"Is this piece seriously arguing that we should continue to consume (another!) known carcinogen so that people can have low-paying jobs?"

Says the top-rated comment on the NYT article "What Else Do We Lose When People Give Up Booze? Yes, there are many benefits of cutting back. But bars are closing. Jobs are going away. And a way of being together can feel harder to find" (gift link).

Related news: "More Americans now use weed every day than drink or smoke cigarettes" (NY Post).

"In the 1800s, a secretary was part aide-de-camp, part executive-in-training — someone who handled the boss’s correspondence and bookkeeping, but also learned the business..."

"... and would eventually ascend to a senior job. With the rise of the modern corporation around the turn of the 20th century, however, the secretary became more like a noncommissioned officer — a worker with real responsibility but little upward mobility. It was at this point that the position became mostly female. Companies then broke up and degraded the job further over the decades, replacing the secretary with pools of typists, receptionists and data entry personnel, almost all of them women, too. The final step, amid pressure from the feminist movement in the 1970s, was to allow a small number of college-educated women to ascend from these clerical jobs to the ranks of middle management. But even this came with a loss of status, as managers would have to do more of their own grunt work. 'They’re now being promoted, but the clerical tasks are promoted with them,' said Jason Resnikoff, a labor historian. 'The middle manager would do more typing, correspondence, more of their own filing.' These days, almost no one has an assistant...."

From "In Trump’s Economy, Job Gains Go to Women. That’s Not an Entirely Good Thing. Despite the administration’s best attempts, the diminishing status of many American jobs is driving a spike in women’s employment" (NYT gift link).

"Surveillance footage showed two people dousing a vehicle with gasoline and blocking the doors as the vehicle and its passengers burned."

"One person managed to escape the vehicle and has been speaking to Italian news media about the harrowing event. Mohammad Taj Alamyar, 35, who is originally from Afghanistan, told investigators that he and the four others, who were from Afghanistan and Pakistan, had been working on the region’s strawberry harvests. He said they had asked the men who had arranged their work and accommodations, and who were driving them back from a shift on a farm after work, about wages that had been withheld, prompting the violent response...."

From "Four Men Are Burned to Death in Italy, Highlighting Abuse of Foreign Workers/The immigrants had been working as fruit pickers in southern Italy, the authorities said, apparently as part of a system of criminal labor trafficking" (NYT).

"I worked in a warehouse. It's where I felt so free. Then HR saw that video and terminated me."

I was good. I was great. I was busy moving freight. But I wanted to be funny, now the trucks will have to wait. I miss that icy freezer. I know that must sound odd, but now the smoke has cleared and my testicles  have thawed. I used to pick up pallets and I used to lift them high. It used to lift my spirits up. I felt like I could fly....

That's Blake Porter, via this Metafilter post by CrunchyFrog.

I enjoyed that. It was sweet and quirky, and I felt for the guy (even though I also think employers do need some rules about making your own videos at work, especially if you're working with heavy equipment like forklifts).

But it also got me wondering about Metafilter. I remember years ago, it had hot debate about political and social issues, but now it seems that everyone has agreed amongst themselves only to talk about sweet little quirky things and to be really nice to each other. It's a gentle pleasant atmosphere, but what the hell happened? What sapped all the vigor out of the place? If you go over there now, you'll see a post about what Isaac Asimov wrote about "1984" in 1980, how Jhumpa Lahiri is finding "quivering energy" in the works of Thomas Hardy, the rescue of a sea turtle, a walk to see (hear?) a sound sculpture, a bird that has relearned an old birdsong, a cat in a library, what rock art might be saying about Tasmanian tigers, etc. etc. 

Attempting to use Grok to explore my wonderment, I encountered the word "cozification." My search based on that word might have led me down various sweet quirky paths, but in the interest of keeping myself sharp and fast-moving, I decided to end this post with this screen shot (from Urban Dictionary) which I deem found art:

"5 things society makes a big deal about that don't have to be that important" and "21 more things I love about being single and living alone."

It might be dangerous — especially for the young — to consume these 2 lists in sequence. It might be what "they" don't want you to know.... 

ADDED: These are Tiktok videos and I'm having trouble embedding them. So: the first one is here and the second one is here.

"But history shows that economists and researchers have been terrible at predicting the effects of new technologies on work and workers..."

"... so take forecasts like this one seriously but not literally. Even researchers cranking out studies of AI in workplaces caution that they’re making useful but fallible best guesses. 'All the important questions about AI’s effects on the labor market are still unanswered,' Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, recently concluded. Economists at Anthropic, the AI start-up behind the Claude chatbot, stressed the need for 'humility' in their analysis of AI seeping into occupations. (Humility is uncommon in Silicon Valley.)

From "Jobs least and most vulnerable to AI" (WaPo)("See which jobs are most threatened by AI and who may be able to adapt"). 

I would have expended one of my 10 monthly gift links on this — so you could fiddle with the graphic depictions — but the graphics are so fussy and overwhelming that I couldn't find the gift-link button. Is that me being vulnerable, unadaptable, and replaceable or is that The Washington Post showing its decline?

Anyway, I like the idea that humility is coming into vogue in A.I. world. Or is that part of its plan to trick us into letting it take over everything?

"Even if Communist Party leaders want to unleash more spending, formidable obstacles stand in the way, including..."

"... a work force increasingly trapped in insecure, low-wage employment, a rapidly aging and shrinking population and a weak social safety net that encourages people to save for emergencies. China’s people, perhaps more than at any time in the last few decades, are in no mood to go out and splurge. Many have been airing growing anxiety online, posting about falling incomes and scarce jobs. The average income was just over $500 a month in 2025. Unemployment is high.... An estimated 200 million people, or at least one-quarter of China’s work force, are now engaged in insecure 'gig' employment — delivering meals or packages, driving ride-hailing cars, selling goods online or doing other short-term work.... Adding to worker insecurity is China’s household registration system, which restricts access to social services like schooling and health care outside one’s hometown. This effectively ensures that people from China’s vast countryside serve as cheap migrant labor for megacities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.... These are hardly a foundation for a vibrant consumer economy...."

Writes Anne Stevenson-Yang, author of 'Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy,' in "China’s Long-Promised Consumer Boom Is a Mirage" (NYT).

"To outsiders, what programmers are facing can seem richly deserved, and even funny..."

"... American white-collar workers have long fretted that Silicon Valley might one day use A.I. to automate their jobs, but look who got hit first! Indeed, coding is perhaps the first form of very expensive industrialized human labor that A.I. can actually replace. A.I.-generated videos look janky, artificial photos surreal; law briefs can be riddled with career-ending howlers. But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose. You might imagine this would unsettle and demoralize programmers.... But I spoke to scores of developers this past fall and winter, and most were weirdly jazzed about their new powers.... A coder is now more like an architect than a construction worker.... Several programmers told me they felt a bit like Steve Jobs, who famously had his staffers churn out prototypes so he could handle lots of them and settle on what felt right.... 'It’s an alien intelligence that we’re learning to work with.'..."

Writes Clive Thompson, in "Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It/In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird" ( NYT)(gift link, because this is very long and substantive).

"I’m trying to manifest more abundance, but I’m really feeling the income streams have dwindled."

"I have over 800,000 Instagram followers. Before, if I wanted to do a brand partnership on social media, $10,000 was an easy get. Now it’s, like, $500. I pretty much live from a bucket of savings."

So says the "Author With One New York ‘Times’ Best Seller," who made only $49,000 last year — "$30,000 from book advance/$14,000 from teaching two retreats/$5,000 from narrating own audiobook."

Quoted in "What Do You Do and What Do You Make? 60 New Yorkers about what they brought in last year" (New York Magazine).

I selected that one story out of the 60 — all of which are interesting — because I was charmed by the statement "I’m trying to manifest more abundance." It's a lighthearted — and culturally connected — way to express real pain. How can you live in NYC on $49,000 a year? And yet you hit the envied goal of publishing a best seller!

I don't need to extend this post by expounding on the words "manifest" and "abundance." What would you pay me to resist the impulse? I'll continue. Briefly.

"Manifest" is New Age self-help jargon, used ironically by our best-selling author.

"Abundance." I think of it as an Ezra Klein word that was supposed to take off more than it did. Democratic Party hacks substituted the drearier word "affordability."

ADDED, ironically: Here's Ezra's book "Abundance," commission earned.

With AI — "First, people began taking on work that previously would have belonged to someone else or might not have been attempted at all."

"The scope of what counted as 'my job' widened. Second, because AI makes it easy to start and continue tasks, work seeped into moments that used to function as pauses. People would send prompts during lunch, before meetings, or in the evening when an idea came to mind. This dissolved some of the natural stopping points in the workday. Third, workers increasingly kept multiple threads alive at once. They would run AI processes in the background while reviewing code, drafting documents, or attending meetings. Some even ran multiple AI agents simultaneously. This created a rhythm where both the human and the machine were constantly in motion.... What surprised me most was the contrast between how people described their moment-to-moment engagement and how they described their overall experience. In micro moments of prompting, iterating, and experimenting, people talked about momentum and a sense of expanded capability. But when they stepped back and reflected on their broader work experience, a different tone sometimes emerged. They described feeling busier, more stretched, or less able to fully disconnect...."

From "AI promised to free up workers’ time. UC Berkeley Haas researchers found the opposite" (UC Berkeley Haas News).

"Part of the sausage making process."

What happens when the minimum wage goes up? Well, California is getting an experiment in that right now. Just ask @gavinnewsom. Reason's @BessByers shares what happened after AB 1228 implemented a government-mandated pay raise for all fast-food workers. 🍔 pic.twitter.com/FFL7hkMOKk

— reason (@reason) December 31, 2025

Excellent video, but let me focus on Gavin Newsom's use of the old analogy between lawmaking and sausage making. The idea is you like the results but you'd be disgusted to see the process. So I guess Newsom's best argument for the bizarre exceptions in California's minimum wage law is that we'd be grossed out by the details if we saw them, but the final product is something we love. But with sausage, the final product has all the strange ingredients blended into one coherent-looking whole. The law Newsom is defending has unexplained exceptions right there in the text. It's more like sausage that has visible chunks of weird things that don't seem to belong and you want to know what the hell is that... and that... and that? You don't eat that sausage. And that's another thing. With sausage, if something about it makes you suspicious, you don't eat it. You're not forced to eat it just because the sausage-factory made it. Don't buy it. If it's served to you, don't eat it. Laws, we're forced to eat. 

***

The oldest version of the law/sausage analogy seems to be: "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." I'm told that was written by the poet/lawyer John Godfrey Saxe, in 1869, in an article in the Daily Cleveland Herald. You probably heard that Otto von Bismarck is part of the story, but stories are like sausages: Everyone's always imagining what's in there, how it got in, and whether it belongs there. 

"If Musk earns $1 trillion over the next decade... an average of $100 billion each year... [he]could make $3 billion more each year than all 1.4 million elementary school teachers in the nation combined...."

"Teaching isn’t the only essential profession Musk is set to out-earn.... Each year, Musk will earn $72 billion more than all 107,950 family medicine physicians in the U.S. Musk will also out-earn all 1,057,660 construction laborers by about $46 billion.... Musk’s average yearly payment roughly equals the combined paychecks of all 3.2 million cashiers in the U.S. America’s 747,750 lawyers are... et to out-earn Musk, with his average annual payment coming in at three-quarters of their combined earnings...."

From "Good work if you can get it: Elon Musk is set to make more than every elementary school teacher COMBINED/Tesla shareholders approved a $1 trillion pay package for the world’s richest person" (Independent).

I'll just do a survey:

Pick the option closest to your reaction.

This is emotional mush for dummies who don't understand economics.

This is useful for thinking about whether, at some point, economic disparities really do matter.

Economic injustice is real and I hope this helps more people care.

This shines a light on pure evil.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"I made dinner for my family because I wanted to and because the world told me I had to and then, three years ago, I just stopped."

"I didn’t want to anymore, and I’m here to tell you that you can stop, too. Your family will remain connected and whole; your kids will still grow up to be well-adjusted humans. And you might even enjoy one another a little more...."

Writes Erin O. White, in "Why I Had to Kill Family Dinner" (NYT).

"The idea of tech workers approaching their jobs with an intense, at times almost religious, devotion is 'part of the DNA of Silicon Valley culture'..."

"... said Carolyn Chen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 'Work Pray Code.'  She also noted that a strain of 'heroic masculine culture' in tech enforces the expectation that people should be working all the time."

From "Would You Work ‘996’? The Hustle Culture Trend Is Taking Hold in Silicon Valley. The number combination refers to a work schedule — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — that has its origins in China’s hard-charging tech scene" (NYT).

"The White House published a list of Smithsonian exhibits, programming and artwork it considered objectionable..."

"... on Thursday, one week after announcing that eight of the institution’s museums must submit their current wall text and future exhibition plans for a comprehensive review. The list borrows heavily from a recent article in The Federalist that objected to portrayals at several museums. It argued that the National Museum of American History promoted homosexuality by hanging a pride flag; overemphasized Benjamin Franklin’s relationship to slavery in its programming; and supported open borders by depicting migrants watching fireworks 'through an opening in the U.S.-Mexico border wall.'...:

I'm reading "White House Lists Smithsonian Exhibits It Finds Objectionable/The Trump administration highlighted material dealing with topics like sexuality, slavery and immigration" (NYT).

Here's that official list put out by The White House.

Most striking item on the list: "The National Museum of African Art displayed an exhibit on 'works of speculative fiction that bring to life an immersive, feminist and sacred aquatopia inspired by the legend of Drexciya,' an 'underwater kingdom populated by the children of pregnant women who had been thrown overboard or jumped into the ocean during the Middle Passage.'"

Notably out of context item on the list: "An American History Museum exhibit features a depiction of the Statue of Liberty 'holding a tomato in her right hand instead of a torch, and a basket of tomatoes in her left hand instead of a tablet.'" There's an image of it, and it looks like really bad art — amateurish junk. But here's the Smithsonian's description of the object and why it is in the collection:

"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. 

"A 'vacation' for me means killing myself working 12+ hour days for several days prior to travel, working up to the last minute at the airport gate..."

"... lugging a work laptop and files along in my carryon, waking up 1-2 hours before everyone else each morning to do some emails and calls, and ducking away from the beach or activity for at least an hour midday for more of the same, possibly a zoom meeting, and if there’s a time change, possibly being interrupted well into the evening even at dinner. Then upon return there are several more 12+ hour days to make up for workload that piled up during the 'time off.' It seems the only jobs around anymore that let you truly disconnect are the ones that don’t pay enough for you to be able to afford to take a vacation in the first place. Our economy is broken for all but the uber wealthy and it’s ruining our family lives and health as well. Something has to give."

That's from the highest rated comment at "How to Create a Family ‘Bleisure’ Trip/Combining work travel with a change of scenery and time with the kids offers respite from the daily grind, but it takes planning. Here’s how to make it happen" (NYT).

The article, of course, is striving to make "bleisure" — business + leisure — seem like something you could jauntily throw together and enjoy, but it still sounded exhausting. The illustration — showing a woman and daughter laughing in the pool while the father sitting poolside with a laptap smiled too — made me smile... in derision.

And that coinage, "bleisure," only makes it feel worse. Why not "bleasure" — for "business" + "pleasure"? If you hear it, that's what you might presume. There's a standard phrase "mixing business with pleasure," but that was something one did in the old days — not now, with poolside laptops and your children splashing in the pool. By the way, make sure your child doesn't drown while you're fixated on your email. Not everyone has a smiling spouse in the water tending to all the children competently while you do nothing well.

ADDED: The conventional phrase about mixing business with pleasure is: Don't mix business with pleasure. Also... if you're sitting poolside working on your business laptop and it looks like your child might have a problem, how much attention do you give to securing your laptop before you plunge in?

"Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged. That’s why, in both cases..."

"... there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats. Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!! I will pick an exceptional replacement. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAGA!"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

The NYT presentation of this news story is: "Trump to Appoint New Top Labor Official Within Days/President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday after the agency released dour monthly jobs data."

Mr. Trump fired the top labor official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Erika McEntarfer, on Friday after the B.L.S. released monthly jobs data showing a significant slowdown in hiring. Mr. Trump accused Ms. McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the numbers.

There's that phrase, "without evidence."

"But the big picture remains one of surprising resilience — strong job growth, low unemployment and little sign that tariffs and uncertainty have so far derailed the labor market."

That feels like a grudging admission, in "Live Updates: U.S. Hiring Remains Solid, Sign of a Resilient Economy/Employers added 147,000 jobs in June, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1 percent, suggesting that tariffs, interest rates and other headwinds are not yet causing employers to pull back significantly" (NYT).

"I don't give a shit whether the upper middle class and Beverly Hills in Bel Air have got to pay actual American citizens to do their lawn or, you know, clean their gutters."

"And people say, oh, we'll never get American citizens to do it. Well, hey, if you have to pay a decent wage in a competitive market because you don't have millions of illegal aliens that are prepared to work for slave... look, we can't have a country that's based upon servitude. That's what this is."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "Steve Bannon’s Battle for the Soul of MAGA," today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily" (audio and transcript at Podscribe).