eager to replace the United States, dominate international institutions, and re-create the liberal international order in its own image. Drawing on data from 12,000 articles and hundreds of speeches by Xi Jinping, to discern China's intentions we analyze three terms or phrases from Chinese rhetoric: “struggle” (斗争), “rise of the East, decline of the West” (东升西降), and “no intention to replace the United States” ((无意取代美国). Our findings indicate that China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented. China's aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited: It cares about its borders, sovereignty, and foreign economic relations. China's main concerns are almost all regional and related to parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Our argument has three main implications. First, China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Thus, a hostile U.S. military posture in the Pacific is unwise and may unnecessarily create tensions. Second, the two countries could cooperate on several overlooked issue areas. Third, the conventional view of China plays down the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address.

There is much about China that is disturbing for the West. China's gross domestic product grew from $1.2 trillion in 2000 to $17 trillion in 2023. Having modernized the People's Liberation Army over the past generation, China is also rapidly increasing its stockpile of nuclear warheads. China spends almost $300 billion annually on defense. Current leader Xi Jinping has consolidated power and appears set to rule the authoritarian Communist country indefinitely. Chinese firms often engage in questionable activities, such as restricting data, inadequately enforcing intellectual property rights, and engaging in cyber theft. The Chinese government violates human rights and restricts numerous personal freedoms for its citizens. In violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), every country in the region, including China, is reclaiming land and militarizing islets in the disputed East and South China Seas. In short, China poses many potential problems to the United States and indeed to the world.

In U.S. academic and policymaking circles, the conventional wisdom is that China wants to dominate the world and expand its territory. For example, Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense during Donald Trump's first term and undersecretary of defense for Trump's second term, writes: “If China could subjugate Taiwan, it could then lift its gaze to targets farther afield … a natural next target for Beijing would be the Philippines … Vietnam, although not a U.S. ally, might also make a good target.” (...) The then–U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in 2022 that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Trump's former U.S. trade representative, Robert Lithgizer, claims that “China to me is an existential threat to the United States…. China views itself as number one in the world and wants to be that way.”

These assessments of China's intentions lead mainstream U.S. scholars and policy analysts from both the Left and the Right to policy prescriptions that will take generations to unfold, and that are almost completely focused on war-fighting, deterrence, and decoupling from China. Those who believe in this China threat call for increasing U.S. military expenditures and showing “resolve” toward China. The conventional wisdom also advocates a regional expansion of alliances with any country, democratic or authoritarian, that could join the United States to contain China. As Colby writes, “This is a book about war.” Brands and Beckley argue that the United States should reinforce its efforts to deter China from invading Taiwan: “What is needed is a strategy to deter or perhaps win a conflict in the 2020s … the Pentagon can dramatically raise the costs of a Chinese invasion by turning the international waters of the Taiwan Strait into a death trap for attacking forces.” Doshi argues that the United States should arm countries such as “Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India” with capabilities to contain China.

This leads to a key question: What does China want? To answer this question, this article examines contemporary China's goals and fears in words and deeds. In contrast to the conventional view, the evidence provided in this article leads to one overarching conclusion and three specific observations. Overall, China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability, and it remains more inwardly focused than externally oriented. More specifically: China's aims are unambiguous; China's aims are enduring; and China's aims are limited.

First, China's aims are unambiguous: China cares about its borders, its sovereignty, and its foreign economic relations. China cares about its unresolved borders in the East and South China Seas and with India, respectively. Almost all of its concerns are regional. Second, China deeply cares about its sovereign rights over various parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Third, China has an increasingly clear economic strategy for its relations with both East Asia and the rest of the world that aims to expand trade and economic relations, not reduce them.

It is also clear what China does not want: There is little mention in Chinese discourse of expansive goals or ambitions for global leadership and hegemony. Furthermore, China is not exporting ideology. Significantly, the CCP's emphasis on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not a generalized model for the world. In contrast, the United States claims to represent global values and norms. What China also does not want is to invade and conquer other countries; there is no evidence that China poses an existential threat to the countries on its borders or in its region that it does not already claim sovereignty over.

We explore how China views its own position and role in the region and globally. Recognizing that public statements vary in their level of authoritativeness, we examined three main sources: People's Daily, which represents not only the state but also the Central Committee of the CCP; Xi Jinping's and other senior officials' speeches; and Qiushi, a magazine publicizing the CCP's latest policy directions. We used computer-assisted text analysis to systematically assess China's stated goals over time. This method allowed us to more accurately track China's concerns and identify how they have changed. We also show that China's top leaders consistently reiterate that China does not seek regional hegemony or aim to compete with the United States for global supremacy. Instead, China views international relations as multilateral and cooperative.

Second, China's aims are inherited and enduring, not new. There is a “trans-dynastic” Chinese identity: Almost every major issue that the People's Republic of China (PRC) cares about today dates back to at least the nineteenth century during the Qing dynasty. These are not new goals that emerged after the Communist victory in 1949, and none of China's core interests were created by Xi. These are enduring Chinese concerns, even though the political authority governing China has changed dramatically and multiple times over the past two hundred years or more.

Third, what China wants is limited, even though its power has rapidly expanded over the past generation. China's claims and goals are either being resolved or remain static. This reality is in contrast to many of the expectations of U.S. policymakers and to the conventional wisdom of the international relations scholarly literature, which maintains that states' interests will grow as power grows. Rather, the evidence shows that the Chinese leadership is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion.

We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions. Just as important, we suggest that there is room for the two countries to cooperate on a number of issues areas that are currently overlooked. Finally, the conventional view of China de-emphasizes the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address. The conventional wisdom about U.S. grand strategy is problematic, and the vision of China that exists in Washington is dangerously wrong.

This article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the conventional wisdom regarding China's goals as represented by top policymakers in the United States and in the existing scholarly literature. The second section examines Chinese rhetoric and points out nuances in how to read and interpret Chinese rhetoric. The third section uses quantitative methods to more systematically and accurately assess Chinese claims across time as reflected in the most authoritative Chinese pronouncements. The fourth section details how China's main priorities are enduring and trans-dynastic, and the fifth section shows how the most important of these claims are not expanding, even though China's power has grown rapidly over the past generation. We present the implications of our argument for the U.S.-China relationship in the conclusion.

by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, Zenobia T. Chan, MIT Press | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. The Roman empire collapsed because it was overextended. China won't make that mistake. They'll just get stronger and more self-reliant - securing their borders, advancing technology, providing security for their citizens. Dominant because they have a strategy for advancing their country's long-term interests, not dominance for its own sake. Most US problems have been self-inflicted - militarily, economically, politically, techologically. We've been distracted and screwing around for decades, empire building and trying to rule the world.]