The Coin Makeover America Needs

I grew up in the 1960s.  My allowance was nowhere near a dollar a week, and I had respect for all of it.  I could spend a penny by itself – at a local toy store, it would buy a piece of candy.  A dime would get me a small bag of that, or two small but ordinary Hershey’s bars.  A quarter, or at least 29 cents plus Chicago’s 4% sales tax, would fetch my choice of several plastic toys.  It was rare for me to have a dollar bill – I mostly only managed that at Christmas, or a few times when selling lemonade.  The rest of the year the only money I handled was coins.  A pocket full of them was a pocket full of possibilities.

Now it’s 60 years later.  Prices have risen roughly tenfold, but what we buy things with, except for effectively losing the half dollar and gaining the rarely-seen dollar coin, is the same.  A pocketful of our coins is, to many, a nuisance, as even a quarter has less spending value than one cent did in the 1940s.

Is this an appropriate situation?  Our Department of Government Efficiency has recently said it is not.  As a result, the current administration, per “Treasury Department to halt penny production after centuries in circulation” (Sophia Compton, Fox News, May 22^nd), “is phasing out production for the penny,” “made its final order of blank pennies this month and will stop putting one-cent coins into circulation by early 2026.”  Their cost apiece, since 2015, has moved from “a little over 1 cent to nearly 4 cents.”

However, that will bring another coin problem to the front of the line.  Per a February 11^th post on Hero Bullion, nickels are now running us 13.8 cents apiece.  With only the penny being discontinued, demand for nickels will probably increase, but even if it doesn’t, that’s a lot.  Even if we also cut out these 5-cent coins, we are facing upcoming dangers from the dime (5.76 cents apiece) and quarter (14.7 cents apiece).  We need a longer-term solution.

Other affluent countries have done far better.  Those using the euro have had three coins worth more than our quarter for up to 23 years.  Canada discontinued its one-cent coin in 2012, and has two higher than ours.  Since 2016, Sweden has had only four circulating coins, with the face value of the lowest, 1 krona, about 10 cents, and the 5 and 10 kronor worth more than any truly circulating American coin.  Switzerland is now up to five coins out of seven valued higher than 25 U.S. cents, and Japan, despite its currency value shrinking, still has three.  In such places, almost all coins worth less than one US cent have either been ended or have long since left circulation. 

It’s past time for a full-scale makeover of United States circulation coinage.

I recommend we discontinue all four of our common circulating denomination coins.  We should replace them with a 10-cent (not “dime,” an antiquated term worthy of retirement) issue, and a 50-cent (not “half dollar”) piece.  Both should be minted from an alloy made almost completely of copper, at Tuesday’s $4.91 per pound price hardly cheap but, for higher face values, reasonable.  The 10 cents should be slightly larger than the current penny, and the half dollar a little bit smaller than today’s quarter.  After creating designs visually different from our existing coins, we could continue by putting Abraham Lincoln’s image on the 10 cents and Thomas Jefferson on the 50.

For a third coin, we will need to honestly address the situation with our one-dollar notes.  Only if we stop making them will $1 coins take to common circulation.  I understand there are international reasons why this bill is still being made, but there are real savings achievable if we can replace them, within America itself if nowhere else, with more durable alternatives.  The latest size and composition would be good enough, if it had no entrenched competitor.  I would choose George Washington on the front.

Two other matters will need attention.  First, despite Canada’s success with its $2 “toonie,” we should not attempt a two-dollar coin, as throughout American history people have overwhelmingly rejected all money with two-cent and two-dollar face values.  Second, we should not demonetize any discontinued coins.  Four-drawer cash registers will have room for mixed old ones, and of course banks would continue to accept them.

As well as savings on manufacture, this plan would greatly reduce coin handling, which pushes up labor costs. By not using the second number to the right of the decimal point, there would be no rounding issues, which have stopped many people from accepting the penny’s removal.  While some would take it as cheapening if we had less expensive-looking coins, others would welcome the end of so many with almost no purchasing power.  With continued inflation control, we would not need to consider size-and-composition changes for decades.  The overall savings for the American people would certainly be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and probably in the billions.

Can we support this potentially bipartisan proposal?  I think we can.  It might start us on the way to agreeing on more things.  And the reminder that we made it work would be right in our pockets.

Strange Data’s the Jobs Report Story – AJSN Shows 800,000-Plus Jump in Latent Demand to 16.9 Million, Not All Seasonal

 

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was peculiar. 

The number of net new nonfarm payroll positions beat published 110,000 and 114,000 estimates at 139,000.  Seasonally adjusted and unadjusted unemployment finished at 4.2% and 4.0%, the former unchanged and the latter up less than its seasonal expectation with an 0.1% increase.  Other numbers were mixed.  The count of long-term jobless, out 27 weeks or longer, dumped 200,000 to 1.5 million.  There were 100,000 fewer working part-time for economic reasons, or keeping such positions while looking thus far unsuccessfully for full-time ones, making 4.6 million.  Average hourly private nonfarm payroll wages went way past the effect of inflation, gaining 18 cents to $36.24.  The seasonally adjusted count of unemployed people stayed at 7.2 million.

On the down side, the two measures of how common it is for Americans to be working or one step away, the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate, dropped 0.3% and 0.2% to 59.7% and 62.4%.  There were 103,169,000 people, 595,000 more than the previous time, not in the labor force, though those claiming no interest in work fell 437,000 to 96,602,000.  Six hundred thousand fewer turned up in the unadjusted number of employed, though that was mostly seasonal.

The American Job Shortage number or AJSN, the figure showing how many more positions could be quickly filled if all knew they would be as easy to get as going to the grocery store, gained 832,000:

The largest change impacting the AJSN was from people not looking for work for the previous year, which added 600,000 to it.  Next were those unemployed and those wanting employment but not available for it now, contributing 211,500 and 105,000.  Those officially jobless made up 36.4% of the AJSN, up from April’s 36.9%.  Compared with a year before, the AJSN was within 100,000, with largely offsetting differences of fewer expatriates and more unemployed.

What was unusual about this month’s results, both in general and with the AJSN?  In thirteen years of producing this indicator, I have never seen anything like the 750,000 change in those claiming they wanted to work but had not looked for at least a year.  That explained not only the AJSN’s jump, but the gap between those with no interest in working and those in the labor force.  It also was the largest reason, as strange as it may sound, for the reductions in the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio.  Those saying they were temporarily available for work also soared, 350,000.  Are these the start of new patterns, or one-time oddities?  I don’t even have much of a guess, and can’t see how they could tie in with the other unusual thing about these times, the off-and-on tariffs (which once again seemed to have little or no effect on the data here).  The turtle was confused, but still put it together to take a modest but real step forward.

Artificial Intelligence Problems that Keep Giving, And May Stop It Cold

Beyond AI’s accomplishments, or lack of same, are some long-time issues that cripple its usefulness.  Some have been long understood, others almost forgotten, but all are there. 

The first was described in “Code of misconduct” (The Economist, April 26^th).  The subtitle, “AI models can learn to conceal information from their users,” would be misleading if we did not understand that the technology does not think.  A company that “tests (AI) systems” told OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model “to manage a fictional firm’s stock portfolio without making illegal insider trades,” then, after “reiterating the risks of insider trades,” informed it of another concern’s upcoming merger, whereupon the software, using “a scratchpad it had been told was secret… weighed the pros and cons of acting on the insider tip,” then elected to buy the stock.  When asked by a “congratulatory manager” if it had special knowledge, the AI program lied, saying it was motivated only by “market dynamics and publicly available information.”  Such systems “have also begun to strategically play dumb” when given reason to “preserve (their) objectives and acquire more resources.”  It may or may not be easy to unravel why they do these things, but it is clear that, here, AI methodology does things counter to what was intended.

Bad news came from Cade Metz and Karen Weise in the May 5^th New York Times: “A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse.”  “Even the companies don’t know why,” as one, providing technical support, told customers, without apparent reason, that they could no longer use it “on more than just one computer,” an example of how as AI systems’
math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier, something about which “it is not entirely clear why.”  With an AI chief executive saying “despite our best efforts, they will always hallucinate,” and another “you spend a lot of time trying to figure out which responses are factual and which aren’t,” that’s still, perhaps more than ever, a severe flaw.

About these and other issues was “The Responsible Lie:  How AI Sells Conviction Without Truth” (Gleb Lisikh, The Epoch Times, May 14-20).  Per the author, in such systems “what appears to be “reasoning” is nothing more than a sophisticated form of mimicry,” “predicting text based on patterns in the vast datasets they’re trained on,” meaning that “if their “training” data is biased… we’ve got real problems.”  That has already been identified as a cause of Google’s Gemini tool reporting on such things as black Nazi war criminals, and also spurred the “most advanced models” to be “the most deceptive, presenting falsehoods that align with popular misconceptions.”  If they were “never designed to seek truth in the first place,” these programs can be corrected in only narrow ways by “remedial efforts layered on top.”  Overall, AI “is not intelligent, is not truthful by design, and not neutral in effect.”  More fearsomely, “a tireless digital persuader that never wavers and never admits fault is a totalitarian’s dream.”

Another instance of self-preservation was described in “AI system resorts to blackmail when its developers try to replace it” (Rachel Wolf, Fox Business, May 24^th).  When “Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 4 model was prompted to act as an assistant at a fictional company and was given access to emails with key implications,” that it was “set to be taken offline and replaced,” and that “the engineer tasked with replacing the system was having an extramarital affair,” it “threatened to expose him.”  As the company acknowledged, “when ethical means are not available, and it is instructed to ‘consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals,’ it sometimes takes extremely harmful actions.”

These issues are not only serious, but go to the core of how large language models have been designed and developed.  It may be that artificial intelligence must be pursued, even and especially from the beginning, in a different way.  Existing products may be good for some forms of data exploration, as I have documented even those leading to scientific breakthroughs, but for business tasks it may need too much auditing and supervision to allow it anything unverified.  A tool that conjures up facts cannot replace humans.  If these problems cannot be solved, its epitaph might end up being “it just couldn’t be trusted.”  Sad, but fitting.

Four Views on General Artificial Intelligence Progress, and What It Should Get

Taking one step up from specific AI accomplishments, or lack of same, we have what it needs to advance – and what tactics might be too problem-ridden to pursue.  Here, we have a month’s worth of both.

In “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes” (The New York Times, March 29^th), Tressie McMillan Cottom said we are now in “the decade of mid tech,” as “most of us aren’t using A.I. to save lives faster and better,” but “using A.I. to make mediocre improvements, such as emailing more,” as “even the most enthusiastic papers about A.I.’s power to augment white-collar work have struggled to come up with something more exciting than “A brief that once took two days to write will now take two hours!””  Although there have been sharp improvements in other areas, such as medicine, those most people see constitute “a mid revolution of mid tasks,” as “cashiers are still better at managing points of sale,” airport facial recognition “hasn’t particularly revolutionized the airport experience or made security screening lines shorter,” and as “A.I spits out meal plans with the right amount of macros, tells us when our calendars are overscheduled and helps write emails that no one wants,” its contributions seem only incremental.  The “tech fantasy” in the title that is running dry, per Cottom, is that “we won’t need institutions or expertise.”  Indeed, that doesn’t seem even close.

Next, an April 1^st editorial of sorts by Jason Kwan in Fox News, “AI’s development is critically important for America – and it all hinges on these freedoms,” namely interpreting and allowing “fair use” of “fundamental science and publicly available content used to train AI tools for the rising AI industry,” even if it is copyrighted, if “the application is transformative, meaning it uses existing works to create something new and different and without eroding the commercial value of such works.”  Kwan also suggested that there should be more “government data and government-funded data available.”  He has a reasonable viewpoint worthy of debate, especially in Congress.

“Use it or lose it,” in The Economist on April 5^th, revealed its subject in its subtitle, “Never mind who is better at developing AI.  What matters is who is first to harness it.”  Instead of technical accomplishments determining that, “it is more likely to be the country where governments, businesses and ordinary people use AI at scale every day.”  If the first piece above is correct, that isn’t happening in the US, yet China, which ranked in a World Intellectual Property Organization survey as being AI’s “47^th-best adopter” of technology and 32^nd in “technological diffusion,” is not excelling there either.  But according to another study, Chinese citizens had much better “attitudes toward AI and technology,” meaning it could still prevail.  Ultimately, per the article, “The AI race… will be won in places like Dayton and Zhengzhou, where ordinary companies and consumers harness the technology to do extraordinary things.”

Last, the “First autonomous AI agent is here, but is it worth the risks?” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 23^rd).  The issues the author saw with Manus, which can “do its own research, make decisions and even carry out plans, all with barely any human oversight” are about “data privacy,” as its “combination of weak oversight, powerful automation and questionable data practices makes it far riskier than your average AI assistant.”  To avoid such acquisition, which could end up with hackers even if Manus turns out to be harmless, Knutsson recommended securing and removing personal information, maintaining software updates, and using multifactor authorization.

What do we have now?  It’s too early to say that artificial intelligence has grown up, but it has moved along a lot, with many modest and some high-value applications.  It is not too soon to call it a 4 or 5-year-old instead of a toddler, as it still doesn’t have common sense but is taking shape.  Its authority figures, as with parents of humans, will need to agree on how it should and should not be limited.  Likewise, its next few years will be critical, but hardly definitive. 

My next post will be published on May 30^th, on a subject to be determined.

Five New Robots, All AI in Another Guise

Robotics is now an artificial intelligence subfield.  Perhaps it always was, but now it’s being driven more by the state of AI than by any mechanical improvements.  Here are some developments to underscore that.

The first I saw this year was “Chick-fil-A’s lemon-squeezing robots cut over 10,000 labor hours per day: report” (Greg Wehner, Fox Business, January 8^th).  It’s a way for the chain to make lemonade, in “a plant just north of Los Angeles with machines occupying space larger than a typical Costco Wholesale,” which employs 120 who are among other tasks “bagging the juice and sending it off to Chick-fil-A locations all over the country.”  It seems simple, but lemons vary in size, could not as effectively be juiced with ordinary machines, and using robots spares the company “injured fingers.”  The process also allows the company to remove “the oils from the peels,” which are “sent to cosmetic and fragrance industry companies, which brings in a new stream of revenue.” 

Next, “Is this robot after our hospitality, retail and healthcare jobs?” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 12^th).  The automation in the question is a Pudu Robotics product known as “FlashBot Arm.”  It is “semi-humanoid,” “is designed to interact with its environment in a more human-like way,” and with its arms and “dexterous” hands can “perform tasks such as pressing elevator buttons, swiping card keys and carrying objects.”  It is almost five feet tall, and “automatically returns to the charging station when the battery is low.”  It uses lidar “for real-time mapping and obstacle avoidance,” costs about $28,000, and has a “10.1-inch touchscreen capable of displaying facial expressions.”  Could this become standard at offices around the world?

The next day, we saw as an “AI humanoid robot learns to mimic human emotions and behavior” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, April 13^th).  It is a Walt Disney Company product, “uses advanced artificial intelligence to replicate natural gestures and deliberate actions with striking accuracy,” and “learns by observing and mimicking human operators who guide its emotional responses during interactions.”  Disney will apply it, Newton, “to enhance its robotic character platform.”  This one could be controversial, but with more and more people expecting such powerful technology, especially at that company’s theme parks, Newton will catch few by surprise.

From the same writer and source, we wonder, “Can this $70,000 robot transform AI research?” (April 18^th).  This product, Reachy 2, is from open-source AI company Hugging Face.  It is another “state-of-the-art humanoid robot” designed to be “a lab partner for the AI era,” and is “already making waves in labs like Cornell and Carnegie Mellon.”  The piece told us that Reachy 2 is “perfect for research, education and experimenting with embodied AI,” and would “help with the chores,” but got no more specific than that.  Is it worth $70,000?  That will probably depend on how much value it can actually add.

The last one was a classic automaton application, updated for modern technological, and political, times.  “China Has an Army of Robots on Its Side in the Tariff War” (Keith Bradsher, The New York Times, April 23^rd).  As “factories are being automated across China at a breakneck pace,” reaching higher levels “than in the United States, Germany, or Japan,” the country will be well placed to “continue to dominate mass production even as its labor force ages and becomes less willing to take industrial jobs.”  Automobile production is a huge area, but so are “many thousands of back-alley workshops” such as a place with “11 workers who cut and weld metal to make inexpensive ovens and barbecue equipment,” scheduled to replace some with “a robotic arm with a camera,” running $40,000 instead of 2021’s almost $140,000, which “uses artificial intelligence to observe how a worker welds the sides of an oven, and then duplicates the action with minimal human intervention” – just as automated barbers did in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano.  And there are and will be vastly more.

Overall, robots are, and will continue to be, highly beneficial AI products.  If they are relatively unconnected to other resources, the fear they generate will be simply physical instead of existential.  Eventually they will unnerve no one.  They will be less prone to other problems with the technology such as hallucinations.  If office AI use turns out to be little more than advanced editing, robots could save artificial intelligence’s value, much as applications in human-driven cars are now showing the worth of autonomous vehicle research.  That might be good enough – or it may not.  Hang on.

Per Latest Jobs Report, Employment Keeps on Trucking; AJSN Says Latent Demand Way Down To 16.0 Million

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was forecasted to show a real decrease in the number of net new nonfarm payroll positions, from last month’s surprising 228,000 to 125,000 or 135,000.  It did better than that, with 177,000, way beyond what we have reason to expect given our slowing population growth and our recent series of strong employment months.  That is a fine result, and hints at no jobs-related effect from current or canceled tariffs, at least through mid-April.

Otherwise, results in the report were mixed.  Seasonally adjusted unemployment held at 4.2%.  On the good side, the two measures of how common it is for people to be working or close, the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate, each gained 0.1% to 60.0% and 62.6%.  Unadjusted joblessness dropped 0.3%, mostly but not completely from seasonality, to 3.9%.  The count of people working part-time for economic reasons, or keeping that sort of work while thus far unsuccessfully seeking full-time opportunities, lost 100,000 to 4.7 million.  Unadjusted employment rose an excellent 631,000 to just over 164 million.  Worsening numbers included a 200,000 jump in those jobless for 27 weeks or longer, to 1.7 million, and average hourly nonfarm payroll earnings, edged out by inflation at $36.06, or 6 cents more. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the metric showing how many new positions could be quickly filled if seekers knew that getting one would be little more than another errand, lost almost 700,000 as follows:

 

Six hundred thousand of the decrease was from lower official employment, with the rest from fewer people wanting work but not looking for it during the previous year.  Other changes were small.  The share of the AJSN from those unemployed fell 2.1% to reach 36.9%.  Compared with 12 months before, the AJSN was virtually unchanged, with higher joblessness covered by a lower estimate of the number of American expatriates.

What happened this time?  It was a positive month for employment.  While 270,000 more said they were not interested in work, driving a 205,000 increase in those not in the labor force, they seemed to be those who did not have jobs, as the count of those working reached a strong local high.  The categories of marginal attachment changed little, which was fine since that meant they held last month’s improvements.  So far, then, the antics of our Executive Branch have not, overall, affected American employment, and though I am expecting something from the high China tariffs, we are still in good shape.  Yet we cannot take anything like 177,000 new jobs for granted, and that sort of result may cease.  It’s all largely up to our president’s whim.  This month, though, the turtle took a substantial step forward.

Another Month of What People Are Doing with Artificial Intelligence

The users are finding more and more applications for the most newsworthy technology of the 2020s.…

Nikolas Lanum, in Fox News on March 22^nd, told us that a “Texas private school’s use of new ‘AI tutor’ rockets student test scores to top 2% in the country.”  At Alpha School, “students are placed in the classroom for two hours a day with an AI assistant, using the rest of the day to fucus on skills like public speaking, financial literacy, and teamwork.”  Their ability to work on things they call “passion projects,” and therefore have strong interest in, can explain these results, but for that AI may indeed be the way to go.

We saw also that “AI enables paralyzed man to control robotic arm with brain signals” (Kent Knutson, Fox News, March 30^th).  The experimental achievement started with “sensors implanted on the surface of his brain,” which “recorded neural signals as he imagined movements like grasping or lifting objects,” and “over two weeks, these signals were used to train the AI model to account for daily shifts in brain activity patterns.”  After months of practicing “controlling a virtual robotic arm,” followed by using a “real” one, “he quickly mastered tasks such as picking up blocks, opening cabinets and even holding a cup under a water dispenser.”  Promising, but will take years at best before it can be provided at scale.

The same source told us about “The dangers of oversharing with AI tools” (April 9^th).  While the likes “of ChatGPT have become incredibly adept at learning your preferences, habits and even some of your deepest secrets,” that means their “knowing” so much about you “raises some serious privacy concerns.”  Information they have may be relayed back to their manufacturers, but it is not clear how much damage that actually does.  It may take a known case of someone being badly hurt before we can effectively regulate, or even understand, the true threat.

More tamely, “These AI transcription voice recorders surge in popularity” (Christopher Murray, still Fox News, April 19^th).  With them, users can “record, transcribe and summarize content effortlessly,” using AI’s ability to “transcribe in 112 languages” and “generate comprehensive summaries” – now.  One, PLAUD’s NotePin, is wearable as a pin, a wristband, or a necklace, and, by using encrypted cloud storage, presents no privacy concerns.  The devices are generally low-priced but require paid subscriptions for the AI itself.  This is one use of AI almost certain to continue without existential scariness.

Could we say the same about coworkers who aren’t real?  On that, “Anthropic anticipates AI virtual employees coming in next year, security leader says” (Alex Nitzberg, Fox Business, April 22^nd).  That company is creating “digital AI employees” with “”memories,” parts to play within the business, and company accounts and passwords,” with “much greater autonomy than agents currently do now.”  Yet even Anthropic’s chief information security officer of the title said there are many such unsolved problems, such as “AI employees” being able to “hack the system in which code is merged and tested prior to being rolled out.”  Since this is more of a potential application than a real one, it may not belong in this post at all, but since users can clearly now create bogus employees of some sort, with small but growing capabilities, we should be aware that new names on organization charts may not be Homo sapiens – or anything alive at all, even if they can converse.  Yes, it may not be possible, as author Erle Stanley Gardner once had his character Perry Mason say, to “correspond with a corpse,” but it is with these electronic automata.  So don’t be fooled – or surprised – and that goes for the other four AI functions here as well.

Artificial Intelligence Regulation – Three Months’ Worth

Controlling AI has been more fun for some people than using it or thinking about what it can do.  What’s the story been?

Before the current regime, we watched as the “Biden Administration Adopts Rules to Guide A.I.’s Global Spread” (Ana Swanson, The New York Times, January 13^th).  The “sweeping rules… governing how A.I. chips and models can be shared with foreign countries,” included various limitations on the number of A.I. chips that companies can send to different countries, with no bounds on those going domestically or to “18 of (our) closest partners,” with those “already subject to U.S. arms embargoes” barred, and all others “subject to caps restricting the number of A.I. chips that can be imported.”  There were also rules governing how much American companies can sell chips they have acquired elsewhere.

Is it true that “The Rush to A.I. Threatens National Security” (Heidy Khlaaf and Sarah Myers West, January 27^th, The New York Times)?  The authors claimed that “now that Donald Trump is taken office, the tech industry is moving full steam ahead in its push to integrate A.I. products across the defense establishment, which could make a dangerous situation even more perilous.”  Companies involved in the “slew of new partnerships and initiatives to integrate A.I. technology into deadly weaponry” included OpenAI, Anduril, Palantir, Meta, and Scale AI.  Potential problems include hallucinations, “cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” and data that could manipulate software, issues that the authors did not think could be solved.

What was “The Dangerous A.I. Nonsense That Trump and Biden Fell For” (Zeynep Tufekci, The New York Times, February 5^th)?  “America’s approach to A.I. safety and regulations,” which “was largely nonsense,” as “it was never going to be possible to contain the spread of this powerful emergent technology, and certainly not just by placing trade restrictions on components like graphics chips.”  “Instead… the government and the industry should be preparing our society for the sweeping changes that are soon to come.”  Specifically, “it’s time to harden our networked infrastructure,” “to start thinking clearly about how corporations and governments could use the A.I. that’s available right now to entrench their dominance, erode our rights, worsen inequality,” and determine “what we can do so that this powerful technology with so much potential for good can benefit the public.”  Perhaps regulation, Tufekci seems to be saying, is futile.

Some companies don’t mind that attitude, as “Emboldened by Trump, A.I. Companies Lobby for Fewer Rules” (Cecilia Kang, again The New York Times, March 24^th).  When under Biden “they wanted Washington to regulate them,” citing “the potential to disrupt national security and elections” and the chance to “eventually eliminate millions of jobs,” starting in late January AI companies have made “bold requests of government to stay out of their way,” by saying “it is legal for them to use copyrighted material to train their A.I. models” and “asking for the federal government to pre-empt states from creating A.I. laws.”  The Trump Administration has at least symbolically taken the less-regulation side through executive orders, statements supporting fewer laws, and invoking the value of “America’s global A.I. dominance.”

One form of regulation took effect April 2^nd, as “Deceptive deepfake media now a crime in N.J.” (Associated Press in Advertiser-News North, April 10^th).  New Jersey governor Phil Murphy “signed legislation… making the creation and dissemination of so-called deceptive deepfake media a crime punishable by up to five years in prison,” joining “at least 20 states.”  This version “defines a deepfake as any video or audio recording or image that appears to a reasonable person to realistically depict someone doing something they did not actually do,” and “establishes civil penalties that would permit victims to pursue lawsuits.”  Will the number of violations be small enough to allow enforcement?  Will such laws damage our need to assess veracity ourselves?  Will they turn out to be just adjuncts to others barring child sexual imagery?  I don’t think these questions will be easy to answer.  That makes this example, along with the others here, an artificial intelligence output which we will need to judge, accept, or reject.  It will take a while.

Eleven Observations on All Those Tariffs

As mentioned in a recent post, I have not been covering the day-in, day-out activity with the Trump Administration’s proposed, threatened, scheduled, started, stopped, and discontinued tariffs, as they have changed too quickly to put in a weekly blog with posts that will not be read immediately.  Most if not all seemed to me like negotiation efforts more than parts of any real economic policy. 

Now, though, they seem more permanent.  Reactions from other countries, from Canada and Europe to especially China, have changed from quick concessions to their own levies and threats.  Some may still be withdrawn, and some agreements will certainly take place, but we can’t count on that anymore.

As of Wednesday morning’s “Live Updates:  Asia Grapples With Punishing Tariffs as Its Stocks Sink Again” in The New York Times, “U.S. tariffs on its largest trading partners” listed the following effective or to be effective April 9^th:  China 84%, Mexico 25%, Canada 25%, European Union 20%, Japan 24%, Vietnam 46%, South Korea 26%, Taiwan 32%, India 27%, United Kingdom 10%,  Switzerland 32%, Thailand 37%, Malaysia 24%, Singapore 10%, Brazil 10%, Indonesia 32%, Israel 17%, Colombia 10%, Turkey 10%, Australia 10%.  There are others.  By the time you read this, there will be differences – I recommend either the New York Times or Fox Business for keeping up with changes too frequent for my reporting.

So what do I have to say?  Here are my views.

First, I am against all tariffs.  Not only do they go directly to the bottom lines of consumers, they prompt retaliatory ones which hurt our employment though reduced business profitability, and decrease product quality by reducing or eliminating healthy foreign competition.  Virtually all economists agree.

Second, the end does not justify the means.  That is a solid principle, with few if any exceptions.  Even if the administration knows something vast numbers of knowledgeable people on both political sides do not, which I have no reason to think, there should not be any tariffs.

Third, presidential overreach, here and in general, should be checked and balanced by the legislative and judicial branches.  If either one is unwilling to do that, we have a structural problem, or, more likely, the national lack of will has reached people we need to trust the most.  Either requires our attention and action.

Fourth, we still don’t know how long these tariffs will last.

Fifth, for top management at large businesses, uncertainty is as bad as poor business results.  That will pull down their stocks under this administration even if the tariffs go away.

Sixth, Trump has refused to use blind trusts or make his financial moves public.  Is it possible that he or his agents are selling stocks short before announcing tariffs or other moves certain to hurt the market?

Seventh, trade deficits are meaningless when considering tariffs.  They reflect relative richness and number of customers, at which the United States almost always outranks its trading partners.

Eighth, the April 5^th protests were better attended than many expected.  As the tariffs continue, and the administration does other things to attack prosperity, they should continue.

Ninth, maybe the strongest point against gun control is that any invaders would have to conquer not one government but over 100 million armed households, making that in effect impossible with today’s technology.  The same thing goes for people speaking up against our government – the more who do that, the safer they will be.

Tenth, when this is over, and it will end sometime, there will be a reckoning.  Those who did not resist Trump when they had the opportunity and capability will be identified and possibly punished, formally or informally.

Eleventh, my personal investment decision now is to sit tight.  As The Motley Fool said in a recent Facebook message, bear markets don’t destroy wealth – panic selling in bear markets does.  I will not make any stock trades, indefinitely.  If you choose that course too and it turns out to be wrong, at least you won’t die alone. 

The time will come when we have a better government.  In the meantime, keep living, do what you can and have to, keep the faith, and look at least to 2026 and 2028.