Rob Taber

With Republicans stripping health care protections and prices climbing, expect more movement in districts once considered out of reach. NC-07 is suddenly looking a lot more competitive 👀

Have a child going through the selective college admissions process for the first time and the system seems designed specifically to maximize stress for student and parents alike. The process has gotten worse in recent years and will will keep getting worse until it breaks. 1/n

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

When I interviewed for faculty positions in the early 2010s, I was told the job had three components: research, teaching, and service. Service meant pitching in to keep the university running, a kind of partnership where professors governed themselves and took turns in roles like chair or dean. These were part time responsibilities layered on top of academic work. It was not perfect, but it reflected the basic idea of what the academy was supposed to be. That model has been replaced by sprawling bureaucracies. A vice dean is now a full time administrator with multiple associate and assistant vice deans, a chief of staff, media relations staff, a secretary, and entire offices of people who report to them. The great Alex Shieh asked the key question: what do these people do all day. They tried to discipline him for saying it out loud, which only proved he was right to ask.

VA Democrats unseated a 36-yr incumbent who represents a Trump +8.5 county tonight.

There is obviously something to this. Housing shortages are very localized in their severity. But the shortage is very real, even in many of the cities that are deemed more affordable. Cincinnati, for example, is short 50,000 units.

There are more Catholics than Protestants in most counties in the Northeast and Southwest. But Protestants dominate almost all the midsection of the country. Obviously, lots of LDS in Utah and surrounding places.

BREAKING: North Carolina plans to redraw its congressional maps, according to Republican legislative leaders. Below is the current map. Likely that any redraw would help the GOP pick up 1 seat.