AI, Labor & Culture
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Is Anthropic vital for US Security?
On Wednesday, April 8, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned the CEOs of America’s largest banks to an urgent, unscheduled meeting. The subject was a single AI model — Claude Mythos Preview, built by Anthropic
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The Wrong Argument
The public debate about AI displacement focuses on headline layoffs — visible, contested, and partially fabricated. The real mechanism is quieter. Vertical AI platforms embedded in industry software absorb labor through updates, one unbackfilled position at a time. By the time the data catches up, the displacement is structural.
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Notes on David French’s “How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich?”
David French describes America’s tiered economy as a cultural problem. It’s not. It’s the result of deliberate policy decisions over four decades — weakening labor, favoring capital, enabling buybacks — that recalibrated who the economy serves. AI will compress the number of humans capital needs even further.
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Coal and Steel
The comparison between AI and coal isn’t about technology. It’s about cognitive lock-in — what happens when an entire economy organizes around one assumption and can’t see the disruption because it’s inside it. Germany did everything right and still produced 38% poverty in Gelsenkirchen. That’s not the failure story. That’s the success story.
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My Claude Wishlist
I use Claude for intellectual work: developing arguments across sessions, stress-testing ideas, writing essays, and building software. It’s the most productive working relationship I’ve had with a tool — and I keep running into the same wall.
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Not Yet
'Not yet' is not a reassurance. It's a diagnosis. Anthropic's own research shows a 14% drop in job-finding rates for young workers in AI-exposed fields. The data says the displacement hasn't hit yet. The structure says it's already underway. I grew up inside that gap in Gelsenkirchen — I know what it looks like when 'not yet' becomes 'too late.'
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The Corporate Benevolence Fantasy
The promise that AI will make everything cheaper rests on one assumption — that corporations will pass their savings to consumers. The forty-year productivity-pay gap says they won't. The 2017 tax cut dress rehearsal says they won't. And $1.6 trillion in shareholder buybacks in a single year confirms they aren't.
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I've Seen This Before
I grew up in Gelsenkirchen, in the Ruhr Valley, and watched coal and steel collapse over decades. Retraining never worked at scale. The trades offer a reprieve, not an escape. And the science fiction writers have been ahead of the economists for seventy years — a structural problem requires a structural response.
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Who Buys What We Build?
U.S. employers cut 1.2 million jobs in 2025 while posting record profits and pouring tens of billions into AI. AI didn't break capitalism. It exposed a version of capitalism that had already stopped distributing its gains.