Screen Time for Kids Has Always Been an Issue

 

Screen Time for Kids Has Always Been an Issue

Today It’s So Much Worse

I have this vision of the evolution of human beings: necks sloped forward, nature’s adaptation for the ubiquitous smartphone addiction that affects children and adults alike. Until the brain implants gain popularity. Even in third world nations, smartphones are everywhere and often double as de facto banking/checking sources. As the Los Angeles Unified School District board (along with several others) voted to ban mobile phones in classrooms beginning in January of next year, the protests, mostly from high school teens, grew loud and clear. “It is just how we communicate.” “How can I reassure my parents if there is an emergency.” “It is how I keep track of my schedule and my assignments.” “How can I call for help if there is a gunman loose in our school?” The list goes on, but the board, so far anyway, has not relented. After all, the United States got along just fine for decades, centuries, without smartphones or anything close.

True those 30 million civilian semiautomatic assault firearms here, banned over the years (remember the Prohibition era Tommy-gun-carrying gangsters and the Assault Weapons ban in effect from 1994-2004), are relatively recent. School shootings are a related consequence of a Supreme Court that wanted all guns, all the time, everywhere, but surely that cannot be a reason for shackling teachers with a distraction that results in a second-rate classroom experience for young minds seeking a place in a competitive world. Screentime used to be just about television, but that sure changed. Now, young eyes and ears are focused on screens all the time, everywhere, and there are profound consequences to that addiction.

Nevertheless, we all seem to agree that much is lost in the massive deployment of handheld technology, today with much more processing power per unit than the entire computing power in the 1969 Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the Moon. And when content choices are left up to the children in their most formative years, they most certainly do not veer toward educational materials. Communication with peers is primary, but even when it comes to “television” … now a pretty all-encompassing term that embraces everything from streaming and other online content choices to degrees of anonymous interactivity on what appear to be very toxic platforms.

Writing for the July 5th Los Angeles Times, Jenny Gold addresses the medical and educational community’s assessment of the enormity of the problem and how parents should react with age-appropriate solutions: “Many parents allow children more than double the TV and tablet exposure that experts recommend… Parents are bombarded with a dizzying list of orders when it comes to screen time and young children: No screens for babies under 18 months. Limit screens to one hour for children under 5. Only ‘high-quality’ programming. No fast-paced apps. Don’t use screens to calm a fussy child. ‘Co-view’ with your kid to interact while watching… The stakes are high. Every few months it seems, a distressing study comes out linking screen time with a growing list of concerns for young children: Obesity. Behavioral problems. Sleep issues. Speech and developmental delays…

“Directives to limit the time young children spend on digital devices may not be taking root because many parents simply don’t believe their child’s screen time is a problem in the first place… [Legions] of parents … by choice or necessity allow their babies and preschoolers to watch several times more than the limit recommended by experts, creating a vast disconnect between the troubling predictions of harm and the reality of digital life for American families…

“The American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP] recommends families avoid screens for babies under 18 months, with the exception of video chatting. Parents who want to introduce digital media to toddlers ages 18 to 24 months should keep it very limited, choose high-quality educational programming, always watch alongside their children, and interact with their children both during and after watching.

“For children ages 2 to 5, pediatricians recommend limiting screen time to one hour a day of high-quality programming that is educational, interactive and pro-social with few or no advertisements. Parents should avoid fast-paced programs, apps with distracting content and anything with violence. Whenever possible, they should co-view with their children to help them understand what they are seeing.

“Pediatricians also recommend that children avoid screens during mealtimes and at least one hour before bedtime. When no one is watching the TV, it should be turned off. And parents should avoid regularly using screens to calm their child, because it can make it difficult to set limits and teach children to regulate their own emotions… In order to develop cognitive, language, motor and social-emotional skills, young children need to experience the world hands-on — playing with toys, exploring outside, experimenting with different materials, and having back-and-forth interactions with nurturing caregivers,” [said Dr. Nusheen Ameenuddin of the AAP]. When they are watching digital media, they lose that time to grow and learn.”

But the habit of living in a world dominated by screens transfers later in life from just television to those nasty handheld smart phones… and have become the way most teenagers today socialize and communicate. The rise in related psychological issues, range from an increase in young suicides to a degradation of perceptions of self-worth and more following of influencers and trends, many of which are, to put it mildly, toxic.

These problems have produced massive congressional testimony to support that toxicity, but truly no viable solutions have evolved yet. The U.S. surgeon general has even called for a warning on social media platforms advising parents that they can damage teenagers’ mental health. But for parents who want to control that access, particularly at the teenaged level, it is an uphill battle… that is often lost. Teens without smartphones and strong social media presence often feel excluded from the world most of their peers live in. But the reality of this notion of “screen dependence” starts very early in life… and are the seeds of that screen additive behavior later in life. Balance is a very difficult lesson to teach, and for many, a more difficult reality to live by… but the consequences of not finding that fulcrum can far reaching and very deep.

I’m Peter Dekom, but as we live in a world with social media-driven conspiracy theories, you really must ask the question as to why most American parents let major screen access replace participating in the tangible and immediate world around our children instead.

A Mean-Spirited Transition in the Name of God

A Mean-Spirited Transition in the Name of God

Part 1 – Senator Josh Hawley (MAGA R, Missouri)

“Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life… What he's doing to his party is one thing. What he's doing to the country is much worse."

Revered former U.S. Senator John Danforth (R/MO) and Hawley’s mentor, on January 7, 2021, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Imagine the power and force of an uninhibited religious zealot, a Stanford graduate (BA, history with highest honors), Yale Law grad, a Rhodes Scholar, law clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, law professor who worked his way up to becoming Missouri’s Attorney General, and ultimately – with pivotal support from Missouri’s iconic US Senator John Danforth at the time – defeating Claire McCaskill in 2018 to become a US Senator. Unlike recently anointed Trump running mate, JD Vance (also a Yale Law grad), who was a never-Trumper filled with negatives about the ex-President but recently flipped to a “whatever Trump wants” US Senator (R/OH) to cater to his raw ambitious side, Hawley always wore his faith on his sleeve. Hawley was raised Methodist, but he and his family now attend an Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

Danforth forth had mistakenly assumed that this religiosity was just a fine conservative trait… not his defining characteristic, but Hawley was a natural MAGA leader. “In December 2020, Hawley provoked a political backlash when he became the first senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 United States presidential election. He led Senate efforts to overturn the Electoral College vote count and rallied supporters of the notion that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen. Although he did not directly encourage the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, observers perceived his [raised fist signaling the soon-to-be attackers, pictured above] as inflammatory. In late January 2021, Hawley denied trying to overturn the election results.” Wikipedia

But here’s his now-clearly annunciated agenda for America, not based on any notion of democracy but firmly anchored in the essentials of theocracy, where religious leaders and the Bible are the deciders. On July 8th, Hawley was the keynote speaker at the National Conservatism Conference on The Christian Nationalism We Need in Washington, D.C. Here are excerpts from that presentation:

I want to speak to you tonight about the future. About the future of the conservative movement and of this nation. But every future is rooted in some earlier past—or as Seneca said, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”… We are a nation … defined by the dignity of the common man, as given to us in the Christian religion; a nation held together by the homely affections articulated in the Christian faith—love for God, love for family, love for neighbor, home, and country... And some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation... And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having?...

The truth is, Christian nationalism is not a threat to American democracy. Christian nationalism founded American democracy. And it is the best form of democracy yet devised by man: the most just, the most free, the most humane and praiseworthy…. And my claim to you tonight is that we must recover the principles of our Christian political tradition now for the sake of our future. This is true whether you are a Christian or not, a person of a different faith or none at all. The Christian political tradition is our tradition; it is the American tradition; it is the greatest source of energy and ideas in our politics—and always has been. It has inspired conservatives and liberals, reformers and activists, and moralists and trade unionists down our history. And now we need this grand tradition again.

But Josh, with that degree in history, you know there is a catch. For the who are non-evangelical Christians, Jews, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, those of Baháʼí Faith, Wiccan, animists, believers in any number of religions of our Indigenous Peoples, agnostics, atheists, etc., the bad news to them is that your faith is second rate, subordinate to evangelical Christianity, does not fall within Hawley’s attempt to show an elevated value system and… Since fundamental evangelicals are a minority in this country, one that is contracting over time, they cannot impose their severely limited religious rules, regulations and mandates in any system where there is a majority vote.

They can scream “woke” and “right to life” and “deviant moral decay” as much as they want, but they are still a dwindling minority. You will note that the “Stop the Steal” campaign, the dozens of legislative efforts to suppress or overturn votes and gerrymandering are all focused on making sure that only their votes count. Nothing new. And while many evangelical leaders are cheering, many others are not, as pointed out by David Amelotti writing for the July 15th 2024 KMOV:

“Rev. Molly Housh-Gordon with the Unitarian Universalist Church in Columbia, Missouri, said religious freedom is essential to other freedoms and you cannot have one without the other… ‘Sen. Hawley your fantasies of tyrannical control are not welcome. Missourians love our neighbors. Missourians know better,’ Housh-Gordan said… Rev. Nathan Empsall is an Episcopal Priest who is also the executive director of Faithful America… ‘First of all - which Christianity? Christianity is two billion people across the world. It’s a diverse religion. When they say a Christian nation, they mean a specific form of mostly white, mostly evangelical conservative straight patriarchal Christianity that becomes often white nationalism,’ Empsall said.

“Progress Missouri, branded as Missouri’s progressive communications hub, brought a handful of religious leaders from across the state for a virtual town hall Monday. They say Sen. Hawley’s words are dangerous for Missourians… [In the second week of July], Hawley spoke with First Alert 4 about his controversial speech. He insists his motive is keeping the political left from destroying the First Amendment and religious liberty that makes the foundation of the U.S.

“‘It is a fact of history and not open to debate, a fact that we were founded by Christian believers and that our fundamental ideals including those in the Constitution of the United States, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights all come to us from a Christian tradition,’ Hawley shared. ‘That is just a fact and I think that’s something worth preserving.’” An ends justified by any means, perhaps even at the barrel of an AR-15, a favorite weapon for extremists to make their point.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Josh Hawley is among the least patriotic Americans alive today, completely dedicated to eliminating any voices contrary to (white) Christian nationalism… and people who believe they are acting at God’s mandate can be the most dangerous people anywhere no matter what rights the Constitution guarantees.

Let ‘em Starve!!!

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Let ‘em Starve!!!

The New Rightwing View of Misery & Poverty

I guess it is not surprising when many of those who have the capacity to feed impoverished families (with children) prefer to use starvation as a military tool (as members of Israel’s rightwing parties have suggested in Gaza) or as a mechanism to keep taxes low under the thoroughly disproven “trickledown” theory: cutting taxes for the rich trickles jobs and money down to everybody else. PS It has never happened that way; rich people didn’t get rich by trickling their money down every time they get a tax cut. So, simply put, if no one feeds children, they get sick and often die or grow up with bodies that carry the aftereffects of malnutrition forevermore. Don’t believe me? Look at the results of the 2017 Trump-era massive federal corporate tax cut (from 35% to 21%) which generated virtually no trickles at all but instead fostered hot dividends and lots of mergers and acquisitions… adding trillions to the federal deficit. Exactly who benefited?

And while it seems odd that we live in a land where there are now individual trillionaires and over 800 individual billionaires (according to Fortune Magazine) – where Trump isn’t even rich enough to make the top 400 list – we have several corporations valued in the trillion+ dollar range… and except for real estate and sales or transfers of assets, we do not tax wealth. Instead, we twist and squirm to cut benefits to those who need them the most to reduce taxes for those who need those cuts the least. We are the only developed nation on earth without universal healthcare; we still have medical bankruptcies (even for those with insurance because of exclusions, caps, deductibles and co-pays), growing homelessness and political parties willing to sell the average and the poor down the river to promote even lower taxes for the rich.

Well, school’s out for the summer for many public-school students, some of whom relied on the school lunch program to get enough to eat. So now what? Writing for USA Today, July 2nd, Kayla Jimenez and Alia Wong explain how “A dozen Republican-led states are rejecting summer food benefits for hungry families… The governors of a dozen states – Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming – opted out of the program, leaving about 9.5 million students without the aid this summer, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. All of these states are led by Republicans, who have said they oppose welfare, the administrative burden of overseeing food benefits and what they call overreach by the federal government. All but two of the six states with the highest rates of food insecurity opted out of the benefits. The two exceptions, whose Republican governors accepted EBT, are Arkansas and Louisiana…

“Summer EBT, or electronic benefits transfer, is the first new federal food assistance program in nearly half a century. The SUN Bucks program grants $120 per eligible child to be used during the summer months, leveraging existing programs including pandemic-era funding. Kids are eligible if they qualify for free or reduced meals during the school year. Families can use the money in addition to other government food benefits…

“What makes food insecurity worse? When everything else costs more too, Americans say… U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called the new federal food assistance program ‘a proven game-changer’ in combating child hunger. He said the program would help officials close the gap in summer hunger families experience.

“The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows more than 44.2 million people nationwide experience food insecurity in the U.S., including 13 million children. The department defines food security as having ‘access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.’ Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Texas and South Carolina have the highest prevalence of food insecurity, according to recent USDA data.

“White House leaders slammed state officials, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who refused to opt in and help combat hunger for parents who can't afford to feed themselves or their children.” The manifestations of younger children facing that polite word for malnourishment – “food insecurity” – are not pretty. The longer term effects include underdeveloped bodies and brains, cognitive difficulties, and an inability to learn or concentrate. Those children are less prepared to break the cycle of poverty, already challenged by the end of upward mobility and a red state obsession with fighting culture wars above the need to care for and educate its children to compete in a world that demands increasing skills just to survive.

For those who want to deal with issue on a “greed is good” analysis, they should be aware that allowing food impaired generation after generation not only perpetuates the need for social programs to respond to the problem… and also leads too many of these youngsters growing up, dropping out and left with no discernible skills. Drugs offer an escape, just as criminal activity ramps up to pay for it all. Yes, “greed meisters,” that requires more jails and prisons, more judges, police and social support systems, and one way or the other we will all pay for this stupid momentary cost savings. Or we could just react as human beings showing a modicum of care and concern as most religious teachings explain. Just when did being a constantly hungry child become their own private cruel and unusual punishment? What did those children do to deserve that fate?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you ever wonder where anger and desperation are born, just look at those who just don’t care enough even to feed hungry children right here in the good old USA.

A Nation of Immigrants Falsely Labels Recent Immigrants as a Horde of Criminals

Bronze Plaque on the Statue of Liberty

The headlines, anytime an undocumented immigrant commits a major crime, all scream about this direct relationship between the rise in undocumented asylum/work seekers and soaring crime rates. MAGA-leaners (e.g., Kari Lake’s GOP convention speech) will tell you that Dems are figuring out how to get these south-of-the-border migrants onto the voting rolls. Their unspoken evidence: the GOP-dominated House passed a bill, pretty much rejected by the Democrats in that body, requiring each voter to prove their citizenship as a precondition to voting. I suspect a lot of multigenerational Americans just might have trouble satisfying that requirement, but this requirement does reflect the real reason the MAGA-led House passed the bill: people who are least likely to have such irrefutable proof of citizenship are those in lower income brackets, ethnic or racial minorities… folks least likely to support MAGA white Christian nationalist candidates.

We live in an era where conspiracy theories are treated as factual, where politicians repeat lies with such passion and such frequency that they seem convincing, where most Americans don’t genuinely engage in bona fide fact-checking (simply accepting what their political leaders say on camera or online), where the “facts” they want to be true are immediately accepted if their leaders or their peers say so, and where those inaccuracies jibe with bigoted biases such voters have always held. Indeed, Donald Trump legitimized a treasure trove of bigots and vulnerable voters feeling marginalized by change… that even his vituperatives – like “vermin,” “rapists, murderers, even terrorists” attributed to border crossers, “fine people” attributed to obvious white supremacists, etc. – are now increasingly acceptable in mainstream conversations and reportage… notwithstanding their clear falsity. Racism is out in the open!

The Republican National Convention made “immigrant crime” one of the major platforms of the Trump/Vance candidacy. Numerous speakers joined the candidates in hammering home this “truism,” and calls to “finish the wall,” massive detention and expulsion of undocumented aliens living in the United States – which would include the DACA residents who were brought here by their parents as young children and have never lived anywhere else. Writing for the New York Times, The Morning newsfeed on July 18th, German Lopez tells us:

“Throughout the first three days of the Republican National Convention, officials have highlighted a surge in what they call ‘migrant crime.’ President Biden ‘has welcomed into our country rapists, murderers, even terrorists, and the price that we have paid has been deadly,’ Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas claimed last night. [7/17]. The day before [7/16], Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said, ‘Every day, Americans are dying’ in crimes committed by migrants. Donald Trump has made similar remarks on the campaign trail.

“But there is no migrant crime surge.

“In fact, U.S. rates of crime and immigration have moved in opposite directions in recent years. After illegal immigration plummeted in 2020, the murder rate rose. And after illegal immigration spiked in 2021 and 2022, murders plateaued and then fell…

“Yes, some migrants have committed violent crimes. There are more than 45 million immigrants in the U.S., and invariably some of them — just like people of any other group — will do bad things. Similarly, thousands of native-born Americans commit violent crimes in any given week.

“Trump and other Republicans have suggested that immigrants are especially likely to be criminals. They point to a few anecdotes. But the data shows the opposite: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. There are genuine issues with the border and illegal immigration, but more crime is not one of them.

“More migrants, less crime

“If more immigration led to more crime, you would expect that crime rates would spike along with immigration flows, locally and nationally. The statistics would show that migrants were disproportionately likely to commit criminal or violent acts. Instead, the opposite is true.

“New York, Chicago and Denver have had an influx of immigrants in the past couple years. Over that same period, murder rates in those cities have fallen. Similarly, border counties in Texas have lower violent crime rates than the state and country overall, the crime analyst Jeff Asher has found.”

Americans speak passionately about the rising cost of foodstuffs and even restaurant franchises built on cheap, fast food. These same Americans are mostly unwilling to accept menial jobs at any wage – from stoop labor for harvesting to manual ditch digging where construction machinery cannot reach or low-pay childcare or cleaning services for working Americans. These same people seem to miss the point that one of the key reasons prices have gone up and likely to rise fast during a Trump administration is because without this cheap labor, prices have to soar. Think of the cost of new construction in an era of unaffordable housing… with no such immigrants. These MAGA believers also speak about violent cartels, yet miss the point that these cartels got their weapons (including lots of military grade assault weapons), smuggled south across the border from the masses of firearms purchased legally in the United States. We need those “immigrants”… desperately… if we want to keep our quality of life.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder how so many in a nation of immigrants have grown to hate and malign “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”

Two State Solution: Who Are We Kidding?

Except for the Trump years, a two-state solution (Palestine – Gaza, East Jerusalem and the much larger West Bank, on one side – and Israel, on the other, in what is currently land under Israeli control) has been US policy since the US participated in the 1993 Oslo Accords. These accords resulted in both the recognition of Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the recognition by Israel of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and as a partner in bilateral negotiations, intended to pave the way for that separate two-state partition.

Decades have passed, and well before the advent of Likud’s ultra-conservative PM, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Jewish settlers – often by force of arms as IDF (Israel’s military) soldiers stood idly by – simply pushed established Palestinian residents (homes, farms and businesses) out, taking over their land, sometimes killing the former residents. The settlers built defensive positions among their conquered real estate, and over time, it estimated that as many as 650,000 such settlers now live just in the West Bank (see above photo of Jewish settlers’ construction cranes), in addition to the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza (who have survived) where there are no Jewish settlers, just IDF soldiers and the hostages.

Post Oslo, most of the world (including the US), voiced by the UN, has always maintained that the Jewish settlements on the West Bank are illegal or illegitimate. But no one did anything to stop this effort, although the Biden administration did sanction a small number of Jewish settlers accused of violent takeovers. In the past few years, encouraged by the Trump administration, Netanyahu declared the two-state solution dead, the open city of Jerusalem to be Israeli (and the capital of the nation) and has approved a vast array of new Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

For example, in early July, it seems that Israel’s government has approved over 5,000 new housing units in a host of illegal settlements across the occupied West Bank, as well as recognizing three new settlement outposts in the Palestinian territory. Netanyahu’s moves are an effort to ensure that the West Bank will never be part of any Palestinian state. How did this happen under the watchful eye of the UN and even Israel’s traditional ally and accelerant of the Oslo Accords, the United States?

Writing for the July 5th Associated Press, Caleb Diehl and Joseph Federman , suggest a two-state solution would be politically impossible today: “Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades and advanced plans to build thousands of new settlement homes, according to Peace Now, an Israeli anti-settlement monitoring group. They are the latest steps by Israel’s hard-line government meant to cement Israel’s control over the territory and prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state…

“Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. Palestinians seek all three areas for their future state. In 56 years, Israel has built well over 100 settlements scattered across the West Bank. Settlers also have built scores of tiny unauthorized outposts that are tolerated or even encouraged by the government. Some are later legalized.” It’s not as if the West Bank Jewish settlements are all concentrated in one, single identifiable pocket; they are scattered. Israel’s extreme right, now in a coalition with Likud, actually envision the expulsion of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza… to God knows where.

No one could have done a better job of making that two-state an impossibility than Netanyahu. He underestimated the growing power of Hamas, PLO’s regional competitor in Gaza, even as he funneled truckloads of cash to that terrorist organization (also funded and armed by Iran) in the hopes of buying a pliant and weak political force… yet one that, like Iran and its other regional surrogates (notably Hezbollah and the Houthis), wanted to purge the entire Jewish state “from the [Jordan] river to the sea.”

Netanyahu also made it clear that Israel is and always would be a “Jewish state.” Muslim Palestinians were always treated with disdain, even as many became Israeli citizens. They were denied free travel, and while they voted, they remained an abused and powerless minority. There were times when an entire family would be punished (their house would be bulldozed) if a member of that family were accused of being a terrorist.

There are so many questions that must be addressed about the future, even in light of Netanyahu’s efforts to oppress all local Palestinians. Aside from the obvious “who rules Gaza and how is that land rebuilt” after the war, if there isn’t to be a two-state solution including the West Bank, what would a one-state solution look like? Apartheid governance? One state where all citizens are treated equally? Reparations to the West Bank Palestinians whose homes, business and farms were taken by force by Jewish settlers? Nothing? Let the parties continue to battle it out over the years?

Many have argued, with justification, that Netanyahu’s pledge completely to eliminate Hamas from Gaza, a military impossibility even according to IDF generals, is just a way for him to avoid the corruption trial he is facing. His pre-Gaza war effort to make the Israeli judiciary subject to reversal by the Knesset (Israel’s unicameral parliament) – with the same goal in mind – led to massive protests. Weak efforts to reach a peaceful end to the horrific Gaza conflict, sabotaged by Netanyahu’s demands, have begun to frustrate the Israel public who want the release of their hostages to be the priority.

On Sunday, July 7th, “Marking nine months since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, protesters blocked highways across the country… calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step down and pushing for a cease-fire to bring back scores of hostages… [Hamas] still wants mediators to guarantee a permanent cease-fire, while Netanyahu is vowing to keep fighting until Israel destroys Hamas’ military and governing capabilities… ‘Any deal will allow Israel to return and fight until all the goals of the war are achieved,’ Netanyahu said in a statement Sunday that was likely to deepen Hamas’ concerns about the proposal.” AP, July 8th. It is an obvious and total mess, and the United States’ relative passivity over the post-Oslo decades has only helped make a terrible situation absolutely intolerable.

I’m Peter Dekom, and except for Iran and its surrogates, Israel’s extreme right wing and Netanyahu, continuing the Gaza conflict and not resolving the obvious questions about future governance under a fair and just program based on human rights, benefits no one.

There’s an Opioid for That

It’s not just about the “south of the border” cartels, armed with easy-to-acquire American made firearms, including lots of semiautomatic rifles (which, thanks to our Supreme Court, can achieve 800-1000 bullets/minute with a US-legal bump-stock), and funded primarily by the money paid by US users. There is another ersatz cartel that involves a cadre of well-meaning trained individuals who can legally dispense a litany of opioids: medical doctors, particularly surgeons. The risks of over-prescribing painkillers, particularly post-surgery, generate this harsh reality: “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 45 people died each day in 2021 from a prescription opioid overdose — about one-fifth of all opioid-related deaths.

“Some efforts to curb opioid prescribing have shown promise, including prescription drug monitoring programs, promotion of alternative analgesics, provider education and informing prescribing physicians when their patients die from opioid overdoses. But there is one medical specialty for which opioids are still a crucial part of most patients’ treatment plan: surgery. Nearly every patient discharged after surgery leaves the hospital in significant pain, which is why surgeons prescribe more opioids than almost any other specialty.

“Most patients, however, do not use all the opioids they are prescribed after an operation. That leaves excess pills in circulation and helps fuel the epidemic. If we could get surgeons to prescribe only the number of pills patients need for their own use, this could greatly reduce the number of excess pills available for diversion and misuse, among patients, their families and members of their communities. This, in turn, could reduce addiction and overdoses.” Zachary Wagner and Craig R. Fox writing for the Mark Lennihan Associated Press, June 18th. Wagner is a health economist at USC and Rand, and Fox is a professor of psychology and medicine at UCLA and chair of the Behavioral Decision Making Area at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Addiction can start with patients continuing to use the excess from an opioid prescription or sell them or forum shop lots of different doctors to generate valuable prescriptions. It is almost a regional sport within the Florida medical profession. But addiction destroys families and individual lives. It accelerates and incentivizes criminal activity and has added vast numbers of hapless individuals to the ranks of the homeless. So, anything that takes unnecessary painkillers off the market has to be a major improvement.

“Minimizing how often a surgery patient ends up with extra opioids would not solve the crisis, but it’s part of the solution — and it’s achievable… Changing prescribers’ behavior is hard. They get set in their ways, moored by a strong belief that what they are doing is best for their patients. Moreover, they strenuously resist attempts to constrain their freedom to decide what is best… [The AP writers’] research team looked to behavioral science for ways to nudge providers to prescribe in accordance with best practices, while leaving them with full autonomy to choose what they think would be best.

“Conventional strategies for curbing excessive opioid prescribing assume that surgeons are rational actors who, whenever they are informed about patient needs and incentivized to attend to them, will act to maximize the welfare of patients. If that were the case, simply educating doctors about the dangers of overprescribing might be sufficient… However, numerous studies from experimental psychology and behavioral economics have shown that people are highly selective in the information they focus on and more socially minded than traditional models of rational self-interest would predict.

“Such insights from behavioral science provide promising avenues for curtailing excessive opioid prescribing by surgeons… For instance, one group of researchers found that setting the default opioid quantity in the electronic health record system to match the amount patients actually use substantially reduces the amount of opioids prescribed. Apparently, busy surgeons tended to go with the flow when prescribing — presumably because the default number of pills became a salient reference point, was easiest to enter and suggested a norm of correct behavior.

“Surgeons, like other humans, are social animals who are strongly motivated to adhere to the norms of good behavior endorsed by their peers. We capitalized on this for our recent study, a randomized trial to test two simple interventions across 19 hospitals in Northern California for a year… In one version, the emails informed surgeons that they had prescribed more pills than other surgeons in their health system had been prescribing for the same procedure. This message highlighted ‘descriptive’ norms of actual behavior… In a second, simpler version, whenever a surgeon prescribed opioid amounts that exceeded recommended quantities for the procedure they had performed, we sent the doctor an email notification informing them. This intervention highlighted ‘injunctive’ norms of ideal behavior.

“Surprisingly, both social norm interventions had the exact same impact on prescribing. Subsequent patients were about 25% less likely to receive an opioid prescription that exceeded the recommended amount. This resulted in about 42,000 fewer pills in the community for the 26,000 patients who were part of the intervention group.

“Imagine how many fewer pills would be prescribed if this were scaled up nationwide, given that there are more than 50 million inpatient surgical procedures performed each year in the U.S. Surely this would lead to millions, if not tens of millions, fewer opioid pills circulating in the U.S. each year… Inexpensive solutions grounded in evidence on human behavior can be powerful tools in our campaign against opioid addiction. Sometimes just a light touch — a tweak to the default settings in the electronic health records system or an automated email to surgeons — can have an outsize effect on prescribing decisions with life-or-death consequences.” AP. It’s hard to convince doctors to change their ways. They resent intrusions into their decisions, believe often that they are all-powerful, all-knowing, and yet are creatures of habit like everyone else. If it has worked for years… Sometimes that resentment is justified (as with their resistance to abortion bans) … and sometimes it is not. These medical professionals need to understand the difference.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while educating over-prescribing doctors is not easy, it has become a dire necessity.

Jobs Categories Have Always Come and Gone: Enter A.I.

There are not a lot of switchboard operators anymore, the typing and stenographic pools have disappeared (along with carbon paper and whiteout), banks of clerical accountants using manual adding machines have vaporized, milkmen are pretty much gone, and film processors have been replaced. Steel manufacturing, food storage, medical technology, communications, travel, etc. have all morphed into a routine mass of “other.” Look back at 1940, before most of us were born or at least conscious of our surroundings and looking for jobs. The American job market was rather dramatically different. But that’s the way change has always been, even as Singularity theorists will tell you, the greatest change in the last thousand years is probably the acceleration rate of change itself.

The Internet, social media, GPS tracking, MRIs, dirt-cheap jet travel, nuclear weapons… and power, remote work, home delivery and ubiquitous access to car services, air conditioning (!!!) and smart phones are “efficiency” technologies that have created more jobs than they have replaced. Technology changes everything, sometimes slowly and at other times faster than a zoomy cat. Climate change and massive demographic shifts, the conflicts that were driven by climate change… and that nasty leader of change: war.

A couple of years ago, I was regaled by a partner in national law firm about how I did not get that the Metaverse was the next big thing and that I needed to stake out some real estate there for my law firm. I smiled and pretended to be an old guy who did not get this “new stuff.” To me, whether it was timing, the disruptive need to maximize my Metaverse experience, literally to immerse myself, would be greatly benefited by my buying a very expensive headset; it was an easy “no.” That alone told me that since most people can’t spend that kind of money, unless and until the cost dropped and the value was vastly more compelling, this was unlikely to generate the standard-setting expectations that lawyer held dear.

But when artificial intelligence began to be developed into real applications, where I saw clear benefits to managing masses of data (internal and external) and teaching itself how to identify valuable patterns, providing descriptions in English, charts most dramatic and even visualizations based on word-inputs, I knew this was a big deal. I had been studying plasma computing, which has a way to go, capable processing thousands if not millions of times faster than our most advanced supercomputers today, the words “game changer” were dramatically inadequate.

Aside from that visual of a robotic assembly line, what I was learning was considerably more, a technology that impacted white collar experts as much as robotics had impacted blue collar workers. And so, I read with interest an article, New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018 by David Autor, Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons & Bryan Seegmiller, Oxford Quarterly Journal of Economics (August 2024, published March 15th), that reminded me that human labor will always be radically changed by seminal shifts in technology, that those who can get comfortable with this may well prosper. Here is the abstract from that Oxonian piece:

We answer three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories (“new work”) in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work, where does it come from, and what effect does it have on labor demand? We construct a novel database spanning eight decades of new job titles linked to U.S. Census microdata and to patent-based measures of occupations’ exposure to labor-augmenting and labor-automating innovations. The majority of current employment is in new job specialties introduced since 1940, but the locus of new-work creation has shifted from middle-paid production and clerical occupations over 1940–1980 to high-paid professional occupations and secondarily to low-paid services since 1980. New work emerges in response to technological innovations that complement the outputs of occupations and demand shocks that raise occupational demand. Innovations that automate tasks or reduce occupational demand slow new-work emergence. Although the flow of augmentation and automation innovations is positively correlated across occupations, the former boosts occupational labor demand while the latter depresses it. The demand-eroding effects of automation innovations have intensified in the past four decades while the demand-increasing effects of augmentation innovations have not.

Simply, patent-based tech has created a present-day schism where highly paid professionals make alarming money from these changes, while those performing physical “blue collar” tasks have only prospered when they have learned to use the technology for their economic betterment. Populism probably grew in the social petri dish.

Yet, learning to use that technology – namely artificial intelligence – is the essence of future employment opportunities. Could society develop such that virtually any work can be better accomplished with AI-controlled machines? To those who believe that machines can never replace sentient tasks, are completely incapable of creating new artistic directions, I have to remind them that we are all programmed to one level or another, we all are capable of learning and accessing new inputs. AI will only grow from here.

So, if I were able to take away the functions of the brain consumed with running the human body – walking, eating, keep the heartbeat going, etc. – and use the balance of the processing power and memory of an AI device with a greatly expanded computing platform (inevitable), we are very close to AI having and soon exceeding the power of the human brain… in everything. Is this the stuff of science or science fiction? One wag posited that the reason we have not yet connected with a “there must be one out there” deep space alien society of greater sophistication than us mere Earthlings just might be: they all perished when they developed AI that totally replaced them. Others have posited that should AI truly takeover, a generous system of “socialism” would dominate how human beings live. There might even be technological containment of climate change.

In the meantime, AI is to stay. We need enforceable ethical boundaries, multinational treaties on how nations can interface with the technology, limit the permissible applications, and add more deep thought on how we can grow, use AI, but make the world safer, more comfortable and allow human beings to seek meaning in new and exciting ways. Or not. We need sophisticated education experts, perhaps aided by AI, to design classrooms (see above picture) at every level to make children, who will replace us, masters of that AI future. We will make mistakes, but the mistake we cannot make is to deal with AI without understanding what it is and what it can do.

I’m Peter Dekom and embracing knowledge and eschewing fear are the essence of our path forward in the world of growing artificial intelligence applications.

Profit Slorping Big Business Hates One Thing Above All Else: Competition

If a company sets its profit levels based on cost of goods sold or services provided, all those nasties that pushed prices through the roof in the post-pandemic era actually benefit corporate America. Huh? Even though the average percentage of revenue attributed to profits almost never, until recently, exceeded 11% (it’s up today, past 12% and rising, as no surprise to you), in terms of hard dollars, it’s pretty obvious that a stable percentage of a much larger and rising gross revenue number will produce more money, more profits.

Simply, if your profit level is 10%, if your pricing structure is based on $1 billion in revenue, that’s a tasty $100 million. But if prices rise, and consumers are willing to bear those increased costs (some as high as 20% or more above pandemic pricing), clearly gross revenues rise proportionately. So, a pricing structure based on a 20% revenue increase, even as the percentage level of profits remains the same, under the above hypothetical: 10% x $1.2 billion = $120 million… adding that whoppingly higher number to that company’s hard dollar profits. Oh, and all those hard dollar cost increases have already been passed on to your consumers!

Global supply chain costs – from underlying materials to shipping – are somewhat amplified further by our higher wages and the higher interest rates mandated by the Federal Reserve. Consumers exploded out of the pandemic with deferred and pent-up spending, undeterred by steadily increasing prices. So, with so much demand, corporate America had little reason lower prices… so they didn’t.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said in 2022: “If corporations were competing vigorously against each other, they’d swallow these cost increases in order to keep their prices as low as possible — especially when they’re making huge profits. Yet corporations have been raising prices even as they rake in record profits. That’s because they face so little competition that they can easily coordinate price increases with the handful of other big companies in their industry. That way, all of them come out ahead — while consumers and workers lose.” It’s a vicious cycle, wages rise to meet a higher cost of living, then factored into the determination of profits, but instead of reducing profits, as noted above, they actually increase profits. The Federal Reserve sees all this as inflationary and has elected to keep interest rates high to compensate. Ouch!

Making this even more painful has been the government’s silent hand in making matters much worse, at regulatory, legislative and judicial level. We do not tax most wealth (except real estate property taxes, money garnered from the sale or transfer of assets and estate taxes), so as corporations build corporate value – usual a multiple based on “earnings” calculated in one form or another – while the profits themselves can be subject to tax, the disproportionate rise in corporate value (remember, it’s usually based on a multiple) is not.

The Trump-era reduction in the federal corporate tax rate (from 35% to 21%) resulted more in a flurry of mergers and acquisitions with virtually no impact on productivity or creating new good jobs… which tanked the federal deficit by trillions of dollars, another inflation factor which the Federal Reserve notes. Added to these missteps is the pattern of a reduction in corporate regulations and antitrust pressure over the past 50 years. Mergers and acquisitions, which most certainly reduce the number of competitors, have slid by the FTC and Congress with minimal limitations. The Biden appointed a new aggressive head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, who has returned to deploy antitrust laws with a vengeance.

But federal regulatory agencies have been seriously eviscerated by the recent Supreme Court rejection of the decades old practice where courts deferred to governmental regulatory expert analysis and interpretation, usually in complex arenas – the “Chevron Deference.” Now trial courts, usually deeply off-base, are able to use their amateur skills and biases to overrule exceptionally educated scientists and economists. Consumer fraud, corporate shenanigans (and there are many), food and drug analysis, etc. are now regulated by defanged federal agencies.

One such example is the recently accelerated use of non-compete agreements – which limit what jobs an employee can pursue after leaving. These were used as tools to keep highly compensated senior employees and engineers from filching clients, financial information and business plans, engineering designs and other clearly private proprietary values when moving to a new employer. But now – as reported by LA Times correspondent Michael Hiltzik on July 10th – “Once applied chiefly to executives, engineers and others with access to a company’s trade secrets, they have expanded to cover almost anybody — low-wage security guards, rank-and-file factory workers and even fast-food counter workers… A recent academic survey estimated that nearly 1 in 5 American workers, or about 30 million people, are subject to noncompetes…

“Noncompetes tend to suppress wages. They also undermine innovation… For these and other reasons, the Biden administration took aim at noncompete clauses in 2021, instructing the Federal Trade Commission to ‘curtail’ those that ‘may unfairly limit worker mobility.’… After more than a year of study, the FTC followed through with a proposed rule, issued April 23 and scheduled to take effect Sept. 4, that banned new noncompetes and forbade the enforcement of existing clauses except for senior executives who were already subject to the restrictions.

“You probably know what happened next: Big Business, in the form of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, sued to block the FTC’s rule. The lawsuit was filed not in Washington, D.C., where the agency resides, but in Texas, where it was almost certain to come before a conservative judge appointed by a Republican… Sure enough, it came before federal Judge Ada Brown of Dallas, a Trump appointee, who on July 3 blocked the FTC from implementing or enforcing its rule until further notice.” Huh? This Texas federal judge is consistent with other Trump-appointed trial judges, in red districts where either there is a small panel of available of rightwing biased judges or it is a rampantly conservative judicial venue.

Why else would a judge in a court farfrom the federal courts in Washington, D.C., which are traditionally the venues where national issues and where the relevant regulatory agencies are focused? It’s called “forum shopping,” and these are the venues for evangelically biased, pro-business supporting and conspiracy theory loving plaintiffs. Administrative agencies hate these courts, and often the federal appellate circuit above them, because they have led the charge on the bulk of major cases that have led to anti-abortion, voting rights, and administrative oversight limiting decisions that have made their way to the US Supreme Court. Winners: evangelicals, conspiracy theorists and mega-wealthy players. The losers: all the rest (most of us).

I’m Peter Dekom, and we all should be acutely aware that one of the most powerful realities of the American presidency is the ability to reshape the nation for decades to come via the ability to appoint federal judges (with a lifetime term).

War Now or War Later

 

War Now or War Later

Is a Full-on War Between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah Inevitable?

Iran claims its Hezbollah surrogates in southern Lebanon are capable of launching 1,500 missiles a day into Israel. And with Israel unable to keep its pledge completely to destroy Hamas in Gaza, with the growing global unpopularity of the Jewish state, there is increasing pressure in both Lebanon and Israel for a real war, well beyond the Hezbollah pattern of missile strikes into Israel, and the latter’s counter strikes with missile, artillery and airstrikes.

According to Orla Guerin, writing for the July 17th BBC, “The current tit-for-tat has already driven tens of thousands from their homes - more than 90,000 in Lebanon and about 60,000 in Israel. Further inland, the father of a paramedic killed by an Israeli strike tells us there is no hope of peace. In Beirut, at the funeral of one of Hezbollah’s most senior commanders killed by Israel, a mourner declares: ‘We are longing for an all-out war.’" As illustrated by the first direct attack by Israel fighters against Iran this past April, and the limited Iranian retaliation, it seems clear that Iran and Israel both prefer if Iran were to rely on its surrogates. And unlike Hamas, which is a Sunni state (literal interpreters of the Qur-an), Iran and Hezbollah, the latter a major political party (literally, “the party of God”) in Lebanon, are both Muslim Shiites (where only the holiest of the holy can interpret the Qur’an).

While military targets are in theory the focus of both sides in the Hezbollah conflict, there have been way too many civilian casualties on both sides. And instead of diffusing the conflict, reducing the temperature of the exchanges, this back and forth only seems to have enraged both, each wanting to ramp up death and destruction against the other, at some point, with no holds barred. Guerin reports from the southern Lebanese city of Tyre (using first names):

“Explosions are part of the sound of summer 2024 in the ancient Lebanese city of Tyre, as Hezbollah and Israel exchange fire across the border 25 kilometres (15 miles) away… ‘Another day, another bomb,’ says Roland, 49, with a shrug, as he relaxes on a lilo [a comfortable lounge chair]. He lives abroad but is back home on holiday… ‘We got used to it somehow over the months,’ says his friend Mustafa, 39, ‘though children are still a little bit scared.’ He nods towards his daughter Miral, 7, who is dripping wet from the pool… ‘When she hears an explosion, she always asks, ‘will there be a bomb now?’ ’he says… Sunbathers look-on as Israeli strikes happen in the distance

“Earlier this month, there was a massive blast in his neighbourhood in Tyre, as his family of four were having a meal. Israel had assassinated a senior Hezbollah commander, Mohammed Nimah Nasser… ‘We heard the noise,’ Mustafa says, ‘and we carried on eating.’ … But the sunbathers on the beach in Tyre may be on borrowed time. This city will be in the firing line in the event of all-out war, along with the rest of southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold… We are now at the water’s edge of a potentially devastating war which both sides say they don’t want. Iran doesn’t seem to want it either…. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has stressed the armed group is ready, but not eager, for war. He says if there is a ceasefire agreed in Gaza, Hezbollah will cease fire too, immediately… Will that satisfy Israel? Maybe not.”

Reporting from northern Israel, near the border, the BBC’s Lucy Williamson (writing on June 22nd) tells us about the other side: “Full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah would be ‘a catastrophe’, the UN Secretary-General says. But to David Kamari, who lives under near-daily fire on the Israeli side of the border, it would be a solution… Last month, a Hezbollah rocket fired from Lebanon landed in his front garden in the border town of Kiryat Shmona, cracking his house in several places and filling it with rubble… He points out the gaping holes where shrapnel sliced through the walls, missing him by inches. And then to the hills above us, where Hezbollah-controlled territory begins.

“‘Every day, every night: bombs. [It’s a] problem,’ he said. ‘And I was born here. If you live here one night, you go crazy.’… David is still living in his rubble-filled house, pieces of shrapnel entangled with the remains of his television set. Outside is the blackened relic of his car, burned by the fire that swept through his front yard after the rocket hit… Most of the population of Kiryat Shmona was evacuated after the 7 October Hamas attacks, as Hezbollah rockets began raining down in support of their Palestinian ally… David is one of the few who stayed. ‘I’ve lived here 71 years,’ he said. ‘I won’t go. I was in the army, I’m not afraid.’… His solution? ‘War with Hezbollah; kill Hezbollah,’ he says.”

Politics plays heavily into the underlying decisions. Even as he has supplied Israel with a continued flow of munitions, Biden has tried to convince Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu (whose popularity in Israel is sinking fast) to continue towards that cherished ceasefire with Hamas. Neither Israel nor Hamas seems to care about the tens of thousands of civilians Palestinians who have perished in the conflict. But Donald Trump is highly regarded as a very good ally of Israel’s rightwing – Netanyahu and Trump were pictured on political posters in Israel – as encapsulated in his dark message to Netanyahu earlier this year: “Finish it!” Nevertheless, the winds favoring that ceasefire are blowing in the right direction. To some, that is a solution; to others, it simply delays an inevitable full-on war between Hezbollah (beyond southern Lebanon?) and Israel.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while a Trump victory in November may spell the end of US support for a desperate Ukraine, it might also spur Israel to attack Hezbollah and “get it over with.”

The Gap Between Gen Z and the Democrats is Still Wide

 

At least Gen Z no longer has to deal with a candidate old enough to be a basic Gen Z’s great grandfather. For many campus activists, however, the Democratic Party still has been supporting Netanyahu’s ambitions in Israel, as he is running from the corruption case against him but still slorping at the weapons trough Biden has funneled towards the Prime Minister’s massive killings in Gaza… even as Netanyahu has no shot of completely eliminating Hamas under any condition. The Party is caught between loyalty to Israel, and a rising disdain for overkill among younger voters. The Dems also could not stop the accelerating abortion bans either. And then there are the bread-and-butter issues and the frustration of Gen Z, that old political parties seem unmovable, may be creating a body of could-be voters into a cadres of “what does it matter if I vote” non-voters.

Does all this negativity help Trump over his prospective Democratic opponent? The July 18th NBC News noted a strange and unexpected trend that might now modify with Biden out of the race: “Viral images of Trump raising his fist in defiance after surviving Saturday’s assassination attempt [7/13] gave the Republican nominee a surge of internet support over the weekend from well-known influencers…

“‘There is a lot of momentum around Trump right now when it comes to influencers,’ said Martin Johannes Riedl, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. ‘I think this is like a unifying power for fans and supporters of Trump to come and rally.’” Is Gen Z angry enough to support Trump? The Dems have not delivered much to them, no matter the excuses why not.

There are serious economic issues facing Gen Z (and more than a few millennials and beyond) as they struggle with housing affordability and unrequited promises for student loan forgiveness. It does seem as if one particular segment of a better-educated crop of young workers entering the job market just may have missed the explosive job boat that seems to have sailed on… offloading more than a few well-educated workers recently hired. This contraction in the job market – that is a sign that the economy is cooling off enough that the Fed may finally implement interest rate cuts – is now targeting one group of applicants with particular force: college educated workers, especially new grads starting out in the job market.

The tech and finance sectors have been brutal, and the entertainment industry has turned into a layoff hell. Applicants that used to be snapped up in droves have now submitted dozens of applications only to be met with resounding silence. Those with jobs, happy or not, are clinging to their positions as they watch applicants vie to replace them. Student loans aren’t going away, but repayment revenues from expected new employment have been reduced to mythology. The July 20th Wall Street Journal explains:

“The white-collar labor market is entering a more uncertain phase after cooling for more than a year. Job insecurity is climbing and fewer professionals feel emboldened to change their employment. The lack of turnover is stalling hiring even more as companies rethink their talent needs after pandemic-hiring sprees.

“Hiring for roles that usually require a bachelor’s degree has dropped below 2019 rates in recent months, new data from payroll provider ADP show. The drop has been steeper for 20-somethings, who are running into a bottleneck of entry-level openings as more established professionals stay put in the jobs they have, according to payroll information on more than 16 million people across 31,000 U.S. employers…

“By historic standards, the job market for college-educated workers remains relatively strong, and unemployment is still low. Yet it feels a long way from just two summers ago, when employers were competing so fiercely for software developers, marketers and other white-collar professionals that some were hiring and hoarding talent before having work for them to do. Cash-rich and confident that a pandemic-fueled boom would continue, corporate leaders worried more at the time about labor shortages... ‘These companies just got way, way too bloated,’ says Aaron Levie, chief executive of cloud company Box Inc. ‘Most anybody who was a CEO four years ago, and still is, will not let that happen again.’ Layoffs hit the tech sector in the fall of 2022 and then spread to other industries. Today, many companies are choosier than they have been in years about who they hire.

“Many employers corrected for the over-hiring by laying off thousands, and big-name companies including Citi and Google cut layers of jobs with the aim of reducing middle management. Meanwhile, more companies have shifted investment to generative artificial intelligence, a technology that many fear could shrink the need for traditionally high-demand workers, such as coders, data analysts and bookkeepers.

“Others have gotten pickier in their hiring. At Exact Sciences, a diagnostics company that makes the colon-cancer test Cologuard, CEO Kevin Conroy instituted a process this year that requires him and other senior leaders to approve every request to hire or promote someone into a supervisory position. The Madison, Wis., company expanded so quickly in recent years that it created too many layers of managers, he says, with some only having one or two direct reports.”

But if you are a skilled blue-collar worker, the number of openings with solid pay are rising. So, I recently heard of a lawyer who looked at a plumbing bill saying, “Wow, I’m a lawyer, and I don’t charge this much.” The plumber just smiled and replied, “Neither did I when I was a lawyer.” OK, that just may be a dark joke, but exactly how many college grads, even those with advanced degrees, are Starbucks baristas today?

I’m Peter Dekom, and with some of the most expensive post-secondary tuition in the world, having cadres of “America’s future” educated but unemployed or under-employed is definitely not good for democracy… or our future in general.