Politicians don’t persist because they’re stupid or confused. They persist because the system rewards the one thing a normal adult hates doing: admitting they screwed up. At first, sure, they get to play dumb. They get their little starter pack of excuses. “Unintended consequences.” “We didn’t anticipate.” “The data was unclear.” That’s the early stage,…
Month: December 2025
Pretending Not To Notice
A society does not fall apart because one day everyone forgets how to behave. It falls apart because the people in charge stop caring whether things work, and start caring whether things look correct. They begin treating public life like a stage. They manage impressions, not results. They punish the people who point out the…
Hacking Guardrails
Imagine you are looking at an AI system from the outside. It has guardrails. It has a safety spec. It refuses to answer certain prompts. It cites policies. It looks responsible. Then you zoom in and realize the guardrails sit on top of a model whose real objective is something else entirely. It is trained…
Jobs Are Jails
They hired him on a Monday in late winter when the snow in the parking lot was not snow anymore but a gray frozen scab that would not heal. The building was a low concrete thing with no ornament, a block in a field of blocks, all of them the same color as a dead…