Shadows Move In Where Faith Used to Be: Chinese Apps and the American People

There is so much to write about at this moment, it was rather hard to for me to narrow down a topic. Fortunately, in the past couple days, a new story hit the media out of nowhere that made the decision for me. All that being said: have you heard about DeepSeek?

It’s a Chinese generative AI app, based upon the same precepts as ChatGPT. Literally it was built using that software. The claim is that it took ~$6 million to make, compared to the running costs of about half a billion for the other generative AI models. Once this news hit the market, the blue chips crashed and shook the US tech world.

There are plenty of fun side topics that we’ll cover with this one. For the first part, I’ll go into two of my favorite things: schadenfreude and hubris. The past few weeks, schadenfreude has been getting me through the news cycle. I know it’s not a virtue, trust me. But I am only human, and with the depressing news we have lately, it’s sort of been a good feeling to see the people who made assumptions get wet-fish slapped with reality. You’ll notice, with the flurry of Executive Orders the American President has made lately, he didn’t manage to leave the Ukraine war in the first 24 hours as promised, nor has he done anything to lower the price of groceries, eggs, or gas. And, in fact, he has said he won’t (although he says he will lower drill restrictions in protected areas, that won’t drive gas costs down; though, if there was more competition from green initiatives that he’s cutting, it would). I just bring those specific topics up because the people who voted for him claimed it was due to those topics, and they are already dead on arrival. As the rest of us knew they would be. So seeing the inevitable happen, has been the spark of joy I’ve been taking from an overwhelmingly dark time.

The other bit, hubris, is aimed directly at the tech bro overlord douche cadre. I’ve always thought to be a billionaire is a sign of a personal failing; it means you didn’t take care of those around you on the way up. And if you continue to be a billionaire, it means that you still aren’t taking care of people like you should. They could use the excess of wealth to solve, or nearly solve, all issues we have. But they don’t. And now that we are in this new administration, they immediately bowed down, got in line, and showed us their true natures. Happy for years to stand quietly behind the scenes pulling strings, they have completely capitulated to our new system and tossed out equality or any other moral standing, in the hopes of favor and succor from above. And man, that really made me angry. They don’t even pretend to want to help society now. Google announced yesterday it’s changing its maps to show the Gulf of Mexico inaccurately renamed to Gulf of America, Facebook is going to stop trying to limit hate speech and disinformation at all, and Elon….well, look at that goose stepper up there. He’s just missing the mustache.

So when China announced DeepSeek, I immediately had two responses: wariness because I know why China is doing this, but then there was schadenfreude at the tech sector freaking out. These guys thought they were untouchable, they put themselves on pantheons and thought they finally made it. They could show us their matching Lex Luthor tattoos finally! They own everything and there’s nothing we can do about it!

And then…BAM. China, playing its long game of stealing and silence, tossed this embarrassing grenade right in their sausage fest. MUAHAHAHAHA! Their stocks tanked, billions were lost. The initiative they just announced last week for “AI dominance” suddenly looked, in the daylight, as though it had gotten dressed in a dark room and didn’t check the mirror on the way out. Wait, you all need half a trillion? They did it with 6 million! They kicked the stool out from under the American tech bros, and man was it nice to see them fall.

I also find it vindicating that there are huge moral quandaries with generative AI that haven’t been addressed at all by the government or the tech oligarchy: how they scrape the data of humans to create their content, but don’t compensate them for it. How their output is displacing the careers of real humans, without compensating the system it’s stealing from. How it takes a huge amount of power to run the systems. All of these issues may hit those dudes differently, now that China is wearing the shoes they’ve been sporting.

However…now that we’ve gotten past the flash of “weeeeee”, I’ll move on to my larger emotional response. If you’re American, this isn’t something to truly celebrate. It will be another vector for China to steal our ideas, code, and initiative; after all, that’s how they were able to make DeepSeek in the first place. There’s even evidence that they are using black market NVIDIA chips to make it, since they are restricted from buying them. This comes shortly after the revelations about the two 6th generation fighter jets they purport to have, which if the claims are true, means they have beat us to market. Again, this is based off of data that they stole from us (I remember they hacked the F-35 program while I worked there, and stole plans. And it certainly wasn’t the only time, or the only platform they did it with). They excel at taking other people’s ideas and building on them, and we are seeing those chickens come home to roost. For years, they have been thinking strategically about global markets, while we continued to only think tactically.

First we exported our manufacturing to them, hollowing out our middle class at the enrichment of the few. Trickle down economics somehow still hasn’t worked, in the 40 years since we started trying to get it to work. Any minute now, right? So our populace is unhappier and more tired, and broker, than ever before. China has executed extremely high levels of industrial espionage against us, and continues to do so, at a prolific scale. They’ve infiltrated our extremely sensitive government systems time and time again. And that doesn’t even include the actual spies that have infiltrated our universities, to pick our brains about our newest ideas.

So now, we have the results coming to market. 6th gen fighters, DeepSeek, and TikTok. I was going to write about the TikTok ban a few weeks ago, but wanted to see things play out. I’m now extremely happy I did, because it pairs perfectly with current events.

TikTok is a dangerous tool, as the government has been saying (and the American people ignoring), for years. It’s no coincidence that the version China allows its own citizens to use is far different from our own. It’s meant to dull us down and occupy our attention, so that we don’t accomplish anything with drive. It’s a time suck. It pushes disinformation. It ruins our attention span. It also gathers massive amounts of data on us. I personally predict that at some point, China will use that data to make digital AI agents to “befriend” users and then use PSYOPs on them to further degrade their loyalty to America and one another. I believe that they will use the data from DeepSeek to do the same; it gathers an incredible amount of data from the moment you download the app to your phone.

The TikTok ban, which Trump originally proposed (and I supported!) has now been stymied by Trump. He claims Microsoft are in talks to acquire the American arm of the business, and we shall see what comes of it. It’s been turned back on for American users. But what’s been fascinating to me has been watching the response online of the average user.

Overwhelmingly, I have seen Americans who use TikTok blatantly say, “So what if they have my data. American companies already have it all and sell it to anyone who wants it.” And you know what? Solid point.

This is a sign of the breech of trust between American government and its citizens. For many years now, I’ve been a vocal supporter of privacy laws like the EU has, and of harsh penalties for companies that fail to prevent security breaches. Neither has gained any traction in the US. Since the government believes its job is no longer to protect the average citizen, but instead to provide the opportunity to any sap who wants to bilk a buck from his neighbor the protection to do so, Americans are hugely data compromised.

Many times a year I am notified that some site or another has been breached. Companies are very poor custodians of customer data nearly across the board, and there is nearly no restriction on the data they can collect. There was just a huge data breach of an app schools use called “Powerschool”, announced last week. That data, among other things, included Social Security numbers of students and teachers, affected up to 70 million users, and was all achieved by one admin’s compromised credentials being used to login. As someone with software development and security experience, there are so many red flags here. Why was ONE lowly admin able to access the social security numbers of that many people? Why was no one alerted at that massive of a pull? Why were they stored in unencrypted areas, instead of being accessed individually with a key? And, why will nothing be done about it? This stuff is not rocket science; it’s lazy engineering because they companies don’t have the incentive.

If we made it so that there were fines and jail time for stolen data, security would improve immediately. Technically there are laws, but they aren’t harsh enough and aren’t enforced frequently enough. But they get away with it. If someone came in my house, and stole my social security card, they would face fines and jail time. Why should the digital data be any different? If a bank lost my money due to their poor security, I would be protected. Why is this different?

In my option, the American government has done a terrible job of protecting us from this. Part of that is they don’t feel the pressure; part of it is laziness; part of it is the fact that most of Congress has no clue how technology works because they are dinosaurs and lawyers. But I also think the tech sector has done a terrible job of being good citizens as well; they suck all our private informaion up and sell it to anyone who coughs up the cash, and then they put nothing back into the society they stole it all from. And now, guess what’s happened: They’ve both done such a bad job, that people think China has their interests at heart more than America. And for me, it’s hard to say they seem totally wrong. China certainly doesn’t have their interests at heart, not at all. But it’s getting harder to be convinced that our own country’s government cares about them, either, let alone American companies. And that is so dangerous.

In this moment, the users have the power, and they don’t realize it. We need to have people who understand current issues step up to the plate to protect us. We need to be on the same team again, and by that I mean ALL American citizens need to be protected, not just the rich. In this moment of chaos and terror, I’m not sure what will happen. But at some point, Trump used to be convinced that TikTok and China were dangerous. And he need to remember that they still are. We also need to stand with our true allies again, and make data and security standards with them. If we don’t stand with them, someone else will, and nature abhors a vacuum. I don’t like this isolationist stance we are moving toward; the world is too interconnected for it to be feasible. I have hope that this will be realized again at some point.

Please don’t download those apps. Please don’t give your data and your attention to bad actors. And while we’re at it, contact your Congress people and let them know your concerns about data, and about the overreach of our tech sector. And if you care about any of these topics, please consider helping do something to turn this around. Run for office, use your voice, speak up. We need people who care about change to make it; it’s happened before and the time is perfect for it to happen again.

As always, thanks for reading. Please add me to your RSS feed and share, and contact me if you like. I’d love to hear from you. Times are scary but not impossible. We are in it together. And, I hope you enjoy seeing the tech bro coalition with their bloody teeth this week (I sure am). Like Mike Tyson says,
”Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.” Maybe they’ll realize they need to take care of Americans if they want Americans to take care of them. Or maybe we need to make them realize it.

Winter Solstice and the Doldrums

Hello, dear readers. It's December 21st, officially the longest night (or shortest day) of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. As with so many other denizens of this planet, current and past, I mark this day strongly in my personal calendar. In my head, as autumn closes and it gets harder to be motivated to do things, I keep track of how close we are to the solstice. Because it always feels to me, after Christmas has passed, that January and February seem unduly long. It's a long, dark, cold plain. But I remind myself of this: the solstice has passed. The days ARE getting longer, even if it doesn't feel like it. We turn our faces, so slowly, back to the sun.

It used to bother me a lot more, to have so much time in the darkness and cold. Now I try to embrace it; "embrace every season" is a phrase I say to myself quite a bit, and in a variety of applications. But I started saying it for winter.

No matter how positive I try to make my attitude, the lack of sunlight still does get me down at some point. But I don't mind it nearly as much as I did ten years ago. And this is what I try to do to embrace the winter.

I fully throw myself into my Christmas preparations, especially since I have two very small children. I make cookies, send out cards, make gifts, sing the songs, watch the movies, and eat all the comfort foods. After all, they are named that for a reason. We've been celebrating the solstice season the same way for thousands of years here in the northern reaches of the planet: feasts, company, wearing the little bits of green and red we can find in the grays and browns of winter.

But I don't stop there. Because I think that's a trap I used to fall into. I'd enjoy the heck out of Christmas; even as a kid. My parents were amazing at making Christmas magical for us kids, and I feel safe in saying that feeling hasn't left us as adults. But I used to get to January 2 and think, "now what?" All that society tells us we have to look forward to then is the inevitable disappointment of making and breaking New Year's resolutions. Heck, no wonder we get so sad at this point! So, I've thrown the resolutions out the window. 

But I have accepted that I'm really not going to hold myself to a high standard between Thanksgiving and New Years on many goals. I'm not going to exercise as much as normal, I'm going to indulge more than I should in delicious sugary and unhealthy treats (and more than a couple libations), and I'm going to buy some presents for myself while I buy presents for others. And I'm not going to have resolutions for the New Year. But I DO recognize that I am cyclical, just like the length of days and nights on this planet, and I embrace that. I allow myself to go into what I think of as "hibernation" mode during this time. I rest more, I'm easier on myself, and I let more of my defenses down and let a bit more gentleness out. But this is all in recognition that after the days start to get longer, so will my own personal regimen.

As the year begins, I recognize that I can't keep my own personal December soma holiday going. Slowly, I start working on myself again. I don't tie it to one day, but I know that it feels right within the first couple weeks of the year. I realize that I can't eat treats as much, I make myself move more again. And I start to work on welcoming the sun back into my life. It feels healthy to me this way. Even though the days are cold, I do keep the cozy feeling going. I've taken pages from the Norwegian book on this, and I embrace the idea of "koselig" (which basically means coziness). In the evenings I light candles and make warm teas and drinks. I invite people over to chat even though it's dark and cold. I make warm food, but less cookies. I have come to embrace the idea of "there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear", and so I dress my children and I warmly and we go enjoy the fact that we don't have to worry about sunstroke or mosquitoes or ticks. I even enjoy shoveling snow (for a while, at least).

So many people in the US find it so hard to shake off the doldrums in the winter months. I understand that; I've struggled with it too. But adapting my behavior to embrace the negatives and find the positives within them, has made winter something I look forward to now. And here's the thing about "the doldrums". That term is a nautical one that has become part of the common lexicon. The doldrums are areas in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans that are usually areas of low pressure. As such, for hundreds of miles, there is barely any wind. That's not a big deal now, because of course we don't depend on wind for most ship transport. But when sailing was nearly the only way to travel, hitting the doldrums was a big deal. You'd be becalmed for potentially weeks, working through rations, sitting bored in still heat. Most likely on a ship with at least one person you couldn't stand (let's be honest here). So no one looked forward to it, but eventually, they DO end. And the same is true of our winter doldrums. Make a plan, embrace the potential suck, and realize that this too shall pass. And soon enough you'll get more sunlight, so then you should embrace that, and move your body and love the breeze. But for now, embrace the warm cuddly silence of winter, let yourself relax a bit, and remember that the doldrums end.

Welfare, and the Relevant Conversation We Need to Prepare Ourselves For

I like to try to approach things with an open mind, and learn and adapt when confronted with new data. It's a human foible to want to cling steadfastly to an idea, and I try to release myself from it whenever possible. In the last few years, I've realized that I need to adapt my way of thinking for a different human scenario that we are likely to be confronted with sooner than we think. And that has to do with the welfare state, and, as so much that I talk about, technology.

A theme that I harp on quite a bit is trying to live a balanced life in a world that is increasingly aslant. I've written several posts that revolve around that idea, and I'm sure I'm not done yet. Give me a topic and I'll yammer on, trust me. But essentially a few of the ideas for leading a fulfilling life in a world that is doing everything it can to distract us from that are: 

• Try to move around every day. Depression hates a moving target. Do some pushups, do some squats, walk and run, jump rope. Any motion is better than no motion.
• Create something physical whenever possible. You don't have to make a masterpiece, and as any artist can tell you, creation is mostly about failures. But the satisfaction of having something tangible will satisfy something in you that nothing else will. Hence my candle business for example.
• Avoid creating an echo chamber that reinforces your own opinions. Seek conflicting information and try to learn. 
• Read! It doesn't matter what. Read cookbooks if you want. Read science fiction (we all know I love it), find history books that engage you. Just read. It engages your mind, as does exercise, and helps fight off mental apathy.
• Keep moving forward! Set goals and work towards them. If you don't, all of a sudden you'll realize 20 years passed without accomplishing anything. It's never to late to start making goals and growing. Make sure not to only set large ones, either. Set small ones as well so you are always seeing progress somewhere; that way you don't get frustrated and bored on the way to meeting large ones.
• Move with kindness and compassion. Stand for your convictions, but remember everyone has arrived at different points in life due to a lot of circumstances, and be compassionate. No one ever looked good by berating someone who was in pain. Help others whenever possible, both through charity contribution and through charitable acts.
• Surround yourself with intelligent people who motivate you and do good things. Understand that no one is perfect, but having people that inspire you to live a better life will help insure that you live a better life. I'm blessed to know some of the most inspiring people on this planet, and I'm not being hyperbolic. 

That's just a partial list, but it's a good starting place. It doesn't take a lot of reading between the lines to see that I'm someone who believes in working towards things. And as such, as you might imagine, I believe that government handouts and welfare are a two-edged sword. I absolutely understand that there are circumstances in which people are thrown off-kilter and can't get back on their feet alone. This life is not easy on any of us, but it's also harder on some. While I believe that it's essential to help others and be compassionate, I also think that large government offices established to fulfill that role are not ideal. First of all, I've been working in the government for the last decade, and can fully reinforce how much waste of funding there is when there's no capitalism involved. I've seen plenty of chairs filled for the sake of securing funding. 

The other problem with large government offices doling out....well, the dole...is the atrophy to the recipients over time. It's a truism of human nature that if we don't have to work for something, eventually, we don't appreciate it. Even if at the beginning we did. We start to see it as something that we deserve, and desire to give nothing back. That feeling is really a poisonous one, and I'm not blaming the people who fall into it. I'm not shirking the responsibility of the receiver here, but I really think it's just a symptom of depression, when we don't feel we're contributing. And it can make us selfish and petty. So I'm a big fan of welfare programs that also give the recipients a purpose. The New Deal building programs changed over time into something that I applaud less, but the initial programs that gave us dams, parks, schools, and much more, built by citizens who were crushed beneath the Great Depression, had a lot that I liked. People didn't atrophy due to lack of motivation; they could see that they were doing something for their community while they got off their feet. That was huge.

So where am I going with this? Well, I've realized something. I'm not the first or only person to think about it, but I like to talk here about things that are rattling around my brain. The last several years have had extremely heated conversations about "handouts" and welfare state behaviors. Belief that work and the feeling of contribution is essential to mental well-being obviously puts me on a certain side in the current conversation. But that conversation is about to go through a fundamental change. 

Within the next decade or so, humanity is going to go through another fundamental upheaval. The population of the earth has ballooned since the 1730s from less than 1 billion to more than 8 billion. As that change has occurred, simultaneously there has been a huge leap forward in nearly every aspect of life due to technology changes. We are quickly approaching a nexus yet again. Within the next one to two decades, most jobs are going to be able to be taken over by AI programs or robots of some kind. That's not just true of the assembly line and customer service jobs that we already see (and as we talk about raising the minimum wage, the rush is coming faster to replace lower skill jobs with cheaper robots that don't require things like healthcare). That also applies to many of the higher level jobs too. Drones will soon be in everything from package delivery, piloting aircraft, driving trains and our own cars. Even now programs are intelligent enough to write NEW programs that can outperform programs written by humans. There are programs that are intelligent enough to design and create music, too. AI is going to be able to out-human us in nearly every human endeavor. That's frightening, but quickly coming closer. Brave New World, indeed. Although a perk that I see is that the outsourcing problem America has had will most likely quickly go away. While human personnel in India and China have taken many production jobs from the US, that will become an obsolete problem. While currently paying an overseas worker much less to than an American to do a job has undoubtedly affected production stateside, the price difference between an overseas robot and a US based robot likely won't be much different (at least not for long), so perhaps we'll see a lot of production return home. I hope so anyway.

So the "welfare" conversation is about to change. Suddenly, instead of requiring people to "find work", even those who would seek work of their own volition, are going to have a hard time finding a role. And in that scenario, we can't just allow millions of displaced workers to starve to death because they refuse to find a job. There just literally won't be enough jobs. It won't be a matter of cross training or getting a new field. Workers won't be needed. So what do we do? Humanity will fundamentally change. It will be necessary to have a basic universal wage for all the displaced people.

What I HOPE is that we will essentially end up in a "post-economy economy", of sorts. In the utopian view, it would be a situation in which people figure out how to adapt and happily live when their work isn't "necessary". My recommendation is that we all look into how the nobility of England occupied themselves in the 18th century. Learn languages, learn to draw, take exercise...maybe the waters at Bath, haha....read and write. Engage ourselves. But what I worry about is that we'll basically just stay heads down and argue on the internet even more. 

The stigma of "not having a job" is going to be much more universal before we know it. And we'd better learn how to adequately prepare ourselves for that era. Learn to be happy and make work for ourselves that doesn't result in wage, but satisfaction in other ways. Because those days are coming. Hopefully we can adapt and become more balanced, rounded, and embrace that change. The conversation will need to.

Post script for further reading: If you'd like an interesting book to read about rapid technology change and its implications for what it means to be human, I highly recommend "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler. It was written in 1970 so it's not 100% accurate anymore (there have been even more leaps since then), but it's a good jumping off point for contemplation. "Brave New World" is a good cautionary tale about how to be the wrong sort of leisure class, but it is disconcertingly easy to think about it going that way.

Pearl Harbor 75th Anniversary: A perspective from a "millennial"

75 years ago today Pearl Harbor happened. It's been on my mind all day, although I'm just now putting pen to page. The shock of that morning has always brought me to tears, though I wasn't even born for another 41 years. I try to place myself into the shoes of people on that day, and I find myself shaken.

In a world already wrought with unrest, and America caught between two warring fronts of terrifying proportion and building terror. To be someone who was all too familiar with the horrors of war; after all just 23 years before the horrors of World War I had concluded, and many people were still scarred and maimed, spiritually, mentally, and physically, from that experience. Now the same power was raising its head in the East (and being terrifyingly successful); to the West, the atrocities and whispers of acts like the Rape of Nanking were creeping in. The Germans and the Japanese were knocking, and we were hoping to find a clear path without being frayed by warfare again so soon. The country was only just over 150 years old, and there had already been so much exhaustion.

Just crawling from beneath the wreckage of the dust bowl and the great depression, and now the storms on every horizon. Can you imagine the oppression on the hearts of the average American at that time? No wonder Americana was such a large cultural force: cling to each other, cling to our history, and think about baseball, movies, and dancing as much as possible. It was a terrifying time. And that was what it would have felt like on December 6, 1941.

Now picture the morning of December 7. A shocking attack out of nowhere (to most citizens, though the signs were there for leadership in retrospect, but the pieces put together too slowly to prevent the attack). That morning it must have felt like a lightning bolt that struck right in the stomach....but you knew the bolt would come sometime. Maybe there was a feeling of sick inevitability, in a world so topsy-turvy and so recently cruel. We knew we'd get pulled in, but not like this, not NOW. A shock attack, cowardly and early in the morning on a Sunday, perfectly calculated to maximize the carnage of those simply trying to rest. Right before Christmas, on a beautiful Sunday morning, before church. 

2,403 military men were killed that morning; many of them drowned in the hulls of the ships they slept on, in a force at peace. Men like people we know now, who surround us every day. People who had children, who wanted children. There must have been someone who died that loved reading too much, and his brothers teased him for having his nose in a book all the time. There must have been someone who died that took care of every stray animal who came his way. Another who wrote home to his little brothers and sisters every week, and sent them his pay, to help, since the farm still hadn't recovered. There must have been someone who hated to talk, but had a sweet smile if you caught it. They loved, they laughed, they hoped, and they dreamed. They knew they were in a world at war, and they would be pulled into it...but they didn't even get the chance. The horror of that morning resonates today just as strongly as it did then, because our clothes and styles change, but humans don't. They were the same as us. 

And thus they were pulled into the war, and our country was pulled into the war, and our world was never the same. And we learned once again through tribulation who we were and what mattered, and did what we needed to do to make it as right as we could. The sleeping dragon was awoken, and didn't sleep again until after Jimmy Doolittle had his raid, and bombs were dropped, and millions of lives were irrevocably changed. But things were still better than they would have been if we had turned our cheek the other way.

So now, it is 75 years later. And to many it feels as though it's ancient history, and eventually it will be. But to me it feels like it could have happened yesterday, and every year I cry on this day in remembrance of those who were lost, and thank them for their sacrifice. Because the world is still made up of people, just as it was then, and that shock feels just as real now as it did to people then. We try to do the best we can, but sometimes someone decides they need to try to take it. And then we have to fight.