Finally, a Trump order I can get squarely behind

PLUS: The AI cheats, More Trump grift at the FCC and in Vietnam

Photo by Acton Crawford on Unsplash

It almost seems irrelevant at this point, as it seems we are ultimately headed toward a cashless society, but leave it to the otherwise objectionable Donald Trump (or someone feeding him MAGA-pleasing ideas) to come up with an executive order I can get squarely behind.

Trump has directed the Treasury to stop minting new pennies. How did he get this great idea? It looks like he saw it on a social media post by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. While the post appears to have since been taken down, CNN quoted it as saying, “The Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in FY2023, around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins for circulation produced.”

The depth of such idiocy is difficult to fathom. As per the Associated Press:

The U.S. Mint reported losing $85.3 million in the 2024 fiscal year that ended in September on the nearly 3.2 billion pennies it produced. Every penny cost nearly $0.037 — up from $0.031 the year before.

So it costs nearly four cents to manufacture a coin that, by itself, can buy you nothing. In what world does that even remotely make sense? Canada, which has its own currency that is nonetheless modeled after ours, eliminated the penny in 2012.

Photo by Gio Bartlett on Unsplash

So what happens if you’re paying in cash, standing at the register and your order comes to $11.57? I say round it up to $11.60. Or better yet, have brick-and-mortar retailers price all items so that all of them end in a zero or a five. Common sense tells us they will simply round up to the next number divisible by five. Retailers and consumers will simply get used to it, and no one will be poorer for it.

According to Money Magazine:

Today, the practice of rounding up or down to the nearest 5-cent increment when paying with cash has become as ordinary to Canadians as being a fan of ice hockey.

Or, I might add, pouring brown gravy over your french fries — one of the many pleasures, along with the “all-dressed” Montreal hot dog, I discovered while frequenting diners in that wonderful nation.

Objection to the penny is not new and has even embedded itself into pop culture. Remember Sam Seaborn, the White House deputy chief-of-staff character in the popular series the West Wing? Bursting forth with facts that remain relevant 20 years later, Seaborn even raised the matter of the environmental hazards associated with the production of the annoying brownish coin.

Compounding the problem is no one actually uses pennies. At most, we hold onto them — not to use them to buy stuff but to turn them in for more practical purposes.

From the New York Times “The Morning” newsletter from last September:

We mostly just store them. The 1-cent coins are wherever you’ve left them: a glass jar, a winter purse, a RAV4 cup holder, a five-gallon water cooler dispenser, the couch. Many of them are simply on the ground. But take it from me, a former cashier: Cashiers don’t have time to scrounge on the sidewalk every time they need to make change.

As CNN also noted, last year a New York Times Magazine piece (gift link) argued that the failure to nix the worthless coin perhaps reflected deeper problems in the federal government:

The necessity of abolishing the penny has been obvious to those in power for so long that the inability to accomplish it has transformed the coin into a symbol of deeper rot.

In that piece, former President Barack Obama was quoted as saying 11 years ago that the continued existence of the penny is “a good metaphor for some of the larger problems” of the U.S. government. “It’s very hard to get rid of things that don’t work.” That last sentence of Obama’s is a perfect example of that “deeper rot” referenced above.

Would eliminating the penny require congressional approval? That appears to be a gray area, but probably only if Congress or individuals objected and challenged the order from the executive branch. That’s what happens with most of Trump’s other executive orders.

For once, it’s nice not to have to excoriate the president in my lede. Not that he actually deserves the reprieve, but …

Is cheating in academia the new norm?

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

The subtitle of this secondary post asks a very important question for anyone who cares about the integrity of learning and credibility of everything from a high school diploma to a Ph.D. dissertation.

If we are to believe what we hear and read from people who have spent time in a modern classroom or studied this issue, the answer to that question in this era of artificial intelligence (AI) is very likely yes: academic cheating is now the new norm. What can we do about it? From the look of things, it feels like very little. For educators and administrators, it could be a matter of simply managing the decline.

A few days ago, I saw an interview on Morning Joe with journalist James Walsh of New York Magazine. Walsh penned an eye-opening piece headlined “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College; ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.” For the uninitiated, Chat GPT has been a boon to the cheating industrial complex, enabling students to input a little data and get an entire essay ready to copy and paste.

If you run into paywall problems accessing the New York Magazine piece, try this archived version (the Wayback Machine saves everything, but it will load slowly).

Walsh talked to dozens of AI experts, admissions professionals, professors and students about how commonplace the use of artificial intelligence has become in everything from college application essays to term papers. Click on the image below to see Walsh being interviewed on MSNBC:

Here are some takeaways:

• In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments.

• It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, “the ceiling has been blown off.” Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier, seemingly without much in the way of consequences?

• But school administrators were stymied. There would be no way to enforce an all-out ChatGPT ban, so most adopted an ad hoc approach, leaving it up to professors to decide whether to allow students to use AI.

So here we are. Technology has made cheating as simple as a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse — and no one seems to know what to do about it. Educators are getting better at detecting AI use, but plagiarism via Chat GPT is harder to prove than the pre-AI days.

When I was in college, I knew some students who lifted entire paragraphs from books in the library. I knew others — needless to say, they had more money than I had — who paid others to write term papers for them or who sent away via mail order for pre-written term papers on various subjects. If the professor knew you well, s/he might suspect cheating but in the 1970s, it would be hard to substantiate.

Cheating remained difficult to prove during my ensuing teaching career (1982-96), but when internet access became more common in the 2000s, teachers who suspected plagiarism could perform a web search for similar or identical language that might have been grabbed by swindling students.

Photo by John on Unsplash

Those days are gone because it appears that AI uses unique language in response to student queries. In many cases, AI can even be used to write code, so this variety of digital cheating isn’t limited to the humanities, though common sense tells us it would probably be more difficult to accomplish in the sciences.

I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done to stop AI cheating. If I were still teaching English to high schoolers, I would simply give more in-class tests that required handwritten responses. That might mitigate some of the damage.

Here’s one college administrator’s take:

How to Stop Students From Cheating With AI: Eliminate online classes, ban screens, and restore Socratic discussion as education’s guiding model -John J. Goyette, Wall Street Journal (gift link)

The grift continues

Among the many available, here are a couple of recent examples of the Trump grift that I couldn’t resist mentioning:

As you might recall, Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris which he claims was “selectively edited.” The suit is absurd on multiple levels, including the fact Trump cannot plausibly demonstrate that he was harmed because he won the election, the full transcript was posted on CBS.com in February, the entire video is on the 60 Minutes YouTube channel and news outlets edit interviews all the time anyway.

Will CBS settle anyway? They just might because its parent company Paramount is seeking a merger with Skydance Media. Guess who will need to approve that move: the Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump’s handpicked chair, Brendan Carr. When Trump took office for his second term, Carr announced CBS would be investigated for the Harris interview. Yah think maybe he had a conversation with the grifter-in-chief? Would Trump even go so far as to offer Carr a piece of the action?

So here’s what Trump is doing. He’s using the power of the presidency to extort money from a private company for his own gain. If CBS hands over a good chunk of change to the president, you can be certain that the merger will be approved. Oh, and who knows what kinds of “gifts” he might be extorting from heads of state in return for lowering or eliminating tariffs (hint: see below)?

Judging from the recent resignation of 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence, it seems pretty obvious at this point that CBS is going to cave.

This action is entirely consistent with Trump’s history of efforts to control what news organizations report, but this time he will likely walk away with millions or billions. It’s such a great scam that it’s a wonder no president has thought to use it before.

Screengrab via nytimes.com

The next one is a doozy. In a journalistic tour de force, the New York Times sent reporter Damian Cave and photographer Linh Pham to the other side of the world to investigate something suspicious.

Gift link below:

Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex, New York Times

It turns out that while the Vietnamese government is negotiating a trade deal with the Trump administration, it has been expediting a proposal from Trump’s business for a $1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital city of Hanoi. At the same time, according to the Times:

… Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports.

This is the kind of greed and naked self-dealing, that if executed by Obama, Hillary or the so-called “Biden crime family,” would result in endless investigations by special select committees in a Republican controlled House of Representatives — to say nothing of articles of impeachment. Chants of “lock them up” from the Orange Rage Machine, as I half-affectionately call MAGA Nation, would be deafening.

If I were a political consultant, I would urge Republicans who make a habit of rushing to Trump’s defense to tread very carefully. You don’t know where the bottom is.