Random Notes from Austin
Keeping it weird
On the Shoal Creek Park trail, near 24th street.
Some random notes:
(1) The Austin City Council has declared January to be Muslim Heritage Day here. In addition, it declared January 22 to be CAIR Austin Day.
(2) So far, my wife and I have attended two music concerts. At each one, the performer drew loud applause for attacking President Trump and for attacking ICE.
But the loudest applause of all came for attacking AI. I would not be surprised if this becomes a plank in the “omnicause” platform. By the end of this year, if you do not oppose AI then they will take away your Progressive movement membership card.
I do not see how the Republicans get much mileage from being in favor of AI. Maybe some nice campaign contributions from wealthy AI executives, but the MAGA voting base is not going to rally around the AI flag.
So how will the anti-AI sentiment translate into policy? Stopping data centers?
(3) We went to the LBJ library, a huge building on the northeast end of the University of Texas campus. Concerning LBJ, Henrik Karlsson writes,
When Johnson looked at a job, which to us is a complex bundle of “a role in the community, a source of income, some status, something to do with our time, and, yes, some limited power”—Johnson saw only power. Therefore he treated the job only as a way to acquire leverage, which is very different from how a normal person would treat a job. And because he optimized so hard along this vector, he got to be very effective at it.
Had he not blundered into Vietnam, Johnson would go down in history as another FDR, which is how he saw himself.
(4) It’s strange to see construction equipment in motion and workers actually moving earth and pouring concrete. You can return to a construction site a few days later and see progress. I am not used to that. The transcontinental railroad project can go months with a single site showing no change whatsoever (see 16th Street and Spring Street). And you might sometimes see workers guarding construction equipment, but you won’t find anyone operating any of it.
substacks referenced above:
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Re: "By the end of this year, if you do not oppose AI then they will take away your Progressive movement membership card."
Compare Nicholas Bloom & Christos Makridis, "The Politics of AI" (NBER Working Paper 34813, February 2026), at the link below:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34813
Here is the abstract:
"Using new data from the Gallup Workforce Panel, we document a persistent partisan gap in self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use. In 2025:Q4, for example, 27.8% of Democrats report using AI weekly or daily, compared with 22.5% of Republicans. Democrats also report deeper task-level integration, using AI in 16% more work activities than Republicans. Consistent with this, Democrats are employed in occupations with higher predicted AI exposure based on task-content measures and report larger perceived differences in AI-related job displacement risk. However, in regression models the partisan gap in AI use disappears once we control for education, industry, and occupation, indicating that observed differences primarily reflect compositional variation rather than political affiliation per se."
From the text:
"Put differently, partisan differences in exposure primarily reflect sorting into industries with higher predicted LLM exposure rather than within industry exposure differences."
It remains to be seen whether greater exposure of progressives (than of conservatives) to AI on the job will translate into fear or, instead, into opportunity.
However that may be, my intuition is that the poltics and rhetoric of AI will take on a life of their own, rather than simply tracking self-interest at the workplace.
Online sports betting got out of control really fast, and this is just the beginning. I was recently at a high school track events, and if they weren't racing, all the senior boys above 18 (and I suspect many below) were busy intensely socializing on the subject of their simultaneous feeding of sports betting addictions via their smartphones. I haven't seen anything like that outside Northeast Asia frantic gambling dens or descriptions or works of entertainment from "the past is a foreign country" old days of betting-obsessed America (think "Guys and Dolls" on steroirds). I thought the age restriction would have been 21 like it is now for cigarettes, and it is in most states, but when I looked it up it turned out that Washington DC allows it at 18 and I think Maryland did too until recently. We are gonna regret this one for sure.