Maureen Dowd's sister got her car stolen in Washington D.C.

"Two polite officers who responded to our call said they could do little, amid a rash of brazen car thefts by teenagers. One officer said that, even if they saw the perp driving in her car, they could not chase him, because of laws passed by the D.C. Council.... The next morning, though, an officer... banged on her door. Her car was found in a park, running, nearly out of gas. When she collected it, after paying a $215 towing charge, she found an odoriferous collection: half-eaten pizza, grape soda cans, fast-food wrappers, a used condom and a couple of debit cards.... [T]he police said to throw [the cards] away... Then... she got over $1,800 worth of speed-camera tickets that the car thieves had racked up going 70 in 25-mile-per-hour zones, and some for running red lights.... She had to go down to headquarters on Friday to get the police report so she could appeal the tickets...."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Criminal Fights Crime" (NYT).

The final line is: "Even if Trump is being diabolical, Democrats should not pretend everything is fine here. Because it’s not."

I like to think the Democrats need to offer solutions, not just admit that there are problems. Of course, it's awful to deny that the problems are really that bad or that we deserve the problems or that side effects of solving the problems are worse than the problems. But assuming Democrats admit there is a terrible problem — and Dowd is only denying that "everything is fine" — they seem to want to focus on how bad Trump's solutions are.

"A famous economist once remarked: 'You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.'"

"That epigram, issued by Robert Solow in 1987, became the subject of a lot of debate among economists in the 1990s.... A decade later, another famous economist made a similar observation about the internet — actually, a prediction: 'By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.' That was Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.... We’re now hearing similar questions about artificial intelligence...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "Are we in an AI bubble that’s getting ready to pop? The promised AI revolution isn’t here yet. But it’s a smart bet that productivity gains will follow" (WaPo).

And this caught my eye: "A friend who is a lawyer... asked a chatbot to draft a document, and though the draft needed work, he estimated it had saved him two to four hours of typing. I asked him what he did with the extra time. He pleaded the fifth." Pleaded the Fifth, eh? That makes it sound as though he billed the client for the 2 to 4 hours it would have taken to do the work traditionally!

It's not just the "typing" that the AI did for him. It also composed material into solid standard English, wrote the citations in the required form, put the substance in some sort of order, and probably much more. It wasn't just "typing" he'd have been doing during those hours. 

McArdle is using the word "typing" in a way that reminds me of Truman Capote's famous insult to Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, that's typing." Oh, Jack wasn't just typing typing. He was typing typing. 

"It was weird enough that six or seven White, trans people moved into the neighborhood. And now the FBI is raiding their house."

Said a resident of the "predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood here known as The Bottoms."

Quoted in "Suspects in Texas ICE shooting tied to trans, anti-fascist activism/Benjamin Song, an alleged ringleader, is a former Marine Corps reservist who trained left-wing activists for close-quarters combat and large-scale gunfights, associates said" in The Washington Post. 

It's quite long, so I'm giving you a free-access link. I'll quote a few highlights:

The raid... was part of an investigation into a July 4 attack outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, an hour’s drive south.... The Alvarado attack is one of the most violent incidents in a wave of assaults and threats against federal immigration officers.... The Department of Homeland Security recorded 79 assaults on ICE officers between Jan. 21 and June 30....

The topic is the rise of left-wing violence in the Trump era, but WaPo interrupts itself to remind readers that there's even more right-wing violence and it's worse.

I'm reading the front page of The Washington Post with the wild hope of keeping up to date.

 

I mean, what do they think they're doing? What did they say to each other as they chose to put this material on the front page — right under stories about Zelensky at the White House, the National Guard in Washington D.C., terrorism in Texas, and Hurricane Erin? Let's revisit the legacy of slavery and balance it with closeups of black asses? It's as if they had to meet a racial quota and brainstormed and juxtaposed the first 2 things they thought of.