AI, Labor & Culture
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That's Just How It Is
What caused the K-curve, and why don't American workers organize against the way they are being exploited? A 1971 confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, fifty years of patient counter-mobilization across think tanks, courts, and political institutions, and a labor architecture built to require continuous firm-by-firm reorganizing. The asymmetry was by design.
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We Kept Growing. Most People Didn’t
The pronatalist alarm and the AI displacement alarm arguing about the same problem from opposite sides. Both assume the growth model is intact. It has not been. The forty years since 1980 were workarounds — debt, asset inflation, immigration, central bank intervention — that kept the appearance of growth going while the broad-based productive expansion stopped happening for most of the population. AI removes the last workaround.
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Our Faith?
Federal agencies under Trump's second term are speaking to workers in the first-person plural of Christian faith — USDA Easter emails, monthly agency prayer services, an OPM memo permitting workplace proselytizing. Federal whistleblower confidence collapsed from 71.9% to 22.5% in a single year. The establishment clause is eroding inside workplaces where saying you are uncomfortable risks your career.
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A Talisman Against Fascism — In Loring Park
The Center for People and Craft is an emerging urban folk school in Minneapolis — a place where cross-cultural connection happens person to person, hand to hand, without hierarchy or gatekeeping.
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Who Fired You
Stanford's 2026 AI Index shows a widening gap between what AI experts believe and what everyone else believes. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch treats it as a puzzle. It isn't. The experts are looking at what AI could do. The public is looking at what AI is being used to do to them. 'AI is taking jobs' is a grammatical evasion. My father's generation lost their livelihoods and kept their vocabulary: Krupp. Thyssen. The ministers in Bonn.
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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.