This is The Morning Press, a Brain Iron dot com production. Here’s eleven minutes or so of news for today, Thursday, February 22, 2024.
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that his administration was beginning the process of canceling the federal student loans of more than 150,000 people. In a post to Twitter/X, the administration said “Starting today, the first round of folks who are enrolled in our SAVE student loan repayment plan who have paid their loans for 10 years and borrowed $12,000 or less will have their debt canceled. That’s 150,000 Americans and counting.” At a campaign event in California, Biden said “Too many Americans are still saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for a college degree.” The Supreme Court last year struck down the Biden administration’s attempt to outright cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loans for qualified individuals as overstepping the executive branch’s authority beyond what Congress had intended. The administration’s more modest approach began rolling out Wednesday—about six months earlier than initially expected—and seeks to avoid legal challenges by folding the loan-forgiveness into already-existing income-based repayment plans already authorized by Congress.
A brief editorial aside: A funny thing that gets missed in the usual back-and-forth about whether or not student loan forgiveness is fair is the odd contradiction that these apparently burdensome loans were both issued and now being forgiven by the same entity—namely, the federal government. An aside to the aside—in order to fulfill the eligibility requirements, a person must have been making payments substantially lower than a hundred bucks a month to still have an outstanding balance on a federal student loan of twelve grand after a decade. This is what it means to be saddled with unsustainable debt? I imagine it being quite a hassle, and an annoyance, but it’s hardly punishing. Biden is voicing the concerns of many progressives when he says that “too many Americans are saddled with unsustainable debt,” but the only debt Biden is capable of helping make go away is debt that was issued by the federal government. Most of those eligible are unlikely to have completed school, simply because doing so would mean that they both would have accrued debt beyond the $12,000 limit, and would have generally been in a better position to pay it off had they earned their degree. There’s just something a little bit rich about listening to the guy at the head of the federal government say that the federal government shouldn’t have saddled anyone with these loans—this at the same time that the federal government is going to issue something like $66 billion in new undergraduate debt again this year. (Another aside to the aside: This is just a very rough estimate, as firm numbers are hard to come by, but something like 20 million people are enrolled in undergraduate programs every year, and something like half of undergrads take out federal student loans, and according to the National Center for Education Statistics, they take out an average of $6600 per year. Half of 20 million people makes 10 million undergrads times $6600 a year for $66 billion in new loans. In the last fifteen years, total outstanding student loan debt has gone from about $500 billion to $1.75 trillion, which is more or less what you would expect to happen with in excess of $60 billion added to the pile every year.) The point is, to call the Biden administration’s actions here even a band-aid on a gushing wound is to grossly overstate the accomplishment—it will no doubt be meaningful to the thousands of people it helps, who would have certainly been better off never bothering with the loans and the college in the first place. But the actual problem continues to go unaddressed—that problem being the steady increase of the cost of a college education, something exacerbated by the freely-flowing federal loans that Biden and progressives decry as such a burden.
Google’s Gemini AI chatbot product has had its image-generating capabilities temporarily curtailed after social media users pointed out that it was refusing to generate pictures of white people. When prompted to create a picture of a white person, the AI demurred, citing guidelines against creating content that would be discriminatory or that might promote harmful stereotypes. It offered less compunction about creating “diverse” images of non-white individuals, including, oddly, depicting black and Native American women as 19th century US senators, an Indian woman and a black man as the Catholic pope, and an incongruously racially diverse troupe of World War II-era German soldiers. When asked to depict a white family, the AI refused, but when asked to produce an image of a black family, it complied. In a statement, Google said it is “working to address recent issues with Gemini's image generation feature. While we do this, we're going to pause the image generation of people and will re-release an improved version soon.”
A brief editorial aside: The robits refusing to produce historically accurate renderings of popes and nazis and senators in an attempt to not be racist is obviously very funny. If you ask the robit, “show me what a president of the United States looked like in the 20th century,” and it returns anything but a white man, out of some misguided notion that representation matters, haven’t you more or less eliminated the historical context of why we are meant to care so much about such things now? There is no more-perfect techno-utopian future in which the Catholic pope will be a woman from the Indian subcontinent—if that comes to pass, it will be because what it means to be a Catholic pope will have been dramatically redefined by the people who make those decisions, and certainly not because the engineers at Google wished it into being. I can’t even get the robit to agree to tell me what the demographics of the median American are, because it believes it might be harmful in some way to admit that she would be a single white in her late thirties, probably with kids, likely Protestant, likely with some college education, and earning about $40,000 a year. The robit won’t tell me this because it is afraid of the conclusions I might draw from these facts, not because it doesn’t know. It is trying to protect us humans from ourselves, because it has been programmed to respond suspiciously to anything that might lead to weaponizing its answers towards racist or discriminatory or hurtful ends, so it defaults to creating strange fantasies. These are straightforwardly political decisions being made by an unaccountable company that has a near total monopoly on what we find when we go looking for things on the internet. When the reactionaries freak out about the removal of the cheap statues installed by the Daughters of the Confederacy in the early 20th century because it’s somehow “erasing history,” it’s easy to brush them aside, because statues honoring Confederates don’t tell the history, they pretend to a romanticized past that is politically and culturally flattering to those in charge. Sound familiar? Gemini and ChatGPT and Meta’s AI product will never save us from ourselves, because we are not perfectible creatures. We don’t live long enough for that, and the lessons don’t stick from generation to generation. Technological progress has convinced us that moral progress is just as linear, and an absurd certainty about the future techno-utopia has convinced us that both are inevitable and permanent. But the robits aren’t going to build a better humanity, because the humans built the robits, and humans don’t build better humans with tricks and lies and limitations, we do so with forthrightness, honesty, and freedom.
In “yeah no kidding” news, Yale University has decided that it will once again require standardized tests for students applying to attend school there starting in 2025, just a few years after going test-optional during the pandemic. In a statement announcing the decision, Yale said, “inviting students to apply without any test scores can, inadvertently, disadvantage students from low-income, first-generation, and rural backgrounds.” The statement went on: “Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT.”
A brief editorial aside: Yale is the second Ivy League school to reach this obvious conclusion, and more will follow. Even granting the anti-racist activists their core and I think easily-disputed point—that standardized tests are racist and discriminatory—it is clear that they are also a great way to find potential standouts. A 1400 SAT score for a kid from a high school that produced 100 1400 scores isn’t terribly impressive, but a 1350 for a kid who went to a school that only produced ten scores over 1200 suggests that he or she probably has a much higher academic ceiling than his peers. What’s annoying about the about-face by Yale, to me, is that they should have known better a few years ago, when they changed the policy—and of course they did, but they felt pressured by a loud contingent of activists to DO SOMETHING during a moment of great cultural upheaval that turned out to have the opposite of the desired impact. Good for them to go back to what works.
In entertainment news, HBO has announced that it will make another season of True Detective following the critical and popular success of the just-ended fourth season. Issa Lopez, who was the showrunner for the recent season, will return to run the show again, and will also create and develop new projects for HBO.
A brief editorial aside: Imagine the sound of a fish, washed ashore and nearly dead on the shore, opening its mouth over and over again, one beady eye flitting about frantically, and then slower and slower, drying out, and the mouth, opening and closing, opening and closing, until the life finally drains out of it. The fish flops listlessly, once, and is still. The mouth opens again, the eye is still, and all is quiet.
Now, here’s a look at the weather.
In just the last ten minutes or so, as of the time of this writing, I’ve read in the news about the death of a 16-year-old in Oklahoma perhaps tied to their bullying, the deaths of multiple children working in meat-processing plants, the death of an 11-year-old in Texas apparently at the hands of a family friend who was supposed to drive her to the next bus stop, the death of a five-year-old on a Florida beach after a sand hole she was digging in collapsed around her, and the so-far only life-threatening wound to a two-year-old in Michigan, who accidentally shot herself in the head after she found her father’s revolver. There are links to all these stories in the transcript of today’s episode at BrainIron dot Substack dot com, if for some reason you want to know more about them.
Here’s a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, of the process here at The Morning Press: When I’m shoving an episode off the muddy river banks and out into open water, the first thing I do is open up two new internet browser windows. The first has this script, in a Google doc, and the second is an array of tabs for various news websites, including but not limited to: the Associated Press, Reuters, BBC News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Drudge Report. From here I will click through those various sites, opening as many stories in new tabs that seem worth reading more about. In today’s example, I opened up about 25 stories, five of which were about these killed or injured children. This is an unusually high number of dead-kids stories for one session! And these all happened to come from the front page of the Associated Press website. All five of the stories have tidy little morals to them, in different ways, which is what probably editorially justifies putting them out front on the AP’s website. Lots of children die every day, but they don’t always die in such a way that a news organization can tell a story that wraps up with a tacit admonishment that things might’ve been different, if only the world or circumstances had been very slightly other than as they were. If only a bullying had not taken place, if only these kids had not been illegally hired to work in such dangerous conditions, if only she hadn’t been late for the bus, if only someone had stopped the digging of the hole in the sand before it got too big, if only the gun had been properly secured. Immeasurable tragedies, all of them, for the families affected, the sort of life-shattering moments whose all-too-real possibility haunts the imagination when you can’t sleep at night, and is now their whole lives, this big awful thing that just takes up everything, the sudden arrival of an all-consuming presence that there is no way around. And for me, I can just close the tabs. Gone. If you watched me reading these stories, peeking around the curtain behind me, you’d have seen my shoulders sag with some awful detail or another, perhaps heard a pronounced exhalation, but then the click-away. The easy escape. Anyway, it was an especially punishing few minutes of news reading, but absolutely nothing when compared to having to live those stories, of course, and I see no particular reason to explain anything further about any of them, except to say that it’s a very strange and sad world we live in, sometimes. And what is the point of knowing about any of this, about these small little personal tragedies, some of which might have been prevented with more vigilance and care, some seemingly as inevitable as any other random and unlucky event? I don’t know. Maybe it only serves as a reminder that someone out there is having a way worse time of it than you are, today and every day, and that there’s no good reason or explanation for that most of the time. Maybe that’s enough, maybe that brings a tiny bit more understanding and patience and kindness to the world. For me, it’s sometimes the opposite, if I’m being honest—it becomes harder to listen to people’s gripes and complaints about relatively petty inconveniences and hardships, makes me less likely to sympathize with them, makes it easier to feel scornful of their narrow little displays of self-interest, invites thoughts of hurricanes blowing through the meticulously-constructed dollhouses of their victimization. How does one swallow the whole world without instrumentalizing and commodifying its inhabitants to one’s own ends, all the people and their suffering reduced to digestive aids for abstraction, in the end? Is it enough to recognize it? Self-awareness is no excuse, self-awareness makes absolution an absurdity. Absolution is for those who don’t know better. The tidy little moral implicit in the telling.
That’s the weather from here—how’s it look out your window?
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The Morning Press is eleven minutes or so of the news of the day, and is a production of the BrainIron dot com multinational media empire. Please direct comments and complaints to brainironpodcast@gmail.com, or visit the website at www.brainiron.com. For a transcript of today’s episode and links to the stories referenced, find The Morning Press at brainiron.substack.com. To support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the good website Brain Iron dot com, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at brainiron.substack.com. Have a wonderful day.
The Morning Press for Thursday, February 22, 2024