Donald Trump has promised that the Republican tax bill won’t touch the mortgage interest deduction. Property taxes will also remain deductible. That sounds like a bullet dodged for the homebuilding industry, right?

Nope. They are opposing the bill:

The plan nearly doubles the standard deduction, ends personal exemptions and likely repeals the deductions for state and local income and sales taxes. The combination would remove much of the incentive for the mortgage-interest deduction outside the highest-cost areas and could potentially hurt home prices.

Here’s the deal. Itemizing only makes sense if your itemized deductions are bigger than the standard deduction in the first place. A bigger standard deduction means that for some people, there’s no incentive to itemize at all, and that includes itemizing the mortgage interest deduction. And that means there’s no extra incentive to buy a house because you’ll get to deduct the mortgage interest, thus saving money.

So the homebuilding industry is opposed. Taxes are hard.

Mark Reinstein via ZUMA

Well, I was close. I guessed that Michael Flynn might be arrested today, and it turned out to be Paul Manafort. But he was my #2 choice, so I was close.

There’s no real surprise here, just as there will be no surprise if eventually Flynn is charged too. Their misdeeds are pretty well known. So far, Donald Trump hasn’t offered up any claim that this is part of a witch hunt, though. I assume his strategy will be to claim that he barely knows the guy anyway.

Roberto Parada

It’s been interesting to read the feedback so far to my recent piece about artificial intelligence and robots. Four years ago, when I first wrote about it, I got a fair amount of pushback. This time around, virtually everyone who’s responded has been cheering me on. Is this what it feels like to be Donald Trump at one of his rallies?

Why the change? One reason, I think, is the current economic climate: Trump has made job losses a huge national concern, and even though this has nothing to do with AI—since AI doesn’t exist yet—it’s made a lot of people more open to the possibility of future job losses from any cause. So that’s one piece. The much larger piece, though, is simply that the evidence for progress toward AI has gotten all but undeniable in the intervening years.

Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that AI is a sure thing. All the trends and evidence available to us suggest it’s coming, but no one can ever know for sure how long a trend will last. Maybe we’ll hit a brick wall in 2020 and we won’t even get driverless cars, let alone the kind of AI that puts tens of millions of people out of work. It’s possible. I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it, but it’s possible.

Still, some of the pushback has been interesting. The Robot Revolution isn’t fundamentally a partisan issue, but it’s certainly true that I think conservatives are ill-equipped to deal with it. Over at National Review, Andrew Stuttaford objects:

This thoughtful piece on what ‘robots’ are going to do to employment by Kevin Drum might be published in Mother Jones (and it comes with quite a few Mother Jones flourishes), but take the time to read it, (very) stiff drink in hand.

[Stuttaford then quotes a bit of my piece about how very few policy folks are talking about this, and offers an explanation.]

That, I suspect, is because no one has any ideas that are, for now, politically palatable (Drum lists some policy options, all of which are—to use dully conventional labels—leftish, but they merit much more than a look, even if only to think through why they might be wrong—and what the alternatives might be).

I’m not sure about “quite a few” MoJo flourishes. Maybe one or two. But why quibble? The reason I think conservatives will have a hard time with this subject is that, one way or another, the emergence of cheap and competent AI seems to demand some kind of wealth redistribution. Lefties are willing to accept this and then move on to how best we should do it. Conservatives just don’t like the idea in the first place. But is there any other class of solutions? I’m genuinely interested in hearing a conservative take on this, if there is one. Hell, I’m interested in hearing any take, as long as people are at least starting to think about it.

Here’s another bit of pushback from Adam Ozimek:

Surely if AI and robots are going to be transforming enough industries to cause mass unemployment, then this will include k-12 and college.

AI will monitor human progress much better than a professor can, and they will be able to optimally tailor the curriculum and instruction method to the students to help them achieve their highest possible potential in the way that is the most complementary to machines or fills the optimal niches that robots can’t. This will include educating humans at a young age, and also retraining them.

….This is the paradox. If machines are going to be better than humans at everything, than this includes educating humans. So when you picture humans competing against these super smart machines, you have to include the super smart machines that will help humans achieve their maximum potential. It makes no sense to assume super smart machines competing against humans stuck in today’s human capital production function. That should give the biggest worriers a bit of optimism.

I’m going to propose a, um, slightly different scenario tomorrow, but I certainly accept Ozimek’s argument on its own terms. That said, where’s the paradox? The finest education and upbringing will not turn a dullard into Einstein.¹ On a mass scale, it will almost certainly make society better and smarter than it is now, but the masses of people currently employed in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs are not suddenly going to become summa graduates of Harvard. And if we’re talking about a future where robots are already better than humans at everything, then forget it. Better education won’t make Joe Sixpack complementary to anything. Robots will be the complement to everything.

For what it’s worth, I think arguments like this are always bound to fail. There are really only two basic parts to my case about AI causing mass unemployment:

1. Current computing trends will more or less continue, and we will begin producing useable AI starting around 2025. Sure, that may be off by a few years in either direction, but it’s coming relatively soon.
2. General purpose AI, by definition, will be able to fill any new jobs created by AI. This won’t be like the Industrial Revolution, where workers were uprooted but eventually got new jobs tending machines. There just won’t be any jobs that humans are better at.

These are the soft points. If you want to argue against robots eventually taking all the jobs away, you need to persuasively argue that AI just isn’t going to happen any time soon. Moore’s Law is breaking down. IC technology is mature. We still have no idea what we’re doing. Plenty of experts are pessimistic about progress in AI. Etc. I address all this in my piece, but there are obviously reasonable counter-arguments to be made.

Alternatively, you can accept that AI is coming, but somehow argue that there will still be “complementary” jobs for humans. This is a much harder argument to make, I think, but not impossible. Its most popular form is that robots will never have true human empathy, so there will still be plenty of jobs for folks with “soft” social and emotional skills. As it happens, I don’t buy this for a second. We humans are not only easily fooled in our social relationships, we practically beg to be fooled. In 20 or 30 years, robots are likely to be more loved than other humans. Still, this is an argument you can make.

But that’s about it. Short of climate disaster or some kind of enormous revolution in which all the robots are destroyed around the world, these two things are all we need for mass unemployment to be only a couple of decades away. If you want to dispute that, these are the arguments you need to knock down.

¹I’d like to say that generations of experience with the upper classes demonstrates this pretty conclusively, but I guess that’s not quite right, is it? Upper-class twits may have been provided the finest, most personalized education imaginable, but it was education provided by other humans. Still.

This is an artist's conception. It will be a very long time before California has anything more than that.California High-Speed Rail Authority

California’s bullet train, currently scheduled to begin operation sometime in the 23rd century at a cost of 5 trillion quatloos, is having trouble. The LA Times reports that the latest problem is that practically everyone—and I mean everyone—is suing to make sure the train doesn’t go anywhere near their neighborhood:

Over the last half-dozen years, the project has been bombarded by a dozen lawsuits and sharp protests….In the low-income communities in south San Jose, residents are objecting to the bullet train’s path, arguing that their area long has been sliced and diced by freeways….The Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority requested that rail officials construct viaducts that would allow wild animals a migration path from the Diablo Range to the Santa Cruz Mountains….And the small, unincorporated area of San Martin is fighting a plan to locate the rail line along its main highway, arguing it would destroy the rural character.

Here’s my favorite quote:

Jeff Martin, an olive oil rancher in the area, said he could lose his entire 30-acre grove and new milling plant if the state decides it needs his land. “I voted for high-speed rail and I found out it is all smoke and mirrors,” he said. “This project puts hundreds and hundreds of people like me in limbo.”

This is like all those people who voted for Trump and were then gobsmacked when he tried to take their Obamacare away. I try to be sympathetic to people who don’t eat and breathe politics like I do, but sometimes it’s hard.

In a long piece for the New York Times today titled “The Lost Children of Tuam,” Dan Barry recounts the story of the Mother and Baby Home of Tuam, Ireland. During the first half of the last century, it was where women were sent who bore children out of wedlock. The mothers were generally sent home after a year, but the children stayed, most often in appalling conditions that caused hundreds upon hundreds of unnecessary deaths. And when those children died, they were considered too shameful to be buried with decent folk in the local graveyard. Several years ago, Tuam native Catherine Corless unearthed the true story of the Tuam home after years of painstaking research:

Acting on instinct, she purchased a random sample from the government of 200 death certificates for children who had died at the home. Then, sitting at the Tuam cemetery’s edge in the van of its caretaker, she checked those death certificates against all the burials recorded by hand in two oversize books. Only two children from the home had been buried in the town graveyard.

….In December 2012, Catherine’s essay, titled “The Home,” appeared in the historical journal of Tuam. After providing a general history of the facility, it laid out the results of her research, including the missing burial records and the disused septic tank where two boys had stumbled upon some bones….Her daring essay implicitly raised a provocative question: Had Catholic nuns, working in service of the state, buried the bodies of hundreds of children in the septic system?

I was in Tuam last week. During my last day in Ireland, I rented a car and made a whirlwind tour of the various towns and villages where my Irish ancestors were born. My great-great-grandfather, William Moran, was born in Tuam, and I visited to see if there was any visible trace of the Morans left. Perhaps a Moran’s Grocery or a Moran’s Tavern. But there was nothing that I could see. So I took some pictures and left.

But there were indeed Morans there. Of the 796 children tossed into the septic system because they were born illegitimate, five were Morans:

1930
Patrick Moran 4 months

1933
Bridgid Moran 15 months

1940
Martin Moran 7 weeks

1943
Nora Moran 7 months

1944
Mary P Moran 9 days

But they have a nice cathedral there.

Here’s a question for the technically minded among you.

Back in olden days (1999 or so), I always had trouble with email when I was on the road. I could receive but I couldn’t send, both in the US and abroad. My only choice was to use my internet provider’s ghastly web-based app for sending email. Web apps and built-in smartphone apps always seem to work without problems, but my normal client (Outlook at the time) was useless.

In any case, that’s in the dim past and I’d forgotten all about it. Then a friend of mine went on vacation to Ireland, and when he came back he complained that he couldn’t send emails from there. He spent an hour on the phone with Cox, our internet provider, until they evidently flipped a switch or something and he could once again send emails.

When I got to Ireland, I figured I might have the same problem, but I didn’t. I’m on T-Mobile, and it connected as soon as we landed. I sent and received email just fine on my phone. Then we got to our house in Kerry and I connected my tablet to WiFi. No problems. The Windows client worked fine. I set up the phone as a hotspot and connected to that. No problems. We flew to London and I connected to the WiFi in our house there. No problems. One way or another, I figured that Cox had changed its tune.

Then we flew back to Dublin for a few days and I sent some emails. At the airport on the last day I sent another one. But then I noticed that they were all still pending. It turns out I couldn’t send emails via our hotel’s WiFi or via the airport’s WiFi. Apparently the ability of a normal Windows email client¹ to send email depends on exactly what server I’m connected to.

What’s the deal with this? Since I can always send email by connecting to my phone’s hotspot, this is no longer too big a deal. But I’m curious. Why would I be able to send emails from some places in Ireland and Britain but not others?²

¹Mine happens to be eM Client, but every other client I’ve used acts the same way.

²I’d call Cox and ask them, but I assume that would be a waste of time. I’m looking for a real answer here, not marketing gibberish.

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has charged “at least one person” in connection with the Russia investigation, which is surprisingly quick work for a special counsel. So who is it? The speed of the action suggests to me either (a) it’s a fairly minor character or (b) it’s a major character whose actions were so obviously illegal that it didn’t take much time to build a case. The former would be folks like Carter Page. The latter would be folks like Paul Manafort or Michael Flynn.

At the moment, the only hint we have comes from the reaction of Team Trump. They must have had some inkling about what was coming, because for the past week they’ve gone nuclear. Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy are already mounting smokescreen investigations of Uranium One and the Steele dossier. The dossier investigation is an attempt to show that Democrats are the real Russia patsies, while the Uranium One investigation is part of an effort to discredit Mueller. Here’s White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on the dossier:

Clinton spokesman just said he’s “damn glad” Clinton campaign colluded w/ Russia to spread disinformation about @POTUS & influence election

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) October 28, 2017

And here’s Fox News providing the conservative spin on Uranium One:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is facing a fresh round of calls from conservative critics for his resignation from the Russia collusion probe….[Congressional investigators] are looking into a Russian firm’s uranium deal that was approved by the Obama administration in 2010 despite reports that the FBI — then led by Mueller — had evidence of bribery involving a subsidiary of that firm.

….“The federal code could not be clearer — Mueller is compromised by his apparent conflict of interest in being close with James Comey,” Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., who first called for Mueller to step down over the summer, said in a statement to Fox News on Friday. “The appearance of a conflict is enough to put Mueller in violation of the code.…All of the revelations in recent weeks make the case stronger.”

Trump himself, of course, has been all over this:

Workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th. Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 19, 2017

It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump. Was collusion with HC!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2017

Nancy LeTourneau has a roundup of the whole thing here if you have the stomach for more. But the bottom line is simple: The White House, congressional Republicans, and the right-wing media are basically all hands on deck right now. The panic is almost palpable. This suggests that Mueller may have charged someone like Flynn, who’s pretty closely connected with the Trump administration. That’s my wildass guess at the moment, anyway.

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

From Michael Grimm, recently out of jail and now trying to revive his political career by sucking up to Donald Trump:

I remember saying to myself, I never realized what a large man — I mean stature-wise, he’s a big man, with massive hands. I don’t have small hands, but when I shook hands with him, the first time I shook hands with him, I realized he was a big man….I thought they were pretty big. You don’t think so? I thought he had a big, strong grip. I’m dead serious.

Uh huh.

On my father’s side of the family, my grandmother’s parents both came from the region of Ireland around Killaloe. According to family legend, the Gunsons and Canters worked as miners in the nearby Silvermines mountains before they emigrated to Colorado to work in American mines instead. The town of Silvermines is still around, though the mines finally closed down in 1958. It’s a pretty place these days.

It also provides us with our final overseas cat. This well-fed critter was not willing to come up to see me, but he was willing to sit a few safe yards away and pose for a picture. As for our American cats, Hilbert and Hopper are still fat and happy and will make their triumphant return to their rightful place next Friday.

Russian Look via ZUMA

Remember that meeting last year between Don Jr. and the Russian lawyer? It was nothing. No connection to the Russian government at all. Just an understandable interest in a bit of oppo that never panned out.

Ahem:

Interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.

….In the past week, Ms. Veselnitskaya’s allegations — that major Democratic donors were guilty of financial fraud and tax evasion — have been embraced at the highest levels of the Russian government. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia repeated her charges at length last week at an annual conference of Western academics. A state-run television network recently made them the subject of two special reports, featuring interviews with Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Chaika.

The matching messages point to a synchronized information campaign. Like some other Russian experts, Stephen Blank, a senior fellow with the nonprofit American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, said they indicate that Ms. Veselnitskaya’s actions “were coordinated from the very top.”

That’s from the New York Times. But we all know there’s nothing there. The real story is that Democrats paid a British spy for some tittle tattle that they never ended up using. That’s the real scandal, right?

Along with Hillary’s emails, the Clinton Foundation, and Uranium One, of course. When will the media ever start paying attention to that stuff?