Steve Sawyer

@stevesawyer12

Recovering data analyst. Husband to the LOML, proud Dad to a union machinist, a union road maintenance worker, and a pit bull. “The old order is not coming back” – Canadian PM Mark Carney

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Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· 27d

The “challenge coins” are the cherry on top of this story.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· 27d

Air quality from wildfire smoke in SE MI is so bad today that the Sun is barely visible despite there not being a cloud in the sky. I put on an N-95 to take the dog for a quick round-the-block walk. 😷

Looking across a suburban neighborhood showing wildfire smoke in the air.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· 27d

Quote of the day

“Nothing limits
intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.”

– Sheri Tepper

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jul 4

The Reflecting Pool is small compared with the crises facing the country, but that's why it's important. Big scandals come wrapped in abstraction, legal filings, classified documents, budget lines, and foreign policy jargon. A failed pool is democratic theater in its purest form, everyone can see it, everyone understands green water, peeling paint, and a man standing next to a mess and insisting the real problem is invisible enemies with knives.
The pool stripped the performance down to its elements:
• There was the promise: I alone can fix it.
• There was the branding: beautiful, strong, patriotic, better than before.
• There was the reality: heat, water, algae, adhesion, chemistry, labor, cost.
• There was the deflection: vandals.
• There was the amplification: allies repeating the claim until it hardened into a story.
• There was the crackdown: fences, guards, warnings, citations.
• There was the cover: tarp.

In this sense, the renovation succeeded because it created the most honest monument in Washington. The Lincoln Memorial asks us to remember sacrifice, the Washington Monument asks us to remember founding ambition, the Reflecting Pool now asks us to remember that paint is not policy, spectacle is not competence, and a tarp is not an argument.
That may be the accidental civic gift of this whole algae-forward debacle. The pool did what it was built to do; it reflected. Not the shining myth of the builder-president, but the soggy reality beneath it: a government addicted to cosmetic fixes, allergic to responsibility, and terrified of being seen clearly.
Four score and seven tarps ago, this nation could still pretend the problem was the water. Now, we know better.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jul 4

The genius of the Reflecting Pool scandal, if one can call it genius without insulting algae, is that it compresses an entire style of governance into one ridiculous image.
First, choose appearance over function, then rush the job for the photo op, then announce success before the work survives contact with weather, then, when the thing fails, invent an enemy. And finally, repeat the enemy's name until the base can no longer tell the difference between evidence and volume. After that comes the enforcement phase.
The pool, a long shallow basin of ceremonial water, was treated like a hostile border crossing. Fences went up, guards appeared, the public was warned away from the troubled liquid, and children touching water became threats to the republic. The administration finally found a perimeter it could secure: the one around a botched paint job.

This is where the story crosses from scandal into literature. There is something too perfect about a reflecting pool that embarrasses a president, followed by an effort to block the public from seeing the reflection. It is almost too neat; if a novelist invented it, an editor would say, "Tone it down. The tarp metaphor is doing too much." But no. The tarp arrived anyway.
Tarp Force One landed at the Reflecting Pool, carrying an urgent message from the Department of Pay No Attention. The mission was simple: shield the people from the dangerous sight of a national symbol behaving symbolically.
The saddest part is that the tarps were not even American Flag Blue. After all that branding, all that pageantry, all that promise of patriotic aquatic excellence, America got regular blue tarp, hardware-store blue, storm-damage blue, "your uncle is rebuilding the shed and something has gone wrong" blue.

Lincoln could stay seated, the Washington Monument could stay upright, the ducks could take their chances; what mattered was that the failure not be allowed to keep reflecting.
The tarp, it should be noted, is no longer confined to the aquatic arts. Across town, at the Kennedy Center, another tarp has been performing public service as the official fabric of wounded vanity. After a judge ordered Trump's name removed from the building, the name reportedly came down, but the covering stayed up, shielding the public from the dangerous sight of a cultural institution no longer pretending to be a condo tower.
Even that tarp has now attracted judicial attention, with a judge ordering that tarp be removed, because apparently America has reached the stage where federal courts must ask follow-up questions of cloth.

This is how a metaphor becomes policy.
One tarp hides a failed pool repair, another hides the absence of a name that should never have been there. Somewhere, a procurement officer is probably pricing bulk canvas for the economy, the Constitution, and any poll numbers that still contain daylight.
This is what makes the story more than
unnv.
ly. It is tunny, obviously, there are only so many ways to describe a presidential algae crisis before the jokes begin writing themselves. But beneath the comedy is a serious civic problem: the replacement of public truth with narrative management.
A government that can't admit a pool repair failed can't be trusted to tell the truth about war, corruption, disaster, disease, money, or power. The scale changes, the habit doesn't.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jul 4

The LOML shared this with me. Apparently folks on FB post stuff without attribution. This is well done. If anyone knows who wrote this please add a reply to let us know.

Four score and seven tarps ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and now apparently guarded by chain-link fence because someone may or may not have touched the national puddle.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was built to reflect the Washington Monument, the sky, and the solemn endurance of the American experiment. Then Donald Trump tried to make it look like a hotel pool, and for one brief, shimmering moment, it reflected something even more historically useful: the governing philosophy of a man who believes every problem can be painted blue, blamed on enemies, and hidden under a tarp.
This was supposed to be a triumph of patriotic beautification. The pool would be cleaned, sealed, restored, and made worthy of America's 250th birthday. There would be grandeur, efficiency, cameras, and the familiar promise that only one man, standing bravely between the nation and ordinary maintenance, could rescue us from algae.

Instead, nature responded with the kind of quiet institutional review that only standing water can provide. The pool turned green, the coating peeled, the blue material floated up, ducks died, reporters asked questions, and the public looked at the most visible ceremonial basin in America and saw not renewal, but a municipal project wearing too much foundation.

A normal administration might have said,
"The repair didn't work as intended. We are reviewing the materials, the contractor, and the timeline." That would have been boring, adult, and almost impossible to monetize politically. So, we got vandals.
Not immediately, of course. The story had to develop, similarly to algae. First there was a renovation, a failure, and a need for someone else to blame. Soon, we had shadowy figures, knives, box cutters, arrests, investigations, and an alleged gash of such elastic dimensions that it seemed to grow every time it was described. Two hundred feet, three hundred feet, three hundred fifty feet; at this rate, by the Fourth of July, the cut will have started in Virginia and ended somewhere near Delaware.
The key thing about the vandalism story isn't whether some small part of something somewhere was damaged.
Washington can always find a foam strip, a scutt mark, or a guy in cargo shorts making a bad decision near federal property. The key thing is whether vandalism caused the visible failure everyone could see: the peeling blue coating, the floating material, the green water, and the spectacle.

That evidence has not been publicly established; what has been established is more familiar. A president who boasted about fixing something cheaply and beautifully was confronted by a physical object that refused to flatter him. The object was shallow, stagnant, chemically complicated, and surrounded by cameras, which made it one of the few institutions in Washington still capable of transparency.
So, the pool had to become a crime scene.
This is the great innovation of modern grievance politics. Failure is never failure, it's sabotage. Accountability? Try persecution. A contractor problem becomes an attack on America, a maintenance issue becomes proof that Democrats hate monuments, and a peeling liner becomes the aquatic wing of antifa. Somewhere in the federal government, a piece of foam is probably being asked whether it has ever donated to ActBlue.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 29

The S&P 500 has become an index that creates its own momentum for its largest constituents. Because the top ten companies now represent an unprecedented share of the market's value, the index is no longer a diversified basket but a concentrated volatility trap. When the professional class begins to draw down its accounts to service mortgages, the resulting market impact will be sudden and violent, as passive funds are forced to sell the index to meet the redemption demands of the displaced losers.
Ironically, the companies with the highest multiples, which present the greatest risk from net outflows, are largely those that make up the Al stack. When the labour-
displacement thesis plays out, it will be the stock prices of these new-world stars that get clobbered the hardest.

The resulting crash in equity prices, particularly combined with decreasing aggregate demand, Will itself be enough to cause a financial crisis on the scale of the global one of 2007-09, if not larger. Problems in private credit and insurance companies' balance-sheets may well make things worse. A reduction in liquidity globally will impact all asset values. Deflationary pressures will mount.
The good news is that the crisis of almost 20 years ago has given policymakers a well-tested playbook to restore liquidity and reflate assets.
The bad news is that stabilising the financial markets will be the easy bit for governments. They will struggle far more to manage the reordering of society that will result from the mass displacement of highly productive labour.

Ultimately, in another irony, the Al revolution will lead to a world in which many consumers no longer have the income to participate in the revolution. Remaking a society in which growth has been decoupled from employment is a task for which today's political structures are unprepared, to put it mildly. We will witness not just an almighty market correction, but the end of the existing social contract. In terms of politics and policy, as the old saying goes,
"You ain't seen nothing yet."
Carson Block is the founder and chief executive of Muddy Waters
Research.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 29

WITHIN A FEW years, artificial intelligence will displace a significant portion of the world's highly paid knowledge workers. Aggregate demand will suffer, but flows into retirement investment accounts will turn net-negative: workers won't just stop paying in, they will need to withdraw funds.
These outflows will come largely from passive investment funds, particularly S&P 500 index trackers.
Although such redemptions sell every constituent in proportion to its index weight, the price impact will not be evenly distributed. The Al
"mega-caps" that have powered the index higher, such as Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon, are also the names whose valuations have been most dependent on mechanical passive inflows as the marginal buyer. The result, ironically, is that the companies powering the Al revolution are likely to suffer the largest price drops.

Al is at the inflection point at which large language models are improving at a rate that is non-linear and will soon become exponential because they are themselves coding their successors. The most sophisticated users of Al are in tech companies.
Using the current generation of models, they have in many cases reduced teams that previously had half a dozen workers or more to just one. It is reasonable to believe that within three to four years Al Will have replaced 15% of jobs in America's broader knowledge economy.
The two counter-arguments are the
"Jevons paradox" —the historical experience that new technology that increases efficiency also increases demand, thereby creating new jobs that offset losses-and scepticism about the slope of the adoption curve. Both will be proved wrong.

Humanity's ability to innovate and invent clearly outpaces its ability to adapt to its innovations and inventions. Al models are doubling in power roughly every six months. This means that workers made obsolete will not be able to develop the skills to use Al as a tool, rather than to compete with it.
Even if demand for services and products increases because of falling costs and prices, many displaced workers will still be obsolete, with more workers made so by successor model generations. Al will have such a profound impact on businesses' cost and pricing structures that failure to adopt rapidly will prove existential for a large swathe of the economy.

The job displacement will fall disproportionately on highly educated, well-paid workers whose retirement savings drive America's stock markets. Michael Green of Simplify Asset Management has shown how passive investing has resulted in "broken" equity markets that are largely driven at an index level by flows into retirement accounts. His and others' research shows how passive investing has led to multipliers on the aggregate market and individual stocks that cause the net inflow or outflow of one dollar to have a much larger impact on the equities in which it is invested, possibly as high as a multiple of 75-100 for the largest companies.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 29

Quote of the day

“We have had good and bad presidents, and it is a consoling reflection that the American nation possesses such elements of prosperity that the bad presidents cannot destroy it...”

– Henry Clay

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 13

Quote of the day

“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.”

– Fernando Pessoa

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 4

Quote of the day

“Failure is not fatal but failure to change might be.”

– John Wooden

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 3

Quote of the day

“Prejudice is more violent the blinder it is.”

– Elizabeth Blackwell

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 2

Democrats will not get many more chances to show they can make the system deliver for the majority.
Overlooking the sometimes troubling but largely rational complaints of America's
Gen Z would assure their failure.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 2

Director of National Intelligence. A part-time gig for a goddamned real estate developer whose other part-time gig is overseeing a couple of small financial institutions. Kakistocracy Inc.

In a social media post, Trump said Pulte, 38, will temporarily replace the @parting Tulsi Gabbard in the intelligence post but will also continue serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of federally supported mortgage-backers
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 2

“More thoughtful?” How about not so stupid as to think Democrats need to “moderate” to win elections? How about smart enough to realize the current trajectory puts fascists back in power the minute Democrats become the establishment incumbents?

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· Jun 2

Quote of the day

“Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.”

– Vita Sackville-West

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· May 31

As I’m watching this, Baxter is being entertained by a fly…

A white pit bull mix playing with a fly on the carpet.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· May 29

Quote of the day

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.”

– John F. Kennedy

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· May 28

But the overall point is not about the policy specifics, but about the tenor and focus of the party. If Democrats win the House next November - or the White House in 2028 — they will inherit the same angry electorate that just kicked out the other party. Being not-Trump won't be enough. Party actors need to put some real energy into developing a believable, affirmative cost-of-living agenda, and the legislative follow-through to deliver it, or they will be the next ones blamed.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· May 27

Looking forward to the 3rd semester which is all individual projects, not being driven be a syllabus! This hasn’t been glazed yet (the color is an underglaze) but isn’t turning out too bad. It’s a coil pot, not thrown but hand-built.

Steve Sawyer@stevesawyer12· May 25

My dad served as n the Navy from ‘42 until the end of the war. My brother saw this at the Aviation Museum on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. My dad probably served alongside these guys as he too serviced carrier-based F6F Hellcats.