Category Archives: The Contrarian

AI And American Workslop


http://reborn-babies-dolls.com/ The sky was supposed to fall. Look up. The clouds are still just as high, just as white and fluffy.

prednisone 10 mg purchase America knows real economic catastrophe. The 2008 housing crisis sent unemployment from 5 percent to 10. The COVID pandemic drove it to 14. The dot-com collapse pushed it past 6. The early 1980s recession hit 9.7.

Each time, the numbers told the story. People lost jobs. The unemployment rate moved.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, Economists marked that date as the beginning of the artificial intelligence era in the American workplace.

Before that day, unemployment ran around 3.6 percent. Today it sits at 4.3. Less than a point of movement in three years. In any normal economic cycle, that is called Tuesday.

So the machines came. The numbers shrugged. Story over.

Except it isn’t.

The unemployment rate counts people who lost jobs. It does not count what those people are doing inside the jobs they kept.

By August 2024, nearly 40 percent of U.S. workers between 18 and 64 were using generative AI to some degree. On average, they reported saving 5.4 percent of their work hours, roughly two hours a week.

Two hours. Every week. Per worker. Saved.

The question nobody is asking: saved for what?

Researchers at BetterUp Labs, working with Stanford’s Social Media Lab, found that employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable-looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. They call it workslop.

Workers reported spending nearly two hours dealing with each instance of it. For an organization of 10,000 employees, the cost runs over nine million dollars a year in lost productivity.

The machines did not make us obsolete. They made it easier to look busy.

But the deeper damage is not in the office. It is in the mind of the person who used to want to work.

A generation has been primed on an AI lifestyle. They grew up getting reactions on the internet and confusing the dopamine hit for accomplishment. The new employment mantra has drifted from look what I’ve done to just look at me. Aren’t I pretty? Radical? Outspoken?

The resume has been replaced by the follower count. The portfolio by the feed.

This is not an economic story. It is a character story. AI did not change the job market. It changed the worker inside it. It gave ambitious people a tool to go faster. It gave everyone else a place to hide.

A report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95 percent of organizations see no measurable returns from AI investment. Billions spent. Productivity flat. The technology works. The people using it have decided not to.

The unemployment rate is fine. That was never the right number to watch.

Watch what gets produced. Watch the quality of the work landing in inboxes, on desks, in front of clients. Watch what happens when the tool is doing the thinking and the human is just hitting send.

The numbers show a minor blip. The behavioral change toward work ethic is the real threat to the American economy. The machines did not take our jobs. We did.

AI didn’t change the American workforce; it changed the American worker.

The Fix Is In


The election is in six months. It is already over.

Not because of polls or approval ratings or the historical tendency of voters to punish the party in power. Because the maps are drawn, the courts have blessed them, and the legal tools to fight back are gone.

What is left is the performance of democracy. The ballots, the booths, the breathless cable coverage. All of it scheduled for November 3, all of it largely beside the point. Assuming, of course, that Trump does not declare a national emergency and cancel the elections before we get there. That remains an open question. The smart money says it isn’t.

This week, Virginia’s Supreme Court killed a voter-approved redistricting plan that Democrats spent $100 million to pass. Voters narrowly approved it April 21. The court voided it today. In a 4-3 ruling, the court found that the legislature violated procedural rules while passing a constitutional amendment on redistricting and placing it on the ballot. The new map would have given Democrats four additional House seats.

The court decided the vote margin played no role. The people had spoken. The court ruled they had spoken incorrectly.

That decision landed the same week the U.S. Supreme Court finished burying the Voting Rights Act. The court’s decision in Callais on April 29 appears to clear the way for Louisiana and other states to engage in the discriminatory practice of vote dilution, delivering a historic blow to one of the most important federal civil rights provisions in the country’s history.

It took 60 years to build that protection. It took one ruling to gut it.

Trump called his shot last summer. He urged Republican-controlled states to redraw districts to help maintain Republican control of the House, kicking off a nationwide redistricting race not seen since the 1960s.

Texas went first, then Missouri, then North Carolina. Republicans could gain as many as 14 seats from redrawn maps across six states, compared to six for Democrats.

Democrats need a net gain of three to flip the House. The math was already tight. The maps sealed it.

Democrats tried to counter. California drew new lines. Virginia held a referendum and won it. The court threw it out anyway.

Justice Samuel Alito ruled it was “indisputable” that Texas’ motivation for redistricting was “pure and simple” partisan advantage, which the court has previously ruled is permissible. Alito found this unremarkable. So did the five justices who agreed with him.

You draw the lines tight enough, you void the votes that cross them, you let the judiciary finish the job. It is slower than a coup. It is tidier. It is entirely legal.

That last part is the point. And it’s already made.