State of the Discussion

This is a mad Vance trope.
I don't listen to Vance and care very little about anything he has to say. Here's hoping that in 2028, there are better candidates for president than Vance and the possible Republican and Democratic candidates I know about.
PA recently did tens of millions of pounds worth of damage when they broke into an RAF base and sprayed gallons of paint on planes and into their engines.
They had to work hard to overcome the two-tier policing.

I don't understand why one wouldn't be helpful to anyone one works with, or anyone at all. Just, why not?
During my time as a manager, our center (~100 people) was assembled from various parts of the old Bell System, and charged with delivering the legally required changes to the local telcos' networks. Half of that staff came from a part of AT&T where the working philosophy was, "You advance your career over the bodies of your colleagues." Most of the meetings I went to was for the purpose of keeping those *ssholes from stabbing us in the back.
I could understand it somewhat. Their part of AT&T had a zillion different levels and salary was closely tied to level. If you didn't get one of the two promotions from "junior assistant flunky" to "assistant flunky" in your organization this year, you didn't get a raise. I came from Bell Labs where almost everyone not in an administrative position was a "member of technical staff". Salaries for MTS covered a spread of perhaps 8x: an MTS with 35 years of experience and demonstrated brilliance might make 8x what a starting MTS made. More than 8x in special cases, like winning a Nobel prize :^)

There are activists on the left bringing books into schools that are, at best, not age-appropriate or shouldn't be in schools at all.
Gotta cite? Either way, "activists" don't sound like people weilding sanctioned government power.

ICE is currently arresting tens of thousands of people a month. Perhaps they are all extraordinary.
You're right. I was thinking about free speech problems in the UK.
The ICE is arresting and deporting far too many low-priority illegal immigrants. The UK is arresting and deporting far too few high-priority ones. Trump promised to deport criminals. Then set quotas so high that ICE and other LE started grabbing anyone they could lay their hands on.
Hopefully, future presidents will be averse to doing anything that can be called Trump-like.

Here, as far as I know, hundreds of ordinary people are not being arrested
"ordinary" is carrying a hell of a lot of water in this phrase.
ICE is currently arresting tens of thousands of people a month. Perhaps they are all extraordinary.

The LLM AI stuff is a great tool. I have friends who have used it for stuff like designing the governing board structure for a small-ish non-profit, and for planning a somewhat complex trip to Scandinavia (two single women, less than unlimited budget, various health and mobility issues).
So, a really good hammer for some kinds of nails.
It's also perhaps the pre-eminent example of GIGO.
For sifting through the universe of basic factual information, it's tres handy. Need to find a useful factual result in the context of lots of different constraints? It's outstanding.
For anything involving matters of moral or ethical value - anything that involves answering the question "is this good?" - I'll stick with good old human reasoning and intuition.
Horses for courses, as they say.

It was a youtube video, so I can't find it, but it discussed how a growing number of people are choosing to locate themselves in Dubai and how it is a different way of thinking about citizenship, nationality and identity.

Dubai is popular, and Türkiye is possible, though a stretch.
Note, however, that Dubai (like all of the parts of the U.A.E.) is an absolute monarchy. Whereas Turkiye is merely a wannabe autocracy.

I don't think I want to live in an Islamic country...
Indonesia? Malaysia? I would consider Krygyzstan but I'd give a pass on Kazakhstan.
Dubai is popular, and Türkiye is possible, though a stretch.
I feel like you are thinking of countries in the neighborhood of Israel...

If any readers here need some help when you emigrate to England, let me know.
You'd be amazed to hear how often I've thought just that!
I don't think I want to live in an Islamic country...
I'm assuming this is a joke, Charles. If not, do expound.

If you care to offer it, CharlesWT, I am agog to hear your opinion of the MAGAt-controlled state of Texas. As regards redistricting, mostly. But bible-thumping, too.
--TP

If any readers here need some help when you emigrate to England, let me know.
LOL.
Emigrating would mean moving, which would mean packing up all of our stuff. I'm just lazy enough to make that a non-starter. Plus, when I retired I finally got my home studio set up just the way I like it.
Whether due to inertia, some remaining morsel of loyalty to the country of my birth, or just plain old contrariness and stupidity, it looks like I'm riding this crazy roller coaster to the end.
But thank you for your very kind offer!

I just find it harder and harder to have anything to say about any of these people.
They're like a bunch of monkeys in a barrel. "Oh look, those monkeys are out of control, just flinging poo around, bearing their teeth and shrieking!".
Yes, because they're monkeys. In a barrel.
I look for ways to minimize the blast radius of this crazy juvenile bullshit, but it's mostly - almost completely - beyond whatever meager resources I can bring to bear.
I mean, I can call my rep and senators, but they're basically already doing what they can. I can show up for the demonstrations etc. but the folks driving the bus at the moment obviously do not give one single solitary flying f*** about any of that.
I appreciate the efforts of those folks who have some influence over it all, but a lot of the time either their hands are tied too, or the process of containing these knuckleheads through legal or procedural means just takes too long to prevent damage from being done.
I'm just waiting for this crap to be over. We'll see what's left at that point.
If we really, really, really want to keep people like these the hell away from any kind of social or political power going forward, there are going to have to be some serious come to Jesus moments at some point.
And I just don't think we - Americans, collectively - have the stomach for it.
"It'd be too divisive"
"Let's come together now"
"Look forward, not back"
All of that is no small part of how we got here.
Trump et al are gonna come after anyone and anything they don't like, and they're gonna use as much of the full power of the state as they can muster to do it. Because Trump himself is a nasty vindictive piece of work, and the folks he has surrounded himself with are a bunch of loser weirdos who find hurting other people - ruining the lives of other people in no small number of cases - to be a lot of fun.
The rest of the world is basically just working around us at this point. And are looking for ways to make us as irrelevant - as unnecessary for their own security and prosperity - as they can.
Or else figuring out ways to play our leadership for their own advantage.
It's a nightmare. If there wasn't so much damage being done, it'd be comical. And, at moments, it kinda is.
But mostly it's a nightmare.
Good luck to Bolton, he said mean things about Trump and now Trump has an army. And a long memory.

At the moment, Bolton is merely a private citizen, who will have to impoverish himself to defend against charges that will eventually be dropped. Powell is still Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I know Trump has some serious nut cases at DOJ, but even those have to be somewhat reluctant to piss off most of the rich people in the country by attacking Powell on fictitious grounds.

It's an outrage and a travesty, and it's happening to a person whose misfortune I read with great satisfaction. I hope that this outrage is prevented - slowly - and that the perpetrators' misfortune is the source of great future satisfaction.
...and the horses they rode in on (which, I suspect, were all nidstangs).
So many poxes. So many houses.

The thing is, Powell is merely not doing something that Trump wants done. Whereas Bolton has been actively slamming Trump on social media. That's a lot harder for Trump's fragile ego to deal with.
It won't be a surprise if he has one of his minion officials go after Powell eventually. But . . . priorities. Powell isn't one. Yet. If/when the economy tanks to the point where it can't be ignored, then Powell moves into the cross hairs.

Connected (ever so slightly) to the discussion about being "polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people"
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-bitter-lesson-versus-the-garbage
One of my favorite academic papers about organizations is by Ruthanne Huising, and it tells the story of teams that were assigned to create process maps of their company, tracing what the organization actually did, from raw materials to finished goods. As they created this map, they realized how much of the work seemed strange and unplanned. They discovered entire processes that produced outputs nobody used, weird semi-official pathways to getting things done, and repeated duplication of efforts. Many of the employees working on the map, once rising stars of the company, became disillusioned.
I’ll let Prof. Huising explain what happened next: “Some held out hope that one or two people at the top knew of these design and operation issues; however, they were often disabused of this optimism. For example, a manager walked the CEO through the map, presenting him with a view he had never seen before and illustrating for him the lack of design and the disconnect between strategy and operations. The CEO, after being walked through the map, sat down, put his head on the table, and said, "This is even more fucked up than I imagined." The CEO revealed that not only was the operation of his organization out of his control but that his grasp on it was imaginary.”
For many people, this may not be a surprise. One thing you learn studying (or working in) organizations is that they are all actually a bit of a mess. In fact, one classic organizational theory is actually called the Garbage Can Model. This views organizations as chaotic "garbage cans" where problems, solutions, and decision-makers are dumped in together, and decisions often happen when these elements collide randomly, rather than through a fully rational process. Of course, it is easy to take this view too far - organizations do have structures, decision-makers, and processes that actually matter. It is just that these structures often evolved and were negotiated among people, rather than being carefully designed and well-recorded.
The Garbage Can represents a world where unwritten rules, bespoke knowledge, and complex and undocumented processes are critical.
I've been thinking about this a bit, and how one overcomes it or at least works around it.
About Cheez Whiz's comment about David Brooks (and the pointer to Driftglass) with the tag David Brooks, definitely worth a look)
his wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(commentator)
has this
As an undergraduate, Brooks frequently contributed reviews and satirical pieces to campus publications. His senior year, he wrote a spoof of the lifestyle of wealthy conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was scheduled to speak at the university: "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping." To his piece, Brooks appended the note: "Some would say I'm envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?" When Buckley arrived to give his talk, he asked whether Brooks was in the lecture audience and offered him a job.
Don't know if it is sucking up to Buckley, or something else entirely (each word is a different link), but the story seems strangely apropros.

I spent 30 years in Operations at a software company in San Jose (Manufacturing Software Engineering, a job title with an odd history). It was where revenue recognition happened, the rubber met the road, and as I put it, I implemented other people's bad ideas. All the stories above ring true to me.
Re: lukewarm David Brooks. When that name comes up I will always refer to Driftglass, who was tracking Brooks before it was cool, and has the receipts. Go back to Brooks' early days at the Weekly Standard and you'll find a man the opposite of lukewarm. He's become much more moderate as the checks kept rolling in from the Times, Yale, Aspen, Davos, etc. but the anger still remains, as Paul Simon once sang.

Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day.
As Marty suggests, it can have big benefits for you, too. And not just admin folks. Perhaps the best thing I did, as someone (at least nominally) in Systems Programming, was to spend time with the computer operations people and listen to them.**
Operation folks get no respect. Even if the Systems Programmers are polite enough to them in passing, it's strictly superficial. But I found that they knew far more about the state of the systems than any monitor could tell me.
As an early warning system, they were unbeatable.
All it took was spending some time occasionally hanging out in Operations. Not only would they tell me, and show me, where things were deteriorating, after a while they would reach out when something didn't look right. Made my job a lot easier, and improved my performance too. I kept doing it, every place I ever worked.
It was helpful enough that my boss push the other members of our team to do the same. Pushed pretty hard. But they just couldn't be bothered to walk ten yards, go thru a door, and visit. I never understood it. I was willing to fly from San Francisco to Phoenix and spend a couple of days talking to all three shifts. But they just wouldn't budge.
** I still remember the first time that, as a very junior Systems Programmer at Bank of America in the mid-70s, I happened to be passing thru Operations and overheard somebody griping about something which was making their job difficult.
I did a little digging when I got back to my desk, found they were right, wrote it up, and got it fixed. Because, after all, I was in a position to get something done. Next time I was in Operations they were waiting for me. With lists! Because they'd found a channel where their problems would get addressed.

Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day." I once asked the waiter, when it was dessert time and based on a hint on the menu, if they had any single-barrel bourbons. She literally lit up, and started through the choices and their relative merits.

Since this is the recent open thread...
Mostly for wj, who purports to be an eventual user of what is currently a piece of toy software for dewarping images. After a small frenzy of coding today, here's a very simple-minded cut at color. I chose this image to see if it preserved the red-eye effect in the right eye. (After looking at the original Polaroid print under 5x magnification, this is surprisingly good.) Among the things on my mind as I kept cutting corners were: (a) how many serial color-space and gamma conversions am I ignoring here, and (b) how much information am I losing by forcing intermediate values back to eight-bit integers? Still, I'm not unhappy with the results.
http://www.mcain6925.com/obsidian/dewarp/obsidian09.jpg