...and we're gonna be late!
If we want to get where we're going, better start packing now.
[AJ Freeman *human byline art c/o yurazenvisuals*]
It’s a little late, but I’ve been busy this week cut me some slack willya? This week On the Job, we’re running a bit behind schedule but that doesn’t mean we find the task at hand any less meaningful.
I’m AJ Freeman, and “This Was a Real Job.”
This Week in Work: Roundtable, Square Hole
Consulting is one of the semi-regular gigs I enjoy most; as you can see in this space I don’t mind sharing my opinions at all.
As a result, I take every opportunity I can get.
I’ve helped a major software company better understand how they can increase voluntary employee usage of workplace communication utilities (short version: you can’t, I don’t get paid enough for that).
I’ve assisted a personal care firm in fine-tuning their outreach by informing them that their new deodorant was unlikely to “boost my confidence to a whole new level.” Not really something spending 9 bucks is gonna help you with.
I’ve even evaluated a political campaign, using my PoliSci background to elucidate all the reasons that without some fundamental ideological shifts at play, the candidate in question could not possibly appeal to me the prospective voter no matter how nice a box “your interests are irrelevant” arrived in.
…but one of the consulting gigs I’ve found myself chewing on most when I’m not being paid to do so (a rare feat indeed) is the ongoing biweekly sessions that explain why this newsletter has been late every other week. Bit different when you’re in a recorded Zoom chat about something that actually matters.
The forum, funded by some shadowy think tank, has endeavored to ascertain the validity of fact-finding methods in scientific research regarding the public.
Based in the nation that brought you the Tuskegee Experiment, the unchecked AIDS crisis, and a body full of microplastics, the meetings represent an effort by researchers to understand why elevated levels of distrust have developed around data curation and maintenance in traditionally marginalized communities.
Now, being a member of multiple “traditionally marginalized communities,” I could go into a whole thing about just why that is, but odds are if you’re reading this you’ve heard it and besides I just went on this diatribe yesterday and I’m not repeating it for less than the $40/hr they paid me to do it.
Short version goes thusly or similar: the structure itself is broken at the base, the whole damn thing is gonna wobble every time you use it.
See, there’s a saying that has dominated my thinking over the past few years, and it goes something like “if you’ve come here to help me, then you’re wasting your time…but if you’re here because your freedom is bound up with mine, then we can work together.”
Wait, quick review of “freedom,” since we have Americans in the audience and we don’t want to cause confusion. Freedom is not the force-given right to take any action without consequence, it is the ability for all to live in dignity…and I guess that loops neatly back into the topic of our opening segment this week.
When working toward a common goal, there’s no such thing as “in” or “out.” If your vision is one of truly assisting communities by collaboratively developing a clearer understanding of the world, it must centralize those communities at every turn. One cannot come from outside a community and dictate how it can best be helped, instead these efforts must be integrated with the community.
Why would inherently high levels of trust around data curation exist in traditionally marginalized communities? They’re traditonally marginalized!
Now, let’s not get too far away from empirical understandings of the world…like, I’m vaccinated and everything, sorry if you have to unsubscribe now loser.
Still, it’s hard to argue that certain segments of the population should be running though walls to participate in medical research studies when it’s traditionally a bad idea. Best case scenario, you contribute to the development of a treatment that you won’t be able to afford when it does finally release in 15 years.
Worst case scenario, you end up giving sensitive medical information to a company that sells sensitive medical information and your insurance premiums mysteriously skyrocket…or yaknow, you end up dead or whatever, that’s bad too.
This undeniably impacts the completeness and therefore validity, of research.
So, for me at least all of the structural elements to create a better scientific community by improving the completeness of data sets are in place…in theory, we have the concept of care around the curation and distribution of data, we profess to protect those who have exposed themselves to the medical industry for purported public benefit and probable private gain. In theory.
In practice, if that was the case we wouldn’t have had that discussion yesterday.
It’s sort of the same way we theoretically have strong protections to prevent a return to feudalism, but in the real world stolen wages are a civil matter while raiding the register is a criminal offense. Nobody goes to prison when troves of medical data “leak,” when faulty drugs are knowingly released to market, when a generation of opioid addicts comes from the latest-labeled medical miracle.
Until we start seeing that kind of congruence, we can talk about better tomorrows as much as we want…so I guess I’m going to keep doing just that.
Sometimes I even get paid for it.
Maybe Update Your Resume: JCPD Superintendent
When I started this publication years ago, in February 2023, the relevant spark was AI eclipsing my own most comfortable place in the employment environment. In the era since, we’ve discovered that there’s more than a few ways to ways to lose your job to AI. Seems like we find a new one every week.
On one episode there was this lawyer who fired his human assistant about a year too early and ended up getting fined although he can still practice law so I guess you gotta call that a win. Oh, then there was the time Drake lost his job to another robotic singer, that got pretty emotional but then again that’s his thing.
One time an AI even lost its pizza delivery job, but being built excusively to perform an impossible and stupid task isn’t the AI’s fault…and although that’s also the case in this week’s installment, it’s definitely a skin-bearing human person that’s going to find themselves looking for employment elsewhere today.
With more students and fewer bus drivers every year, this soon-to-be-jobless person, on behalf of Kentucky’s largest school district, partnered with an AI firm to address driver shortages this fall by systematically destabilizing the student delivery system as a whole.
Well, I guess that can’t be what this forward looking JCPS official planned when reaching out to AlphaRoute (sick biz name bro) to streamline the district’s bussing system, but it is inarguably what unfolded in the later days of last week.
In the debut week of the new, optimized bus schedule, grade-school students were sent on circuitous routes and dropped off in unfamiliar parts of Kentucky’s largest city. Some students didn’t see their front steps until nearly 10pm.
The service of throwing the bussing system into such unrecoverable chaos that schools in Louisville remain closed through this week cost the district a tidy $200k, which kinda sounds like somebody painted a buddy’s pockets with taxpayer funds but I can’t prove that and so I won’t print it.
This edition of “This Was a Real Job” will be digital-only.
That being typed, for context, school lunch debts in Louisville were estimated at just over $50,000 during the 2022-23 school year, but to be fair those kids fucking owe and if they can’t pay they can just practice starving to prepare them for the real world.
Now, this would be a natural interlude to highlight the chronic car-dependence of American cities…in more mindfully-developed parts of the world, schoolchildren simply walk to their nearby school instead of arriving home after second shift ends because an autonomous bus routing system suggested dropping them at the state line, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
No, what we’re always here On the Job to talk about is the dawn of the artificial intelligence age and its impact on the wider world around us…and while AI may not yet be ready to solve all of our modern problems, it’s more than ready to cause some exciting new ones. Here’s to growing up in Interesting Times, kids.
Talent Visa Tracker: Costa Rica
Amid the remote work revolution, more and more people from places where jobs you can do on a computer are common are choosing to live outside their birth nations during their work career, thereby simulating the quasi-retirement that many of us will never live to enjoy. In response, countries around the world are creating initiatives to attract these remote workers and the money they spend.
Costa Rica, nestled somewhere in the part of The Americas not really claimed by North or South, is one of those countries. Its temporary residency program offers a pathway to calling the nation home, provided an applicant can demonstrate an documented legal income equalling 2,500 USD monthly as well as submitting a birth certificate and a clean criminal background from their nation of record.
If an applicant cannot prove documented legal income equalling 2,500 USD monthly, a deposit of $60,000 may be made to a national bank to satisfy the inquiry, and the money is returned (without interest) in monthly installments.
Regarding the quality of life in the country, many who emigrate from abroad report finding a more than manageable landing. The weather is fairly consistent year-round with the exception of rainy season. The food, as in many societies that value diversity and flavor, is delicious. The cost of living is relatively low, at least unless you work in the country and earn its national currency.
The national language, as in all but a few countries across The Americas, is Spanish, but if you insist on not learning to talk to the people who were there first there doubtless are ample insular little enclaves in which to quack English.
Choose from all the finest neighborhoods in cities such as San José while locals glare because you turned the candy lady’s house into a cat café. Patronize exclusively businesses owned by foreigners who do their best to avoid paying local taxes. Stand in a town square and marvel at the remarkably unremarkable national flag. When you call yourself “expat,” the world is yours.
Costa Rica is a beautiful country with warm, welcoming people who already had friend before you showed up all late to the party, so don’t be surprised if you actually have to make an effort to meet new people that don’t loudly remind you of the people you worked so hard and spent so much money to leave behind.
Actually building a life in your adopted home country that doesn’t make you want to jet off on your little sky tube at the first minor inconvenience may be a challenge, but many report that it’s well worth the investment of energy and so if I had to pick, Costa Rica definitely sounds better than Cincinnati or wherever.
Hope Spot: Score One
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this since it’s the coolest summer for the rest of our lives, but we’re not doing super well in this climate fight thing.
Like, sure you’ll read about a new breakthrough in fusion here, and some city installing solar panels there, maybe a system of train lines being powered by the wind and I will say that’s always cool. It gets me going, fills me with the juice I need to drag myself off the mattress and give the whole thing one more swing.
Still, let’s be real here. You and I and everybody who reads this could use our collective eco-consciousness to its fullest extent, recycling bathwater to drink and eating an air-based diet for the next 5 years and it wouldn’t even offset the emissions from the latest leg of Popular Female Singer’s summer tour.
We’re probably not going to Planeteer our way out of this one.
[deep, ragged sigh]
Still, whenever the thinnest cracks appear in the veneer of absurdity that obscures the actions necessary to save our own asses in the coming years, a ray of optimism shines stubbornly through. It gives me hope…and dammit, the latest update out of Montana has given me just a bit of hope for our troubled times.
In a decision that is somehow open to appeal, a judge in the state has sided with a group of climate activists who are suing the jurisdiction itself for failing to uphold its founding document, which promises a “clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”
The facts of the case appear entirely clear-cut: citizens of Montana are not being afforded the rights due them, and the judgment in their favor reflects that. The environment is also fairly fucked up outside the square, artificial borders of Montana, and so the state’s law enforcement is constitutionally obligated to ensure that Wyoming, Idaho, and Combined Dakota keep their acts clean too.
Might also involve some diplomatic doings with non-U.S. entities that Montana shares planetary borders with, like Canada and China.
Of course, I contended even in the previous piece that at this time, regarding this matter, only bullshit can come out of a courtroom. Damages have yet to be announced (I have my doubts they can even be meaningfully calculated) and as we went over earlier this week, it deosn’t really matter until somebody who made money off it gets thrown the fuck in jail.
There is no sanctioned penalty to punish a party for willful degradation of the future we share. There’s no sequence of fancy magic adult terms or Very Serious Costume that can rectify the damage done. You cannot litigate the endangerment of all known life in a court of law. No one “wins” this case.
It’s not a fucking game. Like, at all.
…but that’s only if you ask me, hell I might be wrong. Even I admitted last week in this very “Hope Spot” segment that games are, as reflected by the proportionate investment of our societal and Earthly resources, some of the most important activities undertaken by humankind at any point in our development.
So maybe it’s time to start imagining the fight to save our world from a future of our worst fears as a sport…and through that lens, the good guys just scored one.
I will admit it’s pretty late in the ballgame.