Today smells like a day I remember. It is still summer here in Alaska, but the air takes me right back to fall in Virginia. It's crazy how a sudden chill can instantly transport me to leaf-filled streets and quiet walks.

It feels so good, so calm, but I don't always know where I am in those memories.

Virginia had a lot of chapters.

Some were full of chaos, some were quiet, and honestly, a lot of them I'm glad are behind me. ​If I had to guess, today feels like being back in First Landing, taking Beans out on a long walk through those quiet, mossy trails while the rest of the world fades into the background.

John Lennon 1971

This song was written and released before I was born.

My father never thought much of the Beetles, so I didn't think much of the Beetles. Even now, I can enjoy their oeuvre, especially lyrically, but there's something about the sound in general that I find offputting.

Maybe that means I'll never be a real musician. I don't.

But, Imagine—it's one of those that you just cannot deny is a tremendous track.

That line, 'Imagine no religion', I haven't done my Lennon research, but that's in the Bible. Revelation 17:16, 17 says 'Bablyon the Great' will be destroyed. Now, your mileage may vary, but my money is on BtG representing the collective false religion's and in the maelstrom of destruction, the true religion will be a target.

So the idea of 'No Religion' is an old one. Way older than Mister Lennon and Oko (if you subscribe to her contribution).

Regardless, it's a great tune.

Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today... Aha-ah...

Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion, too Imagine all the people Living life in peace... You...

You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You...

You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will live as one

work in progress

7:45

Headache wakes the artist at 6am. It is time for him to make the donuts. But exhausted, he tries to sleep more and manages to struggle with the physical battle that every morning brings, the headache, worry, and awe.

Awe because he knows in less than an hour, glory welcomes him and all men in his particular place.

At 7:30, he finally manages to overcome the weight of the sheer cover and stumbles out to marvel through the bleariness of the night.

The headache has not abated.

But it is forgotten for a moment as the artist marvels at the spider web glistening in the growing morning light. Spider webs are a special kind of beauty. Art meets function. Useful, but never permanent. Which is odd when we live in this world of dichotomy: everything made is disposable, but our homes are filled with detritus we call treasure and with which cannot bear to part.

But the spider, she works to spin her glory (and could care less if we marvel or not), knowing that tomorrow, she'll do it all again.

In the background, the bees are already hard at work, zinging SSE to drink and collect and do their work.

And the artist smiles at the dense green forest that's grown between his own porch and the fence, giving him a quiet spot without the nosy neighbors watching him in his own glory soaking up the sun's rays to start his day.

A moment he loves.

The final moment of his reverie finds pleasure in the dense thicket of sunflowers growing behind the yard. He ignored the growth outside the fence all spring, inviting the terrestrial creatures to find solace there, a little too close to home perhaps, but now, eight- and ten-foot-tall sunflowers dance heliocentrically in the morning wind, ignored by the bees who seem to have grown tired of plants.

But this artist never will.

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8:24

I'm hydrated, showered and ready for work. 3 hours to get 4 hours done.

Let's see if I can concentrate when all i want to do is write and draw.

Alas! Life requires these dull moments so that we may exist for the real spectacle to have its place.

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#deardiary

I haven’t wrote in a day or two i dont know, im starting to get so exhausting bored these days i stoped even writing how silly is that? not that i had anything important going on, i had absolutely nothing that was worth writing anyway. my sarcasm might be very low on this and my writing will be messy, im exhausted and i dont really care. i got back from work and therapy and these two mixed are such a headache, enough of human interaction and a person who acts like they know me better than i do and on the edge of quitting, but anyway, in the matter of how yesterday went, it haven’t been much of a jolly wolly experience. I went to the mall to buy a nice perfume, i didnt need it. but i bought it anyway, i cant discribe fairly how frustrating it is to be surrounded by sweaty disgusting humans. in a place thats meant to be for them only to spend their day there “shopping” , i went there on monday expecting few people to be there, but No. humans do their best to shock me with how they just appear everywhere and out of nowhere, annoying creatures with their huge eyes staring at you to force an uncomfortably eye contact like its a personal help call. i wouldnt help either way.

i cannot fathom how i despise these creatures if anything they are insufferable to be around and i would rather spend billion more hours with the noises in my head then waste my time intract with another human being even if it was for a minute.

Sincerely,

somnolent

The Question Before the Answer

The controversy surrounding the sale of Israel Government bonds in Ireland has generated more heat than light. Yet beneath the legal arguments and political slogans lies a question that is both older and larger than this particular dispute.

The question is not simply whether a bond should or should not be sold. The question is how a democratic state navigates the space between three different forms of authority: legal authority, democratic authority and moral authority.

The Israel bonds issue merely makes that tension visible. Ireland's Constitution is unusual in that it does not speak only in the language of institutions and procedures. Article 29 affirms devotion to peace, international justice and morality, commitment to the peaceful settlement of disputes, and acceptance of the generally recognised principles of international law as a rule of conduct between states.

Yet Ireland is also a member of the European Union, a community of states that frequently acts collectively in foreign affairs and where major sanctions decisions generally require unanimity among member states.

Meanwhile, institutions such as the Central Bank of Ireland are deliberately designed to operate independently of day-to-day political pressures. Their purpose is not to make moral judgements about the conduct of foreign governments but to administer the law and regulatory framework established by the State and the European Union.

Each of these arrangements makes sense in isolation. Taken together, however, they create a productive tension. A citizen may look at events in the world and conclude that Ireland's constitutional commitment to international justice points in a particular direction. The Government may respond that its room for manoeuvre is constrained by EU obligations. The Central Bank may reply that it has neither the mandate nor the discretion to make such judgments at all. At that point many people become frustrated.

Responsibility appears to disappear into a maze of institutions.

But perhaps this is exactly the moment where democracy begins rather than ends. A healthy constitutional order is not one in which moral questions never arise. It is one in which citizens can identify tensions and subject them to scrutiny. Laws are tested. Powers are examined. Assumptions are challenged. Institutions are asked to explain themselves.

The alternative is ossification. If no one ever asks whether current legal arrangements adequately reflect constitutional values, then constitutional values slowly become decorative. They remain on paper while losing their influence on public life. The important distinction is that testing a tension is not the same thing as rejecting the rule of law. A democracy needs mechanisms through which citizens, campaigners, politicians and governments can ask whether existing structures remain fit for purpose.

This brings us to the Restrictive Financial Measures (State of Israel) Bill 2025, introduced by Sinn Féin. The Bill sought to give the Minister for Finance power to prevent the Central Bank of Ireland from facilitating the sale of Israeli government bonds within the European Union. Supporters argued that Ireland should not facilitate the raising of funds by a state whose actions in Gaza had drawn widespread international criticism. Opponents argued that the proposal conflicted with the legal independence of the Central Bank and would be ineffective in practice.

On 28 May 2025, the Bill was defeated in the Dáil by 87 votes to 75 at Second Stage.

For many observers, the significance of that vote lay not in the result itself but in what the debate revealed. The controversy exposed an uncertainty about where authority ultimately resides when constitutional values, democratic sentiment, administrative independence and European obligations pull in different directions.

One response is to accept the constraint as the final answer. Another is to ask whether the constraint itself should be examined.

That examination need not be hostile to either the Central Bank or the European Union. On the contrary, it may be an affirmation of both. Constitutional democracies evolve through moments where established legal arrangements are tested against changing public understandings of justice. Viewed in this light, revisiting the 2025 legislation is not primarily about Israel. It is about understanding whether Ireland possesses sufficient democratic machinery to reconcile constitutional values with the realities of EU membership and independent regulatory institutions.

The question is not whether the law should simply yield to moral sentiment. The rule of law remains essential. The question is whether there exists a visible pathway through which a democratically expressed moral concern can be translated into lawful state action when citizens believe an important constitutional principle is engaged.

If such a pathway exists, the controversy may help reveal it. If it does not, then perhaps that absence is itself worthy of democratic attention.

There may even be a broader European value in such an exercise. One member state, acting openly and in good faith, can sometimes illuminate questions that all member states share. The purpose of such an inquiry would not be to weaken European cooperation but to understand how constitutional conscience, democratic choice and collective decision-making can coexist within it.

After all, many constitutional advances begin exactly this way. A tension that had previously been hidden becomes impossible to ignore. Institutions are required to explain where authority lies and why. Boundaries that appeared fixed are sometimes confirmed and sometimes redrawn.

Seen from this perspective, the Israel bonds dispute is not merely an argument about finance, foreign policy or administrative procedure. It is a reminder that democratic societies are not built upon the elimination of tension. They are built upon the capacity to live with tension, to examine it, and occasionally to test it.

The challenge is not to make legal authority, democratic authority and moral authority perfectly coincide. That has never been possible. The challenge is to ensure that when they diverge, citizens retain some visible pathway through which the conversation can continue. The real contribution Ireland could make in this instance may not be the achievement of a particular outcome.

It may be the willingness to ask the question.

An apparently too complex situation needs clarification with some simple statments

1: Article 29 states that: – Ireland is devoted to peace and friendly cooperation among nations founded on “international justice and morality”. – Ireland adheres to the peaceful settlement of international disputes. – Ireland accepts the generally recognised principles of international law as its rule of conduct in relations with other states. Moral imperative : Aricle 29 creates a strong constitutional commitment to peace and international law, but it does not automatically dictate a specific government response in every international conflict.

2: The Position of the Central Bank. The Central Bank is designed to operate independently and to apply laws and regulatory rules rather than make foreign-policy judgments. – Whether the Bank may refuse a particular bond-related service depends on the governing legislation and sanctions regime, not on the Bank's independent view of the conduct of a foreign state. – It must apply the relevant legal framework consistently and cannot invent new political criteria of its own.

3: The postion of the government is where the first tension lives. The Government's argument is generally not that it has no freedom of action, but that significant aspects of foreign policy towards third countries are exercised within the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy framework. EU member states coordinate foreign policy through the CFSP and seek common positions rather than unilateral measures.

So in an article it might be best to phrase it as: The Government argues that Ireland's capacity to impose major measures against another state is constrained by EU treaty commitments and by the EU's common foreign-policy structures.

4: The second tension is at the level of the EU: This is probably the sharpest point in the whole debate. – Many CFSP sanctions regimes require unanimous agreement in the Council. In practice, a single member state can prevent EU-wide sanctions from being adopted. So the statement could be simplified as: Even if Ireland favours stronger action against Israel, EU-wide sanctions generally require unanimity among member states, making collective action difficult where governments disagree.

That captures the institutional problem quite well.that requires a unanimous vote by member states in order to apply a sanction to Israel

Summary rewrite – The underlying structure

If I were reducing the entire controversy to four plain statements, I might write:

1: Ireland's Constitution commits the State to peace, international justice and respect for international law.

2: The Central Bank is legally structured to apply financial law and regulation, not to make independent foreign-policy or moral judgments about states.

3: The Irish Government may believe stronger action is justified, but argues that EU treaty arrangements limit how far a single member state can act alone.

4: EU sanctions policy generally depends on unanimity, so one state's position can be blocked by disagreement among the others.

The interesting philosophical tension, as I read it, is that Article 29 appears to express a constitutional aspiration toward international justice, while the practical machinery through which Ireland now acts internationally is increasingly embedded in EU institutions whose decision-making requires consensus.

That leaves the question: How far can a constitutional commitment create a duty to act when the mechanisms of action are shared with others? That is where the real argument seems to lie.

Parece que hay un resurgimiento de la política industrial. Iniciativas como el CHIPS and Science Act en Estados Unidos; la estrategia tecnológica de China, que va anunciando en sus planes quinquenales y las subvenciones más o menos encubiertas de la Comisión Europea a distintas industrias (como el reciente fondo Scaleup), han reabierto un debate que parecía clausurado desde los años noventa.

Como plantea Beata Javorcik, “hoy todos hacen más política industrial” (Fleming, 2024), sin embargo este interés general no se traduce en iguales resultados para todos. Basta con ver el éxito de los países del Este Asiático en comparación a los flojos resultados, mucho más ambiguos, de América Latina.

Entonces, ¿Qué es lo que diferencia a una buena y una mala política industrial?

Comprender estas divergencias exige examinar las políticas aplicadas, entornos institucionales, sociales y geopolíticos que las sostuvieron. Algo así es muy ambicioso para el ámbito que aquí, humildemente, puedo abarcar. Sin embargo, he tratado de comparar dos casos que me parecen muy ilustrativos. El caso de Corea del Sur y el de Brasil.

Con estos casos se puede observar que el desempeño de la política industrial depende de una combinación entre el apoyo estatal decidido, una disciplina competitiva creíble y una capacidad institucional capaz de prevenir la captura por intereses creados. El contraste entre el modelo de crecimiento liderado por exportaciones (export-led growth) y la estrategia de sustitución de importaciones ilustra de forma clara esta divergencia estructural.

Lo que marca la diferencia fundamental entre ambos países, Corea del Sur y Brasil, es la orientación estratégica de sus modelos de industrialización. En Corea, desde la década de 1960, se adoptó un enfoque de crecimiento orientado a las exportaciones. El Estado desplegó instrumentos verticales, a saber: crédito dirigido, subsidios selectivos, tipos de cambio preferenciales y apoyo tecnológico. Todos estos recursos destinados a conglomerados como Hyundai, Samsung y LG. Sin embargo, dicho apoyo estaba condicionado al cumplimiento de metas estrictas de exportación, productividad y calidad. Este mecanismo obligaba a las empresas a enfrentar la competencia internacional desde etapas tempranas, generando una “competencia administrada” que presionó a las firmas a innovar, reducir costos y escalar tecnológicamente. En su libro, Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization, Alice H. Amsden lo sintentiza explicando como el Estado desarrollista Coreano se produjo bajo el principio de equivocar los precios a propósito: “A lo largo de la mayor parte de los veinticinco años de expansión industrial coreana, el crédito a largo plazo ha sido asignado por el gobierno a empresas seleccionadas a tasas de interés real negativas con el fin de estimular industrias específicas.”

Es decir, Corea combinó barreras temporales con disciplina de desempeño: las industrias estaban parcialmente resguardadas del mercado doméstico, pero sometidas a una exposición externa creciente y evaluadas continuamente. Este diseño, articulado a reformas agrarias previas, fuertes inversiones en educación y cooperación tecnológica con Japón y Estados Unidos, posibilitó un proceso de upgrading que avanzó desde textiles y manufacturas ligeras hacia petroquímica, automoción, electrónica y semiconductores.

El contraste con Brasil es claro a cualquier nivel de análisis. Brasil implementó una estrategia de sustitución de importaciones durante gran parte del siglo XX. La protección arancelaria y las barreras no arancelarias buscaban desarrollar una base manufacturera autosuficiente y orientada al mercado interno. Esta estrategia produjo un período prolongado de industrialización acelerada entre las décadas de 1930 y 1970. Sin embargo, el aislamiento respecto de la competencia internacional redujo los incentivos para la eficiencia y la innovación. La rentabilidad dependió crecientemente del acceso a subsidios y a la protección estatal más que de la competitividad.

El resultado fue lo que se ha venido a denominar “industrialización trunca”: se formó una base manufacturera relativamente amplia, pero sin avanzar hacia sectores tecnológicamente complejos o encadenados a mercados globales. La completa ausencia de presión exportadora impidió consolidar ventajas competitivas dinámicas y dejó a las industrias en una posición de fragilidad frente a choques externos, especialmente en lo relativo a la restricción externa y la disponibilidad de divisas.

Las diferencias de diseño estratégico se amplificaron por las capacidades estatales de cada país. Corea del Sur desarrolló lo se ha conceptualizado como un Estado desarrollista con “autonomía incrustada”, es decir, con una burocracia meritocrática, cohesionada y relativamente inmune a presiones clientelares, pero al mismo tiempo integrada en redes densa y estratégicas de interacción con el sector privado. Agencias como el Economic Planning Board y el Ministerio de Comercio e Industria operaban con horizontes de planificación largos, mecanismos de evaluación rigurosos y facultades para retirar apoyo en caso de incumplimiento.

Brasil, en cambio, exhibió un Estado intervencionista significativamente más vulnerable a la captura distributiva. El federalismo fiscal, la fragmentación política, la histórica desigualdad y el peso de élites económicas organizadas dificultaron la formulación coherente de políticas. La protección y los subsidios —frecuentemente canalizados a través del BNDES y otros organismos— tendían a perpetuarse; los “perdedores” no competitivos disponían de poder para impedir la retirada de apoyos, lo que erosionaba la credibilidad de los incentivos. Como señala Javorcik, el desafío central no es seleccionar ganadores, sino “saber dejar ir a los perdedores” mediante cláusulas de extinción monitoreo efectivo (Fleming, 2024).

Así, mientras Corea del Sur contó con mecanismos de coordinación estatal-empresarial y sanción creíble, Brasil enfrentó instituciones menos capaces de generar disciplina ni de gestionar conflictos distributivos asociados al cambio estructural.

Todas estas diferencias estructurales no son solo teoricas. Se vieron claramente reflejadas en los datos de comercio exterior. Corea del Sur experimentó una transformación estructural profunda: las exportaciones de bienes y servicios crecieron del 2,6 % del PIB en 1960 a niveles superiores al 30 % desde finales de los años ochenta. Paralelamente, la composición exportadora se desplazó desde productos primarios y manufacturas simples hacia sectores intensivos en tecnología, configurando un patrón de especialización de alta complejidad económica.

Exportaciones de bienes y servicios (% del PIB)

Brasil, por su parte, mostró una inserción internacional mucho más limitada. Durante las décadas de 1970 y 1980, las exportaciones se mantuvieron entre el 7 % y 9 % del PIB, sin alcanzar una expansión sostenida del sector manufacturero orientado al exterior. Incluso cuando se produjo un incremento exportador en los años 2000, este estuvo dominado por lo que se conoce como commodities (soja, mineral de hierro, petróleo) y no por manufacturas de mayor valor agregado. La persistencia de esta estructura limitó las ganancias de productividad agregada y reforzó los problemas recurrentes de balanza de pagos que condicionaron la política macroeconómica brasileña.

Exportaciones de bienes y servicios (% del PIB)

Exportaciones de productos manufacturados (% de las exportaciones de mercaderías) – Brazil

La experiencia de Corea del Sur nos parece indicar que si es útil la política industrial y que esta puede llegar a impulsar el desarrollo. Sin embargo, Brasil nos recuerda que no todo vale, que es necesario un enfoque largoplacista, que prepare a tu mercado interno para abrirse a la competencia y que no trate de sustituir ese estimulo de la competitividad.

Corea triunfó porque combinó un apoyo estatal masivo con una disciplina de mercado inflexible. El gobierno otorgó créditos y subsidios a conglomerados como Samsung, pero a cambio exigió resultados concretos en los mercados internacionales. Este modelo de “competencia administrada” forzó a las empresas a innovar y escalar tecnológicamente para sobrevivir, guiando una transición desde la industria textil hasta la electrónica y los semiconductores.

Brasil, en cambio, encapsuló su industria tras barreras proteccionistas con la estrategia de sustitución de importaciones. Al aislar a las empresas de la rivalidad global, eliminó todo incentivo para la eficiencia. La rentabilidad pasó a depender de los subsidios estatales perpetuos, capturados por intereses políticos, lo que generó una industria grande pero poco competitiva y una economía dependiente de las materias primas.

– Fuentes Citadas

Banco Mundial. (2023). Exportaciones de bienes y servicios (% del PIB) [Conjunto de datos]. DataBank.

Amsden, Alice H. (1989). Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. Oxford University (Trabajo original publicado en 1989, p. 144). Traducción propia.

Prebisch, R., & United Nations. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. (1950).

The economic development of Latin America and its principal problems. United Nations Department of Economic Affairs. Press.

Fleming, S. (2024, 24 de enero). Update from Davos: Can industrial policy really work? With Beata Javorcik [Transcripción de podcast]. Financial Times.

I wrote this out just after I decided to take this journey. It is obviously influenced by misokink, and I am not sure how much I subscribe to that, but writing it down helped to solidify what is driving me:

i am inferior

i am male property

my only purpose is to take cocks

my only value comes from being available for use

my only goal is to be filled with cum

when a man gives me an order, i must obey him

when a man wishes to use my holes, i must let him

i must never presume, anticipate or think on behalf of a man

i must never beg a man for consideration, care or mercy

I am a trans woman in my 50s and I have decided to follow and explore my inner slut, which means that I will be using hookup apps to meet men who can use me for sex.

I have always been submissive, even before I knew the word. As a child, I used to have vivid dreams of being prepared by machines, buffed and made up, then displayed naked in a department store window for everybody to see. My submissive feelings came with a lot of shame because of my religious upbringing, and I spent much of my early life in the closet. I occasionally met men for sex, which really cemented my fascination for cocks and my oral fixation.

I came out as a trans woman in my 40s and started to explore the world of kink with newfound confidence and all of those old feelings of shame banished. My kink was centred on bottoming for impact and service submission much more than sex, and I felt like a complete person for the first time.

But my desire for cock and sexual submission remained. I could not work out if that was bad or not – bad as in behaviour driven by childhood trauma that I was remembering and repeating. If so, it would be better if I left it in the past or, at most, sought out some kind of catharsis. I let it be for a number of years.

But, recently, I started to think about the pull I felt towards sexual submission, men and cocks. I decided to try accepting it for a change and set about exploring it properly, rather than letting it surface occasionally in the dim half-light.

So here I am: a dumb, worthless, fat, submissive slut who craves cock, obedience and validation. I don't want to have to think, do hard calculations about risk or be reasonable or conservative about it.

Of course I will take care of myself. I will get regular STI checks and I am planning to start taking PrEP. I will use safe calls and let trusted friends know where I am going to be and when I expect to return. I am going to journal here and on paper, check in with my feelings, review whether my decisions still make sense and so on.

But, beyond that, I plan to say “yes” to myself and to whatever men ask of me.

A sua identidade não é o seu diploma nem seu cargo profissional. Se você nasceu no Brasil, assim como eu, deve ter crescido acostumado a se apresentar como: oi, eu sou a fulana, jornalista há xx anos…

Até meus 20 poucos anos eu também achava normal que isso acontecesse, até me mudar para Austrália e perceber que aqui a gente nem se quer sabe a profissão dos nossos amigos. Quantas vezes você estava em uma roda e perguntou o que eles fazem? Eu mesma preciso contar nos dedos as vezes que falamos sobre.

Socialmente falando, Brasil e Austrália tem uma diferença imensa, e não é esse ponto que quero chegar. Claro que com salários mais equânimes estamos diante de uma sociedade que tem alto poder de compra (australianos), mas que aparentemente não liga nem se alguém vai de pé descalço no mercado. E isso afeta sim nossa cultura.

No Brasil, precisamos correr muito atrás de uma boa educação caso queiramos ser considerados “alguém” no futuro, pois lá a disputa por posições define a população.

Só quis trazer essa informação pois essa semana passei por uma situação digamos que constrangedora. Estou atrás de um fotógrafo para o aniversário do meu filho que vai acontecer no Brasil e recebi a indicação de uma moça.

Entrei em contato com ela, ela me passou valores, etc. Agradeci. No dia seguinte, questionei sobre os filtros das fotos que ela usa, se varia conforme o evento ou se eles tem um padrão de filtro, e a resposta me deu um tapa na cara, ela me disse assim: “A identidade do meu trabalho foi construída ao longo dos mais de 10 anos como fotógrafa, então como expliquei antes, você vai receber as fotos dentro do padrão de cor e luz apresentado em meu portfólio”.

Eu não sei vocês, mas para mim, atendimento ao público é 80% do serviço que contrato. Agradeci e me retirei. Não porque a moça não tem qualificação suficiente – até acredito que tenha. Mas porque aqui, onde moro e com o conhecimento cultural que tenho o privilégio de conhecer hoje, carteiraço nenhum vende serviço.

Para mim, você pode estar começando agora e ter alto potencial, ter visão, ter atendimento e conquistar seu público mesmo sem nem se quer ter portfólio.

Isso foi algo que aprendi com a Austrália, a valorizar a experiência em vez do currículo, por isso que a maioria das empresas pede “trials” antes de contratar e basicamente ignora os grandes resumes.

Não é o que você diz. Mas sim o que você faz e como você age.

Respondendo a minha própria afirmação do início deste texto, posso hoje dizer que a sua identidade não é algo que se constrói aos poucos, tentando descobrir “quem você é” através de conquistas, diplomas ou aprovação, ela já estava firmada antes de você sequer nascer. Isaías 49:1 mostra isso: Deus me chamou pelo nome enquanto eu ainda estava no ventre, antes de eu ter feito qualquer escolha, antes de eu ter qualquer história pra apresentar. Deus já pôs, desde antes de eu nascer.

Então antes de hoje eu te falar prazer, Kyane, jornalista há mais de 10 anos, eu te digo: Kyane, filha do Deus vivo. Posso andar descalça pelas ruas da Austrália, mas tem uma coisa que ninguém vai me tirar. A minha identidade firmada em Cristo e quem ele me chamou pra ser aqui nessa Terra.

“Nada façais por contenda ou por vanglória, mas por humildade; cada um considere os outros superiores a si mesmo.” (Filipenses 2:3).

By the way, eu to nem aí para a sua profissão. Vamos ser amigos?

Hello hello

Please to meet you!

I yesterday I smelt the ground coffee! It is one of the best ones, don’t you agree?

Might bake some rhubarb pie if it’s still in me this smell

With vanilla sauce

And hey, did you see that after this rain, there was a warm sun.

The Apple trees looked as if they really were having a great summer, I picture these roots they’ve got like giant straw hands grabbing for the sustenance down below and sucking it up towards the sky! Relishing both the sun and the rain

I cooked yesterday, just lit the grill up and took whatever I found in the freezer

Some vegetarian food pre processed taste really like bark

I’m trying to be positive, it’s my mortar after all

Great great time for some more work

Hey do you use vim a lot for your daily work?

I see people do

:wq

To quit of course

Or even

:x

But I just go shift+ZZ

Above: Not a fictional character, not from TV or film, but a real live person. Cédric Villani (actual last name), French mathematician and politician, spotted in Standart's Enki Bilal documentary. Love me an eccentric. Also of note: North American graphic novelists are rarely if ever seen conversing with mathematicians/politicians. This, I suppose, is part of what separates the French from Americans.

Below: The road back to Cairo from Suez. The construction goes on forever. Cairo, already an insane megalopolis, continues to balloon.

Finished the final touches on the design for the box that will collect the serialized editions of THE SOLAR GRID. My co-publishers at Radix Co-Op tell me it'll debut at the NY Art Book Fair in September. Cover reveal when I get the green light.

Gearing up for THE SOLAR GRID panel at Petrocultures 2026 in Dresden, which will be held on August 27 from 11:00am-1:00pm. I am told that it'll be held in a conference room with a capacity of up to 400 people.

Today: – Finishing a small illustration for a new Houston-based micro press. – Conference call for a potential podcast graphic. – Early prep work for a potential TSG-related exhibition. – Getting my brand new kitchen faucet replaced. Already. – Podcast episode review for edits.

#journal

No red flags and there are several green flags, and I’m a little bit scared because maybe this could be the one.

Old Smoky (Gouda)

Cheese from Jalisco.

Just a fraction of the other cheese selection.

The market.

Pickle Beer.

CORNBREAD ECLAIRS, chicken liver mousse, Luxardo cherries, chives.

MELON GAZPACHO, Le Zette sheep milk yogurt, crispy prosciutto, finger lime, mint.

MT. LASSEN TROUT, Khao Tod succotash, Sai Oua pork sausage, citrus velouté, peanuts.

The sun himself is weak when he first rises

Some days... I lose my mind.

I lost it last night. Hours went by and I could not remember if it was was real or fabrication. My compass, that guided me for so many years, when I check it now, it does not spin, but it bounces wildly from true north to other places on the map.

How does a boy navigate when his direction is inverted? I'm looking for my north star. I'm looking.

Maybe it isn't dark enough yet?

---

Today, just to day, let's not take life quite so seriously?

Deal?

Okay!

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It's never a bad time for a cheese party!

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Life in this country is shockingly luxurious. No one has everything they want. But...then I notice the peanut butter section at the grocery store and realize how privileged we all are.

Like nobles in Versailles.

Only with less head-loping.

Hopefully.

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Client Work!

11:50a

Big posting to client's client tomorrow.

Funny how advertising is. I'm a guy in my bedroom, ahem, my STUDIO, making amazing art... well 'amazing' is probably a bit hyperbolic... making stuff, that's better. Anyway, I'm selling my services to a production studio. They sell that to an ad agency, they sell that product to the end client.

So, I'm the fourth guy down the chain on this. That's a LOT of approvals to get it out the door and green-checked to go into the world.

REGARDLESS! this three weeks of work ships final on Friday, meaning I'll be back to making sketchbooks, writing about Europe and staring into space. That's what romantic poet essayists, do, you know? Star into space. Though that's usually filled with boy scout stuff like helping little old ladies across the street and fetching groceries. :–)

I may not be a great man, but I'm trying to be a good one at least.

IF it all goes well, think I'll take a few days and go camping next week. My wife get's back from PSS (school) next week and she'll be ready for a break.

Okay! Better get this retouching done... oh, wait, no! It's LUNCHTIME!

:–)

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12:30P

Shin-Raising a Glass

Have I ever told you about my buddy, Shin?

This guy.

He's absolutely amazeballs.

I love him to death.

He lives half a world away. We met on a volunteer project fifteen years ago, and if you'd asked me then which of those people I'd still be talking to years later—sharing my darkest fears, biggest failures, and the places where I still come up short—I never would have guessed it would be him.

But here we are.

It turns out we're wired in remarkably similar ways. We have many of the same weaknesses. Our wives have many of the same strengths and struggles. In a strange way, talking to Shin is a bit like talking to myself—but with the enormous advantage of hearing my own thinking from someone who isn't trapped inside my own head.

He's solved problems I'm still wrestling with and I've helped him through some that I've already fought.

There's this beautiful exchange of ideas, encouragement, correction, and goodness that I've only experienced with a few people in my lifetime.

The Bible speaks of friends who are “born for times of distress.”

It's a verse that I have long loved. I think Shin and I have become that for one another.

Ninety minutes on the phone with him leaves me feeling... human again.

Not perfect.

Not finished.

Just... capable.

Capable of being kinder than I was yesterday.

More patient, more thoughtful, more willing to put away selfishness and choose the path of building others up instead of making mself feel comfortabel.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about self-control.

Growing up in a house of violence, anger wasn't something you mastered. It was something people flexed. Tempers weren't controlled; they were wielded.

It took decades to break that horse.

Or at least to get it mostly broken.

I thought that was the battle.

Then I discovered there's another horse entirely.

A quieter one... and WAY more powerful, more intense.

Inward storms that flood worlds not by exploding outward but causing us to turn on our better judgment and chase the unattainable.

Apparently becoming an adult isn't about taming one beast and getting the trophy. It's discovering there's always another challenge hiding behind a tree.

Being human is astonishing.

We have this incredible capacity for love, generosity, courage, sacrifice, forgiveness, friendship. Entire libraries have been written trying to explain what makes people choose goodness over selfishness.

And somehow, one of the greatest gifts in that journey is another person who simply refuses to let you settle.

Someone who reminds you—sometimes without even trying—that you can be better than you were yesterday.

That's what Shin has become for me.

A reminder.

An encouragement.

A friend.

Who makes me want to become the kind of man others can trust. The kind who brings peace instead of turmoil. Hope instead of cynicism. Contentment instead of complaint.

None of us become that person alone.

So tonight, I'm raising my glass to fifteen years of friendship.

To honest conversations.

To brothers who tell the truth.

And to you, Shin.

Thank you, my friend.

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5:30pm

Better is the end

Heavy news: two longtime friends of mine who are full time volunteers and spent the last 5 years fighting cancer are on the back end of a 3rd surgery. They THINK they finally got it all. They took all the parts that can grow the cancer... so let's HOPE!

Pray.

The heavy news is that they just found out their volunteer assignment is changing. This is a tough transition, one that I made in my own way and one that I've had 2 dozen friends make. It is never easy, and they're VERY scared. This is a big adjustment. They are in their late 40's and spent the last 20 years doing nothing but taking care of other people. Now there will be jobs to find, homes to rent, a life to rebuild.

It's not immediate. The team they're attached to is keeping them on until she's fully recovered and back on her feet. Which is probably 3 months, I'm guessing.

When you love someone, you only want the best. But what's best isn't always what's easiest. And this won't be an easy change for them. But they are both so kind and so generous, I have absolutely no doubt they will succeed.

There's a Proverb that says 'Better is the end of a matter than its beginning.' And in my experience, this always true. I'm looking for the end of a matter right now, and I'm confident it will work out for the best in the long run for everyone. Wiser, funner and more of good things than not. But sheesh, getting there is the low road to hell.

I know A and M will do fine.

Maybe time to make that guest room ready to guest. Think I'll go say a prayer.

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645P

It's been A LOOOOOOONG day. I started at 9 after staying up until 5am because I'm stupid. I fell down a well, what can I say.

Everything took longer than it should have, but without distractions, it was still very productive. I got 4 of my 6 images done. At 30x30 inches, that's an achievement. Then I got changes on them all!

haha! So I'll be up late again finishing image #5 and revising 1-4. Then tomorrow morning, up early and KOing #6 for an EOD showing to the client.

My guys are super calm, so that means everything is supergroovy!

Tonight's screening while I work: Galaxy Quest – Feel-good cooperative to overcome a common obstacle. Scratches my SciFi Itch and my dream of being a space faring adventurer. One day. Just as long as I don't have to learn aeronautics.

I may yet slip these surly bonds.

And surely they are. Surly.

Desert, dessert.

I feel a little fragile, I think that's lack of sleep.

Funny story: well, not that funny: we have a cat. Well my wife has a cat. I tolerate it, it tolerates me. Our deal is: I pet her, my wife feeds and everything else's her. Including food.

That dumb cat pesters my wife all day long to be fed.

Since she left, my wife left out a bowl of food. That was gone first thing this morning.

Cat hasn't asked me ONCE for food. I'd say I trained it pretty well.

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FOOD!!

I always forget to eat when my wife's away. It's the nature of 'creative' work. Your brain get's dialed in and you forget. When I was drinking a lot, it was way worse. I'd have a whiskey or two and it would be 2 o'clock in the morning before I realized I wanted food.

Tonight: BBQ chicken and potato salad. The dinner of champions.

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8:55pm

### Tearfest

Just got off the phone with my friends who are getting a new assignment. They are in the throes of the grieving process. Learning that they're going to be starting a new chapter in life at 50 is a hard thing.

They know they'll be fine, but they're also going to say goodbye to 30 years of rhythm.

And so we all cried together... I couldn't say enough good things about them and they were equally kind to my wife and I. I feel so unworthy. But I appreciate their kindness.

I hope hope hope and pray they move here. At least for a little while. They're probably six months out... so time will tell. We agreed to make a road trip up to see them in October (they live in NY). So it will be a good transition.

Some days feel so empty and... faded sort of. Grey. And others just overflow with love and joy and kindness. Today may have started a little rocky, but it's shaped up to be an absolute boon.

I wish I could package this feeling and post it hear for you to download into your heart and mind!

Okay! I'd better get serious about work!

---

You have done everything right. You read the job description twice, tailored the application, rehearsed the difficult questions in the shower, ironed the shirt that only the top half of the camera will ever see. You log in two minutes early, because being early is a habit you cannot break, and you wait. A box appears. A voice, smooth and untroubled, begins to speak. It thanks you for your time. It asks you to describe a moment when you overcame a significant challenge. And somewhere in the second sentence of your carefully prepared answer, a quiet realisation settles over you like cold water: there is no one there. The voice is not listening in any sense you would recognise. The chair on the other side of the conversation is empty. You are performing sincerity, vulnerability, ambition, for a system that will compress all of it into a vector and a score.

This is no longer a fringe experience or a Silicon Valley curiosity. It has become, with startling speed, one of the most common ways that people in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia now encounter the labour market. And it is producing a strange new emotion that does not yet have a settled name: the feeling of having prepared, in good faith, to be seen by someone who was never going to be there.

The Scale of the Empty Chair

In May 2026, the hiring software company Greenhouse published the results of a survey of 2,950 active job seekers across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland and Australia. The headline figure was the kind of number that makes you read it twice. Sixty-three per cent of candidates reported that they had already been interviewed by an AI. Six months earlier, the same measure had stood thirteen percentage points lower. Whatever the future of work is, it is not arriving gradually. It is arriving in quarters.

What gives the Greenhouse data its particular sting is not the adoption rate, impressive though it is, but the asymmetry that surrounds it. Seventy per cent of candidates said they were never clearly told, ahead of time, that an AI would be the thing evaluating them. For roughly one in five, the discovery came only once the interview had already begun: the box opened, the voice started, and the human they had braced themselves for simply failed to materialise. Thirty-eight per cent of those surveyed had already withdrawn from a hiring process specifically because it involved an AI interview with no human present, and a further twelve per cent said they would do the same if asked. Only eighteen per cent believed their prospective employers had any clear policy governing how AI was used to judge them.

The numbers compound into something close to a paradox. A practice that half of all candidates find serious enough to walk away from is being deployed, at scale, without disclosure, without policy, and without consent. Daniel Chait, the chief executive of Greenhouse, put the diagnosis bluntly when the survey landed: most AI in hiring today, he said, is making a bad system worse, generating more applications, less signal and less transparency. His chief people officer, Sharawn Tipton, was sharper still. Seventy per cent of job seekers, she noted, were not told AI was involved at all. AI, in her phrasing, is not fixing bias; it is scaling it.

The downstream experience is no kinder. Of the candidates who completed an AI interview, the Greenhouse figures suggest only around twenty-eight per cent were moved forward, thirteen per cent were formally rejected, and a remarkable fifty-one per cent received no feedback whatsoever. They were neither advanced nor turned away. They were simply left in the silence that follows a conversation with no one in it.

A New Name for an Old Injury

In January 2026, a paper appeared on the preprint server arXiv that gave this whole landscape a piece of vocabulary it had been missing. Written by Ibrahim Denis Fofanah of the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Pace University, and titled “The Algorithmic Barrier: A Framework for Artificial Frictional Unemployment and Information Asymmetry in Automated Recruitment Systems”, it proposed that a meaningful share of contemporary joblessness is, in a precise and unsentimental sense, manufactured. Not by recession, not by automation eating the jobs themselves, but by the machinery that is supposed to connect people to the work that already exists.

To understand why “artificial frictional unemployment” is such a loaded phrase, it helps to know where the unloaded version comes from. Frictional unemployment is one of the oldest and most respectable ideas in labour economics. It describes the joblessness that exists simply because matching workers to firms takes time: a vacancy cannot be filled instantly, and a person cannot sift through every posting at once. The economists Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides built an entire formal apparatus, the search-and-matching framework, around exactly this problem, work that earned them the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In their account, friction is natural, even healthy. It is the cost of a dynamic economy in which people change jobs, firms open and close, and information is never perfect. Full employment, in this tradition, has never meant zero unemployment; it has always included a residue of people in motion between roles.

What Fofanah's paper argues is that we have begun, quietly and at scale, to add friction that has nothing to do with any of that. The new friction is not the natural cost of search. It is an artefact of design. Applicant tracking systems and automated screening tools, the paper contends, have reframed hiring as a high-precision classification problem, one tuned above all to avoid the embarrassment of a bad hire. In statistical terms, the systems are optimised to minimise false positives, the unsuitable candidate who slips through. The predictable consequence is a surge in false negatives: qualified people quietly discarded because the language in which they describe themselves does not align with the language the machine has been told to look for. A nurse who has used clinical software for a decade is filtered out for lacking “computer experience”. A designer is rejected for not listing a degree in programming. The skill is real. The signal is lost in translation.

This is the heart of the concept. Artificial frictional unemployment is the joblessness of people who are not, in any genuine sense, unsuitable. They are simply illegible to the system reading them. The paper's proposed remedy is technical, a candidate-side architecture called JobOS that would standardise, verify and semantically translate a person's competencies into a form the machines can parse. The accompanying simulation is careful about what it claims: a controlled proof of concept built to demonstrate the mechanism rather than measure its scale, showing that variation in wording alone is enough to manufacture false negatives, and that semantic competency mapping recovers applicants a keyword system wrongly discards. What it does not establish, as Fofanah says plainly, is how much real-world friction is artificial, a question he leaves to future field studies. That restraint deserves respect. The deeper contribution is conceptual. It hands a name to an experience millions of people have had and could not quite describe: the sense of being rejected not for who you are, but for how badly you compressed.

The Hidden Worker Was Already Here

If this all sounds suspiciously like a problem invented by the latest wave of generative AI, it is worth remembering that the mechanism predates the chatbots by years. In 2021, researchers at Harvard Business School, working with Accenture, published a study that has aged into something close to prophecy. They coined the term “hidden workers” to describe people who are perfectly capable of doing a job but rendered invisible to employers by the very systems designed to find them. Their estimate of the scale was extraordinary: more than twenty-seven million such workers in the United States alone, locked out not by a deficit of skill but by a deficit of recognition.

The detail that haunts the report is not the headline number but the admission buried inside it. Eighty-eight per cent of the employers surveyed conceded that their own screening tools were filtering out qualified candidates. They knew. Nearly nine in ten companies were aware that their automated gatekeepers were rejecting people who could do the work, and the overwhelming majority had no plan to do anything about it. With algorithmic screening now embedded in virtually every large employer, the gap between what these systems filter and what the job actually requires has become one of the quietest structural failures in the modern economy.

What the 2026 wave of AI interviewing adds to this older story is a cruel new intimacy. The applicant tracking system rejected you in private, before you had invested much of yourself. You sent a CV into a void and heard nothing, and while that is dispiriting, it is at least impersonal in a way that protects you. The AI interview asks for more. It asks you to show up, to be present, to be vulnerable on camera, to talk about the time you failed and what you learned, and then it processes that performance with the same indifference the CV-screener applied to your keywords. The friction has been moved closer to the bone. You are no longer filtered before you speak. You are invited to speak, at length, to no one.

Disclosure, Consent, and the Asymmetry at the Centre

Strip away the technology for a moment and you are left with a question that is really about manners, and beneath manners, about power. When seventy per cent of candidates are not told that a machine will judge them, and only eighteen per cent of employers have any clear policy on the matter, what has actually broken is not an algorithm. It is the most basic norm of reciprocity that has always underpinned the act of applying for work.

An interview, historically, has been a two-way evaluation dressed up as a one-way one. Yes, the employer is assessing the candidate. But the candidate is also reading the room: gauging the warmth or coldness of the interviewer, noticing whether questions are thoughtful or rote, deciding whether these are people they could stand to work alongside. The exchange is asymmetric in power, certainly, but it is mutual in information. Both sides learn something. Both sides are, however briefly, exposed to each other.

The undisclosed AI interview collapses that mutuality entirely. The candidate is fully exposed, on camera, performing sincerity in real time, while the other side of the table offers nothing back: no face to read, no warmth to gauge, no reciprocal vulnerability, often not even the courtesy of having been told that this is what was going to happen. The Greenhouse data captures how acutely people feel this imbalance. Fifty-seven per cent of candidates said they believed disclosure of AI use ought to be a legal requirement. When more than half of the people subjected to a practice think it should be illegal to do it to them without warning, you are not looking at a user-experience problem. You are looking at a legitimacy problem.

It would be one thing if candidates were rejecting AI outright, retreating into nostalgia for the all-human interview with all its own well-documented biases and inconsistencies. They are not. The same survey found that most people want roughly the same amount of AI, or even more, but with guardrails: forty-four per cent want it disclosed upfront, thirty-nine per cent want a clear explanation of what the AI is actually measuring, forty-six per cent want the option to request a human interview instead, and thirty-eight per cent want a human being to review the AI's verdict before it becomes final. These are not the demands of Luddites. They are the demands of people asking to be told the rules of a game they have already been forced to play.

The Psychology of Being Unseen

There is a particular kind of injury that the empty chair inflicts, and it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as squeamishness about new tools. To be seen, properly seen, by another person is one of the deepest social needs human beings have. The job interview, for all its artifice and stress, is one of the few remaining institutional moments in adult life where you present your whole working self to a stranger and ask, in effect, to be recognised as worthy. When that stranger turns out to be a script with a synthesised voice, something in the transaction curdles.

Candidates reaching for language to describe the experience keep landing on the same words. They say it feels awkward, humiliating, dystopian. They describe a one-way interaction with a system that cannot see nuance, cannot answer a clarifying question, cannot register the context that a human interviewer would absorb without thinking. They talk about being reduced to keyword matches and algorithmic calculations, about being processed rather than considered. That last distinction, processed versus considered, is the whole thing in miniature. To be considered is to have someone weigh you, attend to you, hold your particulars in mind. To be processed is to be run through a pipe. Tipton, at Greenhouse, named exactly this when she observed that candidates feel processed rather than considered, and that the bad experiences travel: people share them, and an employer's reputation erodes one humiliating interview at a time.

The dignity at stake here is not a soft concept. Researchers studying AI in recruitment have begun to argue that automated assessment has, specifically, a dignity problem, distinct from its accuracy problem, because it treats people without regard at precisely the moments when they are most exposed and most human. When a rejection arrives through a process that feels opaque, robotic and indifferent, the harm is not only practical, the lost income, the prolonged search. The harm is to your sense of being a person whose effort registered somewhere. You prepared for a conversation. You got a transaction. And then, more than half the time, you got nothing at all, not even the closure of a no.

It is worth being honest that the picture is not uniformly grim, and the better operators in this space know it. Sapia.ai's “Humanising Hiring” research, published in September 2025, drew on more than a million AI chat interviews and eleven million words of candidate feedback across more than thirty countries, reporting average candidate satisfaction of 9.05 out of ten. Many candidates, it found, preferred a well-designed AI conversation to a rushed or distracted human one, saying the AI felt more patient, more consistent, less prone to snap judgement. Kathi Enderes, SVP Research and Global Industry Analyst at The Josh Bersin Company, called it one of the most comprehensive examinations of candidate experience to date. The caveat belongs in the open: this is a vendor reporting on the reception of its own product, measured with its own instrument, and satisfaction data gathered by the party under evaluation tends to flatter. It should be weighed carefully rather than waved away; the sample is enormous and the finding is not implausible. A bored recruiter glancing at the clock is not a gold standard worth defending. The problem the 2026 data exposes is not that AI is inherently more dehumanising than a human. It is that AI deployed without disclosure, without explanation, without a human fallback and without any feedback at the end is dehumanising, and that this careless version is the one most people are actually meeting.

What It Does to Trust

Trust, in the employment relationship, has always run on a kind of advance credit. You apply to a company believing, provisionally, that it will treat your candidacy in good faith: that a real person will at least glance at your effort, that the process is what it claims to be, that the firm is the kind of place that behaves decently toward people it has not yet hired. The undisclosed AI interview spends that credit recklessly. The first substantive thing the company tells you about how it operates is that it was willing to let you talk to a machine without mentioning it. Whatever else you learn later, you have already learned that.

The damage runs in both directions, which is the part employers tend to miss. Tipton has pointed out that recruiters themselves are inundated and anxious, worried about being automated out of their own jobs, and that there is a trust gap on both sides of the table. The AI interview did not appear because hiring teams are villains. It appeared because application volumes, inflated in no small part by candidates using AI to fire off hundreds of tailored applications, have become genuinely unmanageable. One set of machines is answering another. The human beings at both ends are increasingly bystanders to a conversation between systems, each side suspecting, correctly, that the other is not really there.

This is the trap that the labour market is sleepwalking into: an arms race in which candidates automate their applications because employers automate their screening, employers automate their screening because candidates automate their applications, and the signal that the whole edifice exists to transmit, can this person actually do this job and would we want them here, gets drowned in the noise that both sides are generating to cope with the noise. Trust is the first casualty, and trust is expensive to rebuild. An employer that treats applicants as inputs to be processed should not be surprised when the best of them, the ones with options, the ones confident enough to walk, do exactly that. The thirty-eight per cent who have already withdrawn are not a random sample. They disproportionately include the people any sane organisation would most want to hire.

The Economics of Discarded Signal

Zoom out from the individual humiliation and a macroeconomic shape comes into view, and it is not flattering to anyone. The polite economic story about frictional unemployment has always been that the friction is, on balance, productive: it represents people taking the time to find the right match, which is good for them and good for the firms that eventually land them. Artificial frictional unemployment inverts that logic. The friction it introduces produces no better matches. It simply destroys signal, leaving good matches unmade on both sides.

Consider what the systems are actually doing to the information economy of hiring. A qualified candidate generates a signal, a body of experience, a way of describing it, a manner, a set of competencies, and submits it. A well-functioning labour market transmits that signal to an employer who needs precisely it. The keyword screener and the carelessly tuned AI interviewer act as lossy compression: they throw away most of the signal and keep a thin, distorted residue. The nurse who cannot get past “computer experience” is not a market clearing efficiently. She is a match that should have happened and did not, a vacancy left open and a worker left idle, the two of them separated by nothing more substantial than a semantic gap.

Multiply that across the twenty-seven million hidden workers the Harvard study identified, across an economy in which vacancies and unemployment have at times risen together in a way the old models struggle to explain, and the cost stops looking like an individual misfortune and starts looking like a drag on aggregate productivity. Firms complain they cannot find talent while their own tools reject it. Workers conclude the market is rigged and reduce their search effort, or drop out of the official labour force altogether, which is precisely the behavioural response the search-and-matching tradition would predict from people who have learned that effort does not pay. The friction is artificial, but the unemployment it produces is entirely real, and so is the output that never gets made.

There is a distributional edge to this as well, and it cuts the wrong way. The candidates best placed to game an AI interview are those who have been coached on how the systems work, who know to seed their answers with the right vocabulary, who can afford the tools and the tutoring that decode the black box. The Greenhouse analysis flags exactly this risk: that those coached on AI tools gain an advantage over those without access, and that AI hiring deployed carelessly will accelerate existing inequities rather than dissolve them. A system sold on the promise of objectivity ends up rewarding fluency in its own quirks, which is just a new name for privilege.

There is a slower, more corrosive cost too, one that does not show up in any quarterly figure. Labour markets run partly on belief, on the shared expectation that effort and ability will, eventually, be rewarded with a fair look. That belief is a public good, and like all public goods it is easy to deplete and hard to replenish. Every candidate who walks away from an empty chair, every applicant left in the fifty-one per cent silence with no decision and no feedback, learns a small lesson about how much their effort is worth to the institutions they are trying to join. They tell their friends. They tell the internet. The Greenhouse figures already show the cynicism hardening: only twenty-one per cent of candidates believe employers are using AI responsibly, and more than a third reported perceiving age bias from the process. When a generation of workers concludes that applying for a job is an exercise in performing for an indifferent machine, the resulting withdrawal of faith is not a soft cost. It is a structural one, and it will be paid by the very employers who imagined they were saving money.

What Fairer Machinery Might Look Like

None of this is a counsel of despair, and it is emphatically not an argument for pretending the pre-AI world was a meritocratic idyll. It was not. Human interviewers are biased, inconsistent, swayed by the firmness of a handshake and the school on a CV. The interesting question is not whether to use machines but how to use them in a way that adds signal rather than destroying it, and that treats the people on the other side as people. The outlines of an answer are already visible, partly in regulation and partly in what candidates themselves are asking for.

The regulatory scaffolding is being built, unevenly, in real time. New York City's Local Law 144, in force since 2023, requires that automated employment decision tools undergo an independent bias audit each year, that a summary of the results be posted publicly, and that candidates be notified that such a tool will be used and told of their right to request an alternative. It is, in principle, exactly the disclosure-and-consent regime the Greenhouse respondents are crying out for. In practice, a December 2025 audit by the New York State Comptroller's office, covering July 2023 to June 2025, found the law's enforcement to be ineffective, hobbled by weak complaint handling and inaccurate compliance reviews. Seventy-five per cent of test calls to the city's 311 hotline about these tools never reached the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the agency charged with enforcing it; and when that department reviewed thirty-two companies it flagged one violation, while the Comptroller's auditors found seventeen potential ones in the same set. The framework is sound; the teeth are missing.

The European Union has the larger hammer, and has just postponed the moment it falls. Under the EU AI Act, systems used to filter applications and evaluate candidates remain classified as high-risk under Annex III, and the obligations are substantial: risk assessments, technical documentation, bias testing, meaningful human oversight, transparency disclosures and continuous monitoring, with a specific duty to inform the people subject to them, and a scope reaching beyond conventional employees to freelancers and platform workers. What has changed is when it starts to bite. Under the Digital Omnibus on AI, agreed provisionally on 6 May 2026, confirmed by Member State representatives on 13 May and granted final approval by the European Parliament on 16 June, the Annex III obligations were pushed back from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027: a sixteen-month deferral, fixed and unconditional, replacing an earlier proposal that would have tied the start date to the readiness of technical standards. Annex I systems embedded in regulated products slipped in parallel, from August 2027 to August 2028. The stated reason was that the regulatory infrastructure needed to make the obligations operable had not materialised on schedule: a candid admission, and for anyone waiting on protection a cold one.

The shape of that delay reproduces this essay's problem exactly. Article 50's transparency obligations were not postponed; they remain live from 2 August 2026. So the layer that tells you a machine is involved arrives on time, while the machinery that would make it answerable, the bias testing, the documented risk assessment, the human oversight meant to stand between an algorithmic verdict and your livelihood, slips by sixteen months. Candidates get the disclosure and wait until December 2027 for the substance behind it: told what is happening to them, given no means to contest it. Whether enforcement matches ambition remains the open question, the same one New York is currently failing. The direction of travel is still clear, disclosure and human oversight migrating from courtesy to legal requirement, but the timetable has slipped.

The American picture follows the same rhythm of ambition and deferral. Colorado passed the country's first comprehensive state AI statute, SB 24-205, and never brought it into force: a federal court halted enforcement on 27 April 2026, and it was repealed and replaced by SB 26-189, a narrower automated-decision-making-technology regime signed by Governor Jared Polis on 14 May 2026 and effective from 1 January 2027. What survives the narrowing is instructive. Deployers must give consumers clear and conspicuous notice before the technology is used in a decision affecting them; must furnish, within thirty days of an adverse decision, a plain-language description of it and of the automated system's role; and must offer meaningful human review and reconsideration on request. Disclosure upfront, an explanation, a human in the loop: very nearly the list the Greenhouse respondents gave. The law is converging on the candidates' own asks. It also does not begin until 2027, and Colorado's first attempt died before it bound a single employer.

Beyond compliance, the design principles are not mysterious, because candidates have spelled them out. Tell people, before they invest themselves, that AI will be involved. Explain what it is measuring, so the exercise is a test and not a trap. Offer a human alternative to those who want one, which is most of them. Put a human being in the loop to review the machine's verdicts before they become destinies. Close the loop with feedback, so that the fifty-one per cent currently left in silence at least receive the dignity of a decision. And audit the systems for the bias they are so good at scaling. Fofanah's JobOS proposal points at the same goal from the other direction: give people a way to make their signal legible to the machines, rather than leaving them to be discarded for failing to speak fluent algorithm. The technology to do all of this exists. What is mostly missing is the will to slow down enough to use it.

The Chair Is a Choice

Return, at the end, to the person logging in two minutes early, because that person is the whole argument. They did not ask for the labour market to become a conversation between systems. They simply wanted a job, and believed, reasonably, that wanting it and being able to do it might be enough to earn them a fair hearing from another human being. The empty chair tells them otherwise. It tells them that their preparation, their nerves, their carefully chosen story about the time they failed and recovered, all of it was poured into a vessel that was never going to hold it.

What is happening to their relationship with work is a slow withdrawal of faith. Not a dramatic refusal, just a quiet recalibration: apply to fewer places, expect less, invest less of yourself, assume the no before it arrives. What is happening to their relationship with employers is the conversion of provisional trust into settled suspicion. And what is happening to their sense of being seen is the discovery that an institution they had imagined was, at some level, about people, has decided that people are the expensive part.

The deepest point is that there is nothing inevitable about any of this. The empty chair is not a law of physics. It is a procurement decision, a default setting, a box left unticked on a configuration screen by someone who never had to sit on the other side of it. Every one of the harms in the Greenhouse data, the non-disclosure, the missing policies, the silence where feedback should be, is a choice an organisation made and could unmake tomorrow. The machines are not the problem. The problem is that we have allowed the machines to inherit, and amplify, our willingness to treat the people who want to work for us as a queue to be cleared rather than a set of human beings to be met. The interview was always a small ritual of recognition, an hour in which a stranger's life mattered enough to attend to. We are deciding, application by undisclosed application, whether that ritual is worth keeping. The candidate is still showing up, early, prepared, hopeful. The only question is whether anyone will be there.

References

1. Greenhouse, “63% of Job Seekers Have Faced an AI Interview. Most Haven't Had a Good One Yet”, Greenhouse Newsroom, 1 May 2026. https://www.greenhouse.com/newsroom/63-of-job-seekers-have-faced-an-ai-interview-most-havent-had-a-good-one-yet
2. Greenhouse, “AI interviews in hiring: What candidates actually want, and how to get it right” (2026 Candidate AI Interview Report), Greenhouse Blog, 2026. https://www.greenhouse.com/blog/2026-candidate-ai-interview-report
3. Ibrahim Denis Fofanah, “The Algorithmic Barrier: A Framework for Artificial Frictional Unemployment and Information Asymmetry in Automated Recruitment Systems”, arXiv preprint 2601.14534, submitted 20 January 2026, revised (v2) 2 July 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14534
4. Fortune, “Nearly 4 in 10 job candidates have bailed on a hiring round because it required an AI interview”, 4 May 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/4-in-10-job-candidates-bailed-hiring-rounds-required-ai-interview/
5. HR Dive, “Job candidates say they're quitting the hiring process over AI interviews”, 2026. https://www.hrdive.com/news/job-seekers-walk-away-from-AI-interviews/819443/
6. The Harvard Gazette, “New study says 'hidden workers' are being excluded”, Harvard University, September 2021. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/new-study-says-hidden-workers-are-being-excluded/
7. New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, “Automated Employment Decision Tools (AEDT)”, New York City. https://www.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/automated-employment-decision-tools.page
8. Office of the New York State Comptroller, “Enforcement of Local Law 144, Automated Employment Decision Tools”, 2 December 2025. https://www.osc.ny.gov/state-agencies/audits/2025/12/02/enforcement-local-law-144-automated-employment-decision-tools
9. European Commission, “AI Act, Shaping Europe's digital future”, European Commission. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai
10. EU Artificial Intelligence Act, “Annex III: High-Risk AI Systems Referred to in Article 6(2)“. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/annex/3/
11. Gibson Dunn, “EU AI Act Omnibus Agreement: Postponed High-Risk Deadlines and Other Key Changes”, 2026. https://www.gibsondunn.com/eu-ai-act-omnibus-agreement-postponed-high-risk-deadlines-and-other-key-changes/
12. Morgan Lewis, “EU Approves Delays and Other Amendments to Certain EU AI Act Obligations: What Businesses Should Know”, June 2026. https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/06/eu-approves-delays-and-other-amendments-to-certain-eu-ai-act-obligations-what-businesses-should-know
13. AI Compliance Atlas, “Colorado AI Act (SB 24-205, repealed and replaced by SB 26-189)”, 2026. https://aicomplianceatlas.com/law/colorado-ai-act
14. Sapia.ai, “Humanising hiring: the largest study of AI candidate experience ever”, 18 September 2025. https://sapia.ai/resources/blog/humanising-hiring-the-largest-study-of-ai-candidate-experience-ever/
15. RM Compare, “AI Assessment has a dignity problem, here's how to fix it”, RM Compare Blog. https://compare.rm.com/blog/ai-assessment-has-a-dignity-problem-heres-how-to-fix-it/
16. The Nobel Prize, “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2010” (Diamond, Mortensen, Pissarides). https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2010/popular-information/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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