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February 23, 2025
Half our brains tied behind our backs
Researchers have spent plenty of time and effort looking for differences, but there is no scientific evidence for a meaningful difference in general intelligence between males and females. To any clear-headed individual, there's nothing controversial in that factual statement. ■ But it's worth observing that the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was only ratified in 1920. The judgment of women wasn't just excluded from the highest offices until just a century ago, it was mostly absent even from the voting booth. ■ Any society, institution, or culture that excludes half its people from the decision-making process on account of sex is making a colossal and stupid mistake. It's literally the surrender of half of the available intelligence. ■ And yet it still happens, either systematically or through the brute force of chauvinism. It is a matter of strategic stupidity that there are no women among the 24 members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party: Rival powers like the United States benefit from that decision to self-handicap. It is statistically quite nearly impossible for the 24th most talented man in the country to have better judgment than the most talented woman. ■ In any contest of judgment, the team most open to the contributions of all of its available talent stands the best chance of arriving at the best answers. Who gets excluded from the room when decision-making is taking place reveals quite a lot about whether the people doing the excluding care more about themselves or about the people they're ostensibly there to serve.
February 22, 2025
If a primary purpose of a national public-service broadcaster is to sustain a sense of national identity, then it's hard to think of a set of conditions more suitable than those of Canada. It's the country with the second-largest land area, but 90% of its population lives within 160 kilometers (99.2 miles) of the US border -- less than two hours of driving at highway speeds and, for many, within the reach of radio and television broadcast antennas. ■ Its roughly 39 million people are outnumbered more than eight-to-one by America's 341 million, sharing a primary language and a fair amount of history. To be outnumbered by that margin in that close of proximity doesn't set up Canada to have a lot of its own cultural product. ■ No government, and certainly no public-service broadcaster, can force a culture into being. Culture is what people choose, within the constraints of their circumstances. But one of those constraints is whether they see anything distinctive and worth adopting. In theory, that's what an institution like the CBC is expected to promote. ■ At what cost? Yearly, about the price of a dinner for two at a quick-service restaurant. Is that what culture is worth? That's for Canadians to decide. But it seems likely that much smaller populations have credible claims to having distinctive cultures of their own, so it's a justifiable case. But especially as legacy broadcasting media come under heavy pressure from asynchronous digital alternatives, the need to have something distinctive to say about local history, values, habits, or other identifying touchstones becomes more of the focal point than simply making sure the meters are still moving.
February 21, 2025
Someone stole cryptocurrency with a market price of $1.4 to $1.5 billion from the Bybit exchange. The company's CEO rushed to do a live video statement on the incident about two hours after it happened, which has certain echoes of bank presidents addressing crowds of panicked depositors in the 1930s. ■ It is strange to hear an executive giving a lengthy account of a heist almost immediately after it happened. To a small degree, that's almost refreshing to see. When things go wrong, most corporations go into lockdown mode and pretend like they don't know things that are self-evident to any reasonable onlooker. ■ But the need to address the incident like that is a reflection of the high-speed, high-emotion environment of cryptocurrency. There's no FDIC waiting to reassure depositors. Cryptocurrency middlemen and brokers depend upon amplified emotions and a high-stakes trading mentality -- it's not built on patience, due diligence, and sound valuations, it's built on hype. ■ Warren Buffett will release his annual letter to shareholders at Berkshire Hathaway tomorrow, in which he will undoubtedly follow his half-century-old practice of using plain language to tell a clear story about his investment choices and the productive activity taking place at the businesses he controls. ■ It's a stark contrast with explaining a blow-by-blow account of how malicious hackers could steal $1.5 billion during a "cold wallet" to "warm wallet" transfer. Slow (and perhaps even boring) has a lot going for it, even if it's not much to stir the blood. But losing ten digits to North Korean hackers (or whomeveer was behind the heist) is the kind of excitement nobody needs.
Behind the scenes at "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood"
A wide-angle view of the set that never made it to the TV show
President fires top uniformed military officer in the US
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff received a Friday-night dismissal, as did the Chief of Naval Operations.
February 20, 2025
Aside from clothing (where "fast fashion" is a very real market force), few areas of culture are as subject to trends as parenting. Even if not everyone becomes a parent, everyone has been on the receiving end of parenting -- so feelings run high and nobody much doubts that they, themselves, see how it should be done. ■ The latest in the ultra-long line of parenting trends is "FAFO parenting", which derives its name from an off-color phrase that effectively means "You'll get what's coming to you, and you'll deserve it". ■ To a narrow extent, there is some room for parenting via natural consequences -- when the stakes are low and the feelings run high, it can be useful for children to see that the world is indeed ruled by cause and effect, and that their choices can be those causes. As some people represent it, "FAFO parenting" is just an extension of that logic. ■ Yet it's noteworthy how many approaches to parenting -- and management, teaching, coaching, and law enforcement -- depend upon a faulty model of the person who is being influenced. The flaw is in seeing them as objects, rather than as complete human beings. Certainly, the whole experience of childhood is formative; there's lots of shaping and molding that takes place. ■ But we recognize fairness before we can form sentences and we remember circumstances of our treatment from our first years, even if toddlers can be unreliable narrators. Everyone has at least a hazy memory or two of how they felt in the midst of a pre-school experience. That memory is part of the integral whole of the person. ■ We are, in terms of temperament, personality, and lots of other orientations, whole not long after birth. And a lot of parenting would be better if it started from the assumption that the child is, in fact, complete, rather than some kind of puzzle still under construction.
February 19, 2025
Repair is possible, but it takes time
In 1945, the Japanese occupation of Korea was ended by the defeat of Japan by Allied forces. That occupation lasted for 35 long and painful years, during which countless crimes and horrors were committed against the Korean people. Korea had little time to recover before the Korean War split the peninsula and brought further agony to the people. ■ Yet, despite an often tumultuous path, South Korea has emerged as one of the world's biggest economies and most technologically advanced societies, with a civil society strong enough to put a rogue president in his place. ■ In the aggregate, it's a spectacular tale: The Japanese occupation ended just 80 years ago, the blink of an eye in historical terms, and yet the two countries were able to normalize relations just 20 years after the occupation ended -- and today, both are among the most advanced societies in the world, able to jointly celebrate their mutual accord. ■ That doesn't mean the past is entirely forgotten, nor forgiven, nor repaired. The relationship remains a work in progress. But it does go to show that prosperity and liberalization can go a long way towards creating incentives to get along and even to reconcile. ■ It's unlikely that the two countries would recognize anything remotely close to an alliance today if either one had remained poor or had rejected many of the hallmarks of a modern liberal society. That's worth remembering and recognizing in the affairs of the world around us: It's possible to overcome a terrible past, but doing so takes time and effort. It stands the best chance of success if other macro-scale conditions, social and economic alike, are right.
The Secretary of Defense says he wants to cut Pentagon spending by $50 billion in a year -- out of a budget of about $850 billion.
On-ramp phrases for an Irish accent
"You know, your man across the road turned 33 the other day"
Russia attacks Ukrainian energy infrastructure
Look at whom they're trying to hurt and you'll have an idea of who's the evil side in the war
Warning indicators on the US economy
It's effectively impossible to predict when the economy will experience a downturn -- economics is a social science, and nobody can really predict the timing or the triggers that initiate a downturn. But it's prudent to keep an eye on mathematical models that have held up in the past.
Signet rings should make a comeback
The real killer app is to find a way to seamlessly use them for multi-factor authentication. If you could prove who you are with something light, simple, and always on your finger, it could be revolutionary. Multi-factor authentication looks for people to furnish two or three of (1) something you know, (2) something you have, or (3) something you are. Passwords are how we furnish the "something you know", but digital jewelry could be a great way to supply the "something you have".
February 18, 2025
A major warning sign from China
China has just issued a major warning sign which the rest of the world shouldn't ignore: Not about its external ambitions, but about its internal fragility. Xi Jinping has been quoted by state-run media saying, "It is the right time for the majority of private business and entrepreneurs to show their talent". It's not a particularly poetic take, but it reveals a lot in its subtext. Something has Xi alarmed about his country's economy. ■ It's also worth noting that among the audience members targeted for the message was Jack Ma of Alibaba. The same Jack Ma who effectively went missing for a couple of years after he criticized some government regulators. Someone like him doesn't just show up in the government's favorable public light if they feel strong enough to keep him in the penalty box. ■ If Xi is putting the private sector on notice that it's going to need to step up its game, he is telegraphing that the economy is weaker than he needs it to be in order to feel secure in his regime's internal stability. Every power structure depends on some form of legitimacy. Democratic elections are the best way, to be certain, but even dictators depend upon a certain amount of buy-in from others. When they lose it, they often lose their own lives (see: Muammar Qaddafi, final days of). ■ Xi needs economic growth because it is the widely-recognized token the Communist Party has exchanged with the people of China as a substitute for their natural political and civil rights and liberties. If the economy stalls, the party's legitimacy is undermined. And if it has stalled enough that Xi is trying to rally the economic troops in public, then things may be worse than the official data might reveal. ■ The CCP isn't particularly good at adapting to bad news or big trends promptly; look at how long it took them to realize that the One Child Policy was a demographic doom loop (something that should have been evident from simple math done decades ago). Even the tech industry can't move fast enough to reignite a stalling economy of China's size, so the fact there appears to be some grasping underway should serve as a noteworthy warning.
Someone's been trying to sabotage German naval vessels
It's not hard to guess which country is probably the culprit
Import taxes and the American manufacturer
The higher up the economic food chain, the more likely it is that import taxes are going to cause hassles
Nearby pilot caught Toronto crash on video
(Video) And there's at least some data to suggest that the plane was coming in hard at a very bad time for ground conditions
February 17, 2025
Some Los Angeles fires were sparked by live power lines
If there really were serious breakdowns in communication between firefighters and the power company, it points to a serious failure in systemic design. Some things just shouldn't be difficult to do, and getting power lines de-energized in the middle of a fire outbreak should be counted among those things.
Airliner crash at Toronto Pearson
Astonishingly good fortune that nobody was killed
The dawn of computer weather graphics
(Video) The BBC shares clips from the changeover from giant maps illustrated with magnets to computer-generated graphics. Noteworthy is how clean the graphics (including the text) come across, despite how comparatively rudimentary computer graphics were in 1985. Someone at the BBC put real thought into color, fonts, and shading.
February 16, 2025
An award one would rather not receive
Kaja Kallas, until recently the prime minister of Estonia and now one of the European Union's top diplomats, has been honored with an award at the Munich Security Conference to recognize her "for her essential leadership in rallying support for Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion, recognizing her as a resilient and widely respected leader and staunch defender of the rule of law". ■ Unsurprisingly, she deflected praise from herself to the people of Ukraine. Kallas proves that clarity and direct language have a vital place in orienting a response to bloodthirsty aggression. Everything that has happened to Ukraine over the last three years has been the result of choices ultimately made within the Kremlin. The war could end tomorrow if the right order were issued from somewhere within sight of Red Square. ■ Kallas is one of the clearest voices about the tragic consequences if no such order is given, because it's clear that the aggressor's impulses aren't limited to Ukraine alone. But Europe needs to not only be included in discussions about peace, but to have broad popular buy-in over the importance of standing strong, too. ■ Europe's defensive posture has, in many ways, grown flabby and sclerotic. That's particularly so when looking beyond just the obvious measures of military capability: Depending on natural gas from Russia or telecommunications equipment from China leave European countries strategically tied up. That in turn makes the EU less of a credible threat, and people other than the leaders of the Baltic States need to be vocal about fixing that.
Iowa: No teams, six "home" markets
Major League Baseball makes life really hard on fans in Iowa, giving six different teams the right to black out games in a state that is home to none of them.
A plea for the integrated psyche
Samantha Hancox-Li: "[P]arodies of traditional masculinity or femininity can never fill the gaping void left by the absence of the other gender's virtues"
An assessment worth reading about what Ukraine has been able to do when challenged by a much more fearsome enemy
February 15, 2025
One of the main objections cited against the practice of a country running trade deficits with others is that the accumulated deficits ultimately represent a transfer of capital, now or in the future, from the country running the deficit to the countries on the other side of the ledger. Some very intelligent people have raised this objection, as have more than a few unintelligent ones. ■ Foreign ownership is often unpopular: Just look at the excruciating lengths to which two Presidential administrations have now gone to block Nippon Steel from buying US Steel. And Japan is one of our strongest allies -- its interests are tightly aligned with America's, both geopolitically and economically. If ever there were a friendly country into whose hands we could trust to place a few assets, Japan would be at or near the top of the list. Yet even with that in mind, the objections remain loud and often deeply irrational. ■ But there is a different way to look at trade deficits. Lots of countries have really big export economies in very specific products: Finland exports a massive amount of wood. Saudi Arabia exports oil and its byproducts. Iceland exports lots of aluminum. These countries have certain inherent competitive advantages in those products, and it would be silly to expect them not to make full use of those advantages. ■ What if the United States were seen to have a massive natural advantage in business formation? What if our strength isn't an endowment of natural resources, but the ability to start valuable new companies? In other words, what if LLCs and Delaware-based S-Corps are our version of Saudi Arabian oil? ■ And what if that's OK? Ecuador produces more bananas than its population could possibly eat, so it exports huge volumes of bananas. Perhaps we simply ought to see (to oversimplify a bit) that the United States produces more shares of stock than our population is willing to buy -- at least, in comparison with the bananas and big-screen TVs and other stuff we'd rather buy -- and so we export those shares of stock rather than letting them go to waste here. ■ There may, of course, be sound reasons to object to other aspects of our trade behaviors, and some people are so unwaveringly opposed to foreign ownership of any type that they object on that principle alone. But just like Ecuador has a physical climate especially conducive to growing bananas, the United States has a legal, social, and economic climate that is especially conducive to business formation. ■ Maybe we should recognize that as a unique strength -- one that ought to temper how we look at trade deficits. If we can put aside our reflexive nationalistic pride, is there anything entirely wrong with selling off a few businesses once in a while, especially if our capital markets are so well-developed that domestic investors have countless other investments from which to choose? ■ There are few, if any, real obstacles to Americans buying American assets, so the ones that ultimately end up for sale on a global market might well be those that Americans don't see a future in owning. Besides, if those American companies require further investment to stay competitive, most of the spending on them will probably take place with nearby American vendors. If we can think of business creation as a special American export, then we might not be in the dire straits that conventional thinking about trade may lead us to believe. Maybe we're just bottling our entrepreneurial spirit and selling it for a premium price.
February 14, 2025
Like people, companies sometimes have suitors. And sometimes those suitors get rejected, just as OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) have spurned a takeover offer from X (formerly known as Twitter). ■ The offering price tells us one thing: At least two parties think the company is worth more than $97.4 billion -- the offeror and the offeree. It would be irrational to offer a price higher than the perceived value of the firm, and it would likewise be crazy to reject an offer for much more than intrinsic value. ■ But the whole story tells us something else. We are not well-equipped to handle large institutions run by any rules other than large, for-profit shareholding. OpenAI has an unusual structure that tries to blend a non-profit mission with a semi-profit business. The origins of the structure come from the perception that artificial intelligence is a special kind of public good, and that it requires a special kind of managerial orientation. ■ Within a capitalist or market-driven economy, the for-profit model will always predominate. The profit motive is almost undefeated when it comes to encouraging innovation, progress, and efficiency. But that's not always what's optimal for society. ■ Especially where there are distinct matters of public interest involved, we need to be experienced and familiar with a toolkit that doesn't just include C-corporations, but also regulated utilities, mutual associations, co-ops, and the like. And then we need to be sure those other structures attract people just as skilled, thoughtful, and forward-thinking as any conventional for-profit.
February 13, 2025
Apparently not content with the neverending flood of spam texts and voice messages promising deals on "your car's extended warranty", Jeep has decided to permit in-dashboard advertising for an extended warranty plan on new vehicles. The oversized display screen has been a feature of some vehicles for more than a dozen years, and a majority of all new cars for at least ten, but the explicit conversion of the displays into advertising panels is reckless. ■ Giant touchscreens may be adaptable for the programmers working behind the scenes of automaking, but they are a terrible development for the drivers of any vehicles that are not fully self-driving. They are distracting (basically out of necessity) and inevitably cause problems particularly at night, when drivers' eyes need to be able to detect obstacles in low light. But even in the best of circumstances, touchscreens demand lots of attention that should be devoted to the act of driving instead. ■ Analog inputs, like buttons, dials, and switches, are not always well-designed. But, at their best, they are plainly easier to make intuitive and non-disruptive to the conduct of the driver. It's known that drivers perceive their vehicles as extensions of themselves -- it's why a rental car takes some getting used to, and why someone driving their own car can often tell precisely how far away they're parked from a curb. Likewise, a good cabin design becomes an extension of the driver's space, making it intuitive where to reach to raise the temperature or turn down the radio. Touchscreens and their menu trees are impossible to navigate so unconsciously. ■ And an analog display is much harder to abuse by filling it with uninvited advertising for extended warranties -- or anything else. Just because technology makes some behaviors possible doesn't authorize making parasitic choices about how to treat vehicle "consumers". It's dangerous enough to let us all on the road with vehicles that can weigh 7,000 or 8,000 pounds and have deadly blind spots caused by factors like wildly excessive hood heights. Automakers need to show the social sense and public-interestedness to know when it's time to pass on one more opportunity to advertise to chronically distracted drivers.
February 9, 2025
What happens between and among celebrities is generally of lesser importance than the value of the paper upon which the gossip columns are printed. Very few things worthy of note or admiration happen in the limelight. ■ Occasionally, though, rather than serving as a helpful example to others, someone chooses to serve as a horrible warning instead. Howie Mandel, for instance, has done exactly this by bringing the comedian Bill Burr onto his podcast and surprising Burr with a guest visit from rock star Billy Corgan. ■ Corgan has previously suggested to Mandel that he has been told credibly of the scandalous prospect that he and Burr are unwitting half-brothers. Mandel decided to exploit this rumor because "I thought it was funny". ■ The stunt should have been stopped at the brainstorming stage for sheer lack of good taste. But there are certainly quarters where good taste isn't considered a useful boundary, since it can fail to get audiences' juices flowing. That's sad, and it speaks poorly of people who continue to patronize that kind of entertainment, almost as much as it does of the people who create it. ■ Certainly, though, the encounter should have been stopped on the grounds that it treated both Corgan and Burr as objects to be manipulated for entertainment value, rather than as dignified human beings. Something is badly broken in a person who sees a shadowy but potentially intimate connection between other people as a vehicle for laughs and attention. ■ It's even worse that Mandel has put on a show of feeling wounded by a lack of acknowledgment of his supposed apology. Nobody is entitled to forgiveness, and even a sincere apology is often far less than a complete act of repair for harm done to others. There's a real sickness in objectifying others and then whimpering about one's own hurt feelings. It may be too much to expect Mandel or anyone on his team to truly reconcile the error of their ways, but it shouldn't be too much for audience members to ask honestly whether their own appetite for shock value has gone too far.
February 8, 2025
Just half a decade before his death, Booker T. Washington wrote a set of memoirs which included this assertion: "Experience has taught me, in fact, that no man should be pitied because, every day in his life, he faces a hard, stubborn problem, but rather that it is the man who has no problems to solve, no hardships to face, who is to be pitied." ■ If the idea of Black History Month is to have any meaning, it ought to be in exposing Americans to more encounters with historical artifacts that been under-appreciated or under-exposed -- foremost among them, primary source materials written by authors like Washington. Invariably, that leads to uncomfortable tensions: After all, one of Washington's own "hard, stubborn problems" was that he suffered enslavement at the hands of another human being. The very idea is so offensive that it's natural to be turned away from wanting to consider such an awful institution or any of its consequences any further. ■ But if the reader looks away or retreats to a categorical way of thinking, they risk denying something enormously valuable to the author: His agency. Washington published "My Larger Education" in 1911, just shy of half a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and 46 years after the 13th Amendment. He had every reason to expect that any intelligent reader then would share the same categorical rejection of slavery as a reader would today. ■ Yet he still shared those words intentionally: He pitied people like those enslavers who enjoyed a life of nothing but ease, not because he wished enslavement on anyone, but because he knew that choices make a life just as much as circumstances. ■ Even if it makes us uncomfortable, and even if it makes us want to object categorically ("Nobody should have to face the circumstances he did!" is a perfectly normal reaction), it's important for modern ears to hear a reflection like Booker T. Washington's and appreciate the enormous strength of his character. To receive and repeat his words isn't to validate the conditions of slavery, it is to celebrate the triumph of human character over evil circumstances and sinister institutions. ■ This is a real person, speaking to us from beyond the grave, asserting the right to look down with pity upon people who undoubtedly thought themselves to be his superiors in life. That's an assertion of moral standing; one which says that his human life was fully valuable, no matter what others did, and that we should see equal value in all human lives in our own time.
February 7, 2025
UNI to tear down Campbell Hall
The University of Northern Iowa has announced its intentions to tear down Campbell Hall, a residence hall that has stood for seven decades. The dormitory "has $27 million worth of deferred maintenance" and only housed about 600 students. $45,000 per bed seems like a fairly high price to pay for a renovation, especially when compared with a median price of $148,000 per room to construct a brand-new hotel. There are probably some important differences in cost between the two types of construction, but assuming that each room could house two students, the cost to renovate clearly ran into the same zone as the cost of new construction. ■ For further comparison, the university built an entirely new apartment-style residence hall in 2011-12 for around $20 million, for about $100,000 a room. Construction costs have inflated quite a lot since that time, but certainly not by double -- perhaps by 60% to 70%. And at the end of the day, even a renovated building is still old. ■ Deferred maintenance remains the elephant in the room that America just doesn't want to address. College buildings are sometimes generously funded by benefactors at the time of construction but inadequately endowed for the long term. Computer systems are designed for the state of the art in one period but never fundamentally upgrades, leaving airlines (for example) still using dot-matrix printers. Cities build ambitious infrastructure projects with wide boulevards and eye-catching bridges, but neglect to upgrade the hidden infrastructure of levees and pipes and sewers that make urban life sustainable. ■ America is exceptionally good at tearing down the old and replacing it with the new; this much is to our credit. But we need to find ways to grow more dedicated to the often uninspiring but essential duty to pay for ongoing maintenance as an investment. That tends to express itself in political outcomes, but it starts as a cultural choice: We have to value a practice enough to be conscious of what it does for us, and to be ashamed if we don't follow through on doing it. Rust and entropy eventually come for almost all things.
February 5, 2025
A 10-year-old boy was one of the people injured by flying debris when a medevac airplane crashed in Philadelphia. He was in a car with his father and siblings, and as his father attempted to steer the vehicle to safety, the boy shielded his little sister. Despite taking a fragment of metal to the skull, he has regained consciousness and is on a path to recovery. ■ In the hospital, the boy asked his father, "Daddy, did I save my sister?" (The 4-year-old was OK.) Those words, though, are enough to arrest the full attention of any sensible adult. ■ A lot of people profit, either directly or indirectly, from trying to convince other people of the bad in the world: Conspiracies, criminality, and countless forms of malevolence. And it is true that there are evil people among us (a few), as well as people who really aren't motivated by evil but who may succumb to evil temptations (a few more). ■ But most people -- a supermajority, really -- are out to do the best they can for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. If we were truly drowning in evil spirits, humanity would have gone extinct long ago. Most people are like the heroic 10-year-old, who sense a responsibility to protect those more vulnerable than themselves. We express this sense in different ways and with different levels of self-sacrifice, but it's a thread that comes within human nature for most of us. ■ It's a thread worth remembering. There's no way for all of the imagined evils to be real, even if a few of them really are true. Our species is cooperative and social by nature -- anyone who violates those conditions through stealing, selfishness, or antisocial behavior is a threat to us in our natural state. If we expect that most others are trying to do right, even if in flawed or incomplete ways, then we can sustain hope. ■ A 10-year-old trying to save his sister is a hero, for certain -- but he's also an exemplar of what's most normal in all of us, rather than some strange outlier. If his story seems well outside the norm because we're consuming too much media that makes the deviants among us seem like the normal ones, then it's time to recalibrate our information diets.
February 3, 2025
Every organization, from the smallest mom-and-pop cafe to the world's most sophisticated military, depends heavily upon institutional memory: The knowledge held by the people who make up the institution. Most of that institutional memory in most organizations is retained informally, passed along through stories, apprentice-like relationships, and hard-won experience. In other cases, it's formally documented -- in training manuals, after-action reports, yearbooks, and corporate archives. ■ Well-run institutions treat this form of memory as a living resource. They study, document, and use their institutional knowledge, refining it and incorporating it into ongoing decision-making. Documentation is a sort of superpower: When it's done regularly and kept current as evolutionary progress is made, it allows the organization to become better and entrench those gains, even as old members leave and new ones are brought in. ■ Documentation is also vital to ensuring that people don't get out over their skis. Every generation and every line of human endeavor brings about a fresh crop of people who think they know better than everyone else because some seemingly new idea has occurred to them. It's an especially common trait of the young and intellectually gifted. (Who hasn't encountered an insufferable teenager who won't shut up after their first reading of Ayn Rand or Karl Marx?) ■ Clubs, private firms, government agencies and departments, charities, and NGOs with what we might call "living" programs for institutional memory can help to protect themselves from the damage these neophytes can do. Calvin Coolidge put it succinctly: "It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old and, because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new." And he said it more than a century ago, in 1919. ■ Very few ideas are really ever entirely new, and those who loudly and overconfidently represent themselves as the first to "discover" things are often merely novices who don't know how much they don't know. A living program of institutional memory won't always tone down the confidence of the zealous convert, but no organization should think itself immune to risk without making a deliberate effort to approach knowledge-keeping -- not just "what" and "how", but crucially "why" -- as an intrinsically important function.
February 2, 2025
Technology rules don't always make sense, but the United States Copyright Office has done the world a favor by issuing guidance that quite rationally concludes, "Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements". It's a good conclusion on both of the most important levels. ■ First, it is a rational conclusion on the merits and appeals to existing law (instead of staking out new ground unnecessarily). Copyright law -- which in America is as old as the Constitution itself (Article I, Section 8) -- is for the protection of people, not automation. Thus the guidance is harmonious with the very point of having protections for intellectual property; machines don't need our help. ■ The decision also makes sense on a practical level. If any content generated by unsupervised artificial intelligence can be granted copyright protection, then the incentive structure for content mills to carpet-bomb society with rent-seeking content would go wild. AI-generated slop is already gumming up the works of the Internet, with bad or hallucinated information now appearing in places where it contaminates the training material for further generations of AI, adding an apparent (but utterly misleading) paper trail to bad information. ■ Some of that may get sorted out. But it also might not. And if it's bad for junk content to clutter the Internet, it may be even worse for it to begin cluttering the shelves of libraries and other curated repositories of information. It's one thing if Tom Clancy is still employing an army of human ghostwriters from beyond the grave; it's quite another if human names can start getting copyright credit for junk content published into books by the thousands. ■ With so much worthwhile and timely content already available in the marketplace, we should hope to see quality take precedence over a firehose of often false mediocrity. Much of that content will still make its way into the world, but denying it the protections of copyright is a good first step.
February 1, 2025
Plan thoughtfully and execute with humility
Facebook's computer-engineering mantra for a long time was Mark Zuckerberg's rallying cry to "Move fast and break things". It's catchy, and it sounds like the kind of attitude that gets results. But even at Facebook, the motto quickly outlived its usefulness, and it gave way (in 2014) to the much less mellifluous "Move fast with stable infrastructure". Zuckerberg himself may not have matured much, but his product had to. ■ "Move fast and break things" may have impressed the sort of minds that are impressed by mere pithiness, but it was bad practice even when Zuckerberg initially made it his slogan. Complex systems are always to be handled with care: Is there a backup plan in place? Have critical processes, settings, and data been archived safely in case a reversion is needed? Are there checkpoints and validation steps along the way to make sure that dependencies aren't inadvertently broken? Does everyone on the team have an understanding of what results will indicate success or failure? Has security been designed into the process and into the final product? ■ All are vital questions to ask in the process of making significant changes -- not only in computing, but in any other process involving more than a handful of people. Speed can be a virtue -- "Speed equals success", in the words of Jim Mattis -- but successful tactical speed is virtually always the result of strategic prudence. An army (or a Marine division) can punch quickly into enemy territory, but it had better not do so without planning and forethought around matters like the supply lines that ensure food, fuel, and bullets make their way to the front line. ■ A bias in favor of impulsive speed isn't a virtue. "Move fast and break things" is a battle cry of emotional immaturity, combining an overconfidence in one's own raw intelligence, an underappreciation of unforeseen consequences, and a potentially devastating lack of intellectual humility. Computer systems can be both powerful and amazingly responsive, so it's no surprise that people who spend lots of time around them can fall into a sort of God complex. But they also need to know better. ■ The things we can create with our massive human brains can quickly become even more complex than any one of us can fully understand. People who prioritize speed above all and disregard the fragility of the innumerable complex systems around us put themselves and others at great risk. To those minds that only respond to simple turns of phrase, consider this: Plan thoughtfully and execute with humility.
January 31, 2025
For most of the electronic media age, one of the key steps in any military invasion, popular uprising, or coup attempt was to seize control of the broadcasting outlets. It's why the BBC went to such great lengths to make contingency plans during World War II, and why the Russian people learned a peculiar connotation to broadcasts of "Swan Lake". ■ As the Internet has displaced the airwaves as the leading conduit for communications, the strategic significance of seizing the radio and television stations has fallen behind the significance of capturing control of the official websites and domains. Thus the sweeping disruptions to the online domains of the Federal government reveals just what is now valued most, by all sides in political conflict. ■ Controlling the words people use for outward display on public-facing government websites is so important in some quarters that it effectively eclipses all other considerations, including the basic availability of the websites themselves or content contained therein. Sections of some government websites have been blanked, while other sites have been sent offline altogether. ■ It's interesting to note the similarities in outcome between a self-imposed content purge and what would happen if a hostile entity (like an adversarial foreign government) were to disable a government website for tactical advantage through malicious hacking. Either way, the site becomes unavailable. ■ Few systems are as fragile and as susceptible to breakage as the computer systems belonging to government agencies -- and their website servers are no exception. Breaking things is easy; repairing them is hard. Prudential treatment of those high-tech outlets is today as important as not breaking the vacuum tubes once would have been at a captured radio station.
After getting subsumed into the Google-borg and fading away altogether, the Pebble smartwatch is set to return later in 2025
Cyberattack "compromised the personal data of more than 134,000 students"
Evil people are targeting information belonging to children, and we should be a great deal more clear about the fact it's neither inevitable nor benign. It's sinister stuff they're up to.
January 30, 2025
The problem with website monoculture
A huge share of websites are managed through the same platform: WordPress is the 800-lb. gorilla. Some claim that it serves as the foundation for more than 40% of sites on the Internet, which is a huge fraction, if true. Thus, even if it isn't technically a monoculture, it is the decisive player in the content-management market. ■ But any time a large number of attractive targets are lined up in one place, that presents a danger. Having the same website backbone as 40% of all other websites makes every individual site using WordPress more attractive as a target for both crime and mischief, because the vulnerabilities discovered for one are replicable for many others, if not all. ■ That is presently the case, as a coordinated attack campaign appears to be underway. Outdated plugins and obsolete versions of WordPress are being exploited by the crooked in order to snare information they shouldn't have. ■ WordPress is nice in that it does permit people to put up websites without having to develop in-depth coding expertise. But that's a vulnerability, too, since a user base heavily populated by those with modest technical skills is also one in which precautions (like a regular schedule for installing platform upgrades or a policy for user data securuty) may be few and far between. It's a little like having lots of banks use the same keypad on their vaults -- especially if many of them don't know how to. ■ Farmers raising row crops know that a healthy soil environment often depends upon rotating among crops. The website owners and managers of the world need to learn that monoculture is equally problematic when so many websites are driven by the same tools on the backend.
The relative humidity recorded in Des Moines on January 27th was 20%, the lowest since 2002
Collier's, once an influential publication, has been partially preserved in certain online archives
January 29, 2025
The quailty of content on Saturday Night Live has ebbed and flowed with the times, but other than the cold open and the guest host monologue, no feature has come to the rescue of an episode more often than "Weekend Update". Sketches can be about anything (and often are), but "Weekend Update" is constrained by the news of the week. Anything older feels dated. ■ The constraint often works. Whereas the monologues on the Monday through Friday late-night shows are often trite or predictable, having all week for a team of writers to refine the content helps to sharpen the wit and make it consistently the first- or second-most-rewatched segment of the show. It's not always good, but it's generally much better-watched than nightly monologues written mainly about the same news items. ■ It isn't hard to find breathless but serious commentary and analysis about the news. The torrent is often too much for anyone to digest and remain of sound mind. If, after 50 years, "Weekend Update" has a lesson for the real news, it is that the American media landscape is in need of something not intuitively obvious: More mass-market literary magazines. Or, to be more precise, more outlets aiming to reach a broad audience, devoted to a restrained frequency of publication, and interested in ideas more than individual people or instantaneous events. ■ A big part of publishing survival seems to have pivoted towards having more to say, more often: What used to be the Atlantic Monthly is now very much a daily publication rivaling the country's newspapers of record (literally even recruiting journalists directly away from the Washington Post). Much the same could be said for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, which are not always quite CNN-like in their coverage of breaking news, but which no longer see fit to wait. ■ If even those with access to the best information-gathering tools in the world still can't refrain from speculation in light of news events, perhaps that is a sign our social appetite for instant commentary has outpaced what's really good for us. "Weekend Update" proves that people are willing to wait a week for a good laugh about the news. We could use a diverse array of editorial voices to prove that we're willing to wait a week for good insights into the news. Impatience hasn't paid off that well up to now, and there are no signs the news will abate a week, a month, or a year from now.
January 28, 2025
Dr. Mark Lewis, a Utah oncologist with a substantial social-media following, once earned a lot of laughs for sharing a patient review: "Dr Lewis saved my life! [4/5 stars]". His wry rejoinder? "Honestly don't know how to earn that 5th star". ■ Ratings can serve useful purposes, especially when used for low-stakes choices for which a lot of investigation would waste useful time: Which restaurant in the neighborhood serves the best steamed dumplings? Did other people like this toaster they found in an online store? Expertise isn't always useful; sometimes, the wisdom of crowds is more than enough. ■ But ratings can also deceive, particularly if they are solicited poorly. One Ukrainian points out that her review of the Air Alert app is five out of five stars, but takes issue with Apple's way of asking for the rating: "Enjoying Air Alert!?" Considering that it's an app designed solely to warn of incoming aerial attacks from Russia, there is nothing enjoyable about it. ■ It does speak to the chronic infantilization of the user experience by companies like Google and Apple that they use "enjoying" as the test verb by default, as though every experience with a product should "spark joy". Some of the most important and useful things in the world (like vaccine shots, sewage treatment, and air raid alerts) aren't enjoyable at all, but they can be literal lifesavers. It's nobody's job to make those experiences enjoyable -- the important question is whether the solutions are useful, efficient, and reliable. ■ Some people only wish to be treated like perpetual adolescents, but they shouldn't steer the rest of society. Life comes with hard times, tough choices, and burdensome sacrifices. Learning to muddle through those with the help of friends, family, and a cheerful disposition is one of the defining ways we become adults.
January 26, 2025
The metaphor of the "long arm of the law" has roots that are nearly 500 years old, but it has a whole new applicability in the Internet age. The US Department of Justice has indicted a group of people for using computers in the United States to facilitate remote work done by North Korean IT workers in order to fill North Korea's government treasury with income earned at wages prevailing in the US market. ■ The DOJ says that "North Korean IT workers could individually earn more than $300,000 a year in some cases [...] The North Korean government withheld up to 90 percent of wages of overseas workers, which generated an annual revenue to the North Korean government of hundreds of millions of dollars." ■ For a country with virtually no meaningful international trade other than a busy market in exporting wigs and fake eyebrows to China, "exporting" IT labor is a clever solution to generating some foreign cash. If the trade were legal, it would still be awful for the government to rob the workers of 90% of their earnings, but it would still be a rational strategy for the government. ■ But for good reasons, including those abuses of North Korean workers by their government, the United States has severe sanctions on doing business, electronic or otherwise, with North Korea. That's why the indictment points to an elaborate scheme to cover tracks and maintain the fraud. Nobody should underestimate the need for people in unlikely fields (like law enforcement) to develop and apply high-technology skills in ways that weren't on anyone's radar 25 years ago.
January 24, 2025
The cost disease that's hard to cure
The concept of Baumol's cost disease holds that the cost of some services will rise even without improvements in quality because the work itself cannot be achieved more efficiently, and the people performing the work have to be incentivized to choose doing it over doing other work for which wages are rising. There are, for instance, only so many surgeries that a surgical team can perform -- the cap on productivity is relatively immobile. ■ At the extreme end of the example, there's no way to increase the productivity of a string quartet playing a piece of music with a known tempo. Three people cannot play all four parts adequately, and playing the song at twice the tempo won't enhance the experience of the audience. Despite these hard limits, musicians' wages have to rise or else they will find work doing something else -- perhaps composing music for YouTUbe videos. ■ There may be something even more sinister than Baumol's cost disease, though: Whereas the cost disease isn't anyone's nefarious design, there are certain occupations where people are rewarded for halting the progress of others. ■ It is generally easier to destroy than to build; look no farther than any war. Destruction can happen in a moment; reconstruction can take generations. When an economy induces too many people to become obstacles to productivity, it asks implicitly to become hamstrung and listless. ■ Lee Kuan Yew could be an autocrat, but he also knew how to make sure Singapore could grow economically, despite its meager natural resources: "Those with good minds to be scholars should also become inventors, innovators, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs; they must bring new products and services to the market to enrich the lives of people everywhere." ■ There are disruptive forces all around, both in the public and private sectors, who are rewarded mostly for getting in the way of initiative shown by others. Americans need to be on the lookout for drift in that direction, particularly as people get their hands on the levers of regulatory and other legal powers and see opportunities to favor their own preferred outcomes. It's already easy for that kind of creep to settle in as large private firms see opportunities to squeeze out rivals not by innovation but by litigation (and contract-terms inflation).
January 23, 2025
From the local forecast office
When television broadcaster Allen Media Group announced that it would be replacing local TV weather teams with a centralized forecasting hub tied to the Weather Channel, it made the announcement under an avalanche of words like "groundbreaking format", "cutting-edge technology", and "superior weather content". The disquieting reality was that the plan was a move to cut the costs of employing at least 100 local meteorologists. KWWL-TV in Waterloo, Iowa, was among the stations affected. ■ Some changes represent progress. Not all do. The plan to replace local expertise with a centralized weather office represented neither strategy nor initiative. It was fatally flawed judgment rooted strictly in cost-cutting with insulting disregard for the viewing public. ■ Weather coverage isn't just about technical proficiency in reading a Skew-T plot or looking for a hook echo on a radar screen. ■ It's about knowing how to pronounce obscure but meaningful local place names (good luck to someone cold-reading the Eastern Iowa town name "Maquoketa"). It's about recognizing meaningful local patterns, like the impact of a strong westerly wind during an ice storm for drivers traveling over the Iowa River bridge at Steamboat Rock. It's about having a sense for what numerical data doesn't always tell you (yes, there are days when acute observers can smell tornadoes in the air). ■ Authentic experience on the ground matters when you're talking about the intersection of physical science and social science -- that's the essence of weather reporting. ■ Broadcast licensees don't "own" the airwaves; they borrow them. And their products should serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity. That's a matter not of opinion, but of law. Indications are that Allen Media Group has reversed its decision, at least for some individual employees in some markets. That's good, because the plan as announced was anything but a public service.
January 19, 2025
Almost 9,000 single-family homes destroyed in California
Almost 9,000 homes were destroyed by the fires around Los Angeles -- that's the early estimate being used by reinsurance brokerage Gallagher Re. For perspective, the US builds about 1.4 to 1.5 million new homes a year. But that's a national figure. In California alone, new single-family housing starts run about 8,000 to 9,000 per month. ■ In other words, the Los Angeles-area fires aren't just substantial in their scale and impact, replacing them is going to materially affect the construction rate for the largest state in the union. It's extremely unfortunate, but the event is going to present a dramatic set of natural experiments for economists. ■ For one, the differences between the post-disaster rules imposed on rental versus owner-occupied housing will have significant consequences. Price limits in the name of "gouging prohibitions" will only affect rental housing: Nobody can tell you not to price your house for sale for an exorbitant amount. Indeed, nobody can force you to sell your home at all (aside from exceptional circumstances involving public domain). ■ For another, the process of local regulatory approval is going to discourage innovations. Local authorities have already said they want to see like-for-like replacements, via statements like, "if you got a mid-century modern, we want to see that mid-century modern come back". The mayor's executive order includes "Clear the way to rebuild homes as they were" as an express bullet point. ■ It's understandable why regulators would prefer like-for-like replacements; the less change, the easier to review. But the mayor's executive order says that for expedited review policies to apply, "The structure or facility to be repaired, restored, demolished, or replaced does not exceed 110% of the floor area, height, and bulk of the structures or facility existing immediately prior to the Wildfires" and says, "the project cannot result in a change of use from [...] a less intensive use to a more intensive use, or an increase in density or units (including accessory dwelling units)". ■ The problem for residents is that they need as much square footage to be built as quickly as possible: It's not hard to imagine neighbors helping neighbors by offering them temporary space in a freshly-built accessory dwelling unit (ADU), like a granny flat or a prefabricated tiny home, while more neighborhood homes are reconstructed. Most people probably want to get back into their original neighborhoods as quickly as possible, and living temporarily in a neighbor's back yard studio probably beats having to live for a longer time in an RV. ■ Likewise, manufactured and modular housing doesn't fit neatly within a regulatory model that favors like-for-like reconstruction, but it could provide a significant way to expedite the reconstruction process and get people home faster than waiting for site-built assembly. Manufactured housing is wildly under-appreciated in America today, and that under-appreciation has stifled much-needed innovations. Helpfully, California's recent statewide liberalization of ADU rules has done much to boost the market. ■ Regulators and city officials too often assume that what matters most in a community is the superficial stuff: Architectural styles, paint colors, and the like. That's a mistake. The lesson of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is that people want to get home, but if there are too many obstacles, they'll be forced to make their homes elsewhere. Neighborhoods are made of people, not just the buildings where they live. If the fire-devastated communities around Los Angeles are to recover, what matters most is getting the people back as soon as possible. How the homes look should be a far-distant lesser consideration.
Users surge to all the wrong services
American users of TikTok, facing the app's shutdown over national security, have joined another China-based social media platform in such numbers that it is scrambling to find English-speaking content moderators.
Enough with the "red state/blue state" stuff
According to Pew survey data, there are five states where a majority of voters are registered Republicans and eight states where a majority of voters are registered Democrats. The largest majorities are just 57% each (Republicans in Wyoming and Democrats in Vermont). No party has an impenetrable majority anywhere, and every state has a substantial number of minority-party voters. Things are not as binary as they seem.
FTC goes after Pepsi for giving pricing favors to Walmart
Is this really what the government needs to be using its law-enforcement powers to manage?
Self-interested Crankery Rules Everything Around Me
People whose bread is buttered by the exchange of cryptocurrency have come out in favor of a "strategic Bitcoin reserve", which might be the most transparently self-interested proposal imaginable. ■ Even in the most favorable of interpretations, cryptocurrency is an extremely speculative asset: Something that Party A purchases strictly in the hope that Party B will purchase it later for a higher price. The greater the speculative excitement, the better for Party A -- because there is no true underlying value to the asset. ■ It's not an enterprise that produces an ongoing stream of valuable output, like farmland or a share in a productive business. It's not an investment in future returns, like a college education. It's not even like a pile of gold bars, which, even if they had no exchange value, could at least be melted down to make dental fillings. ■ Cryptocurrency, at least as an "investment", is entirely a gamble that a greater fool can be found. Anyone proposing that the government should purchase lots of cryptocurrency isn't seriously arguing that there is a "strategic" reason for so doing. They're doing it to get the government to take a pile of their asset class out of the marketplace in order to artificially drive up the market price that the next fool might be willing to pay. ■ It's not one iota different from collectors of any other "asset" -- like Beanie Babies, Hummel figurines, or baseball cards -- proposing that the government needs a strategic reserve of their plush toys, porcelain statuettes, or cardboard-backed photos. And in the case of those other assets, the producers at least knew enough to limit total production. Whole new cryptocurrencies are still being invented, and even the biggest names (like Bitcoin) aren't promising to stop producing new "assets" until 115 years from now. ■ Can cryptocurrencies be used to store value? Potentially -- just as value can be stored in the form of fur coats or antique paperback books. But the government doesn't need any such store of value when it's got the U.S. Treasury Department. A "strategic Bitcoin reserve" is nothing more than a proposal to enrich a handful of speculators at the expense of every taxpayer. Its proponents should be laughed out of the public square.
January 17, 2025
A healthy, even vigorous, skepticism of certain high-profile technology moguls is entirely justifiable. Elon Musk took Twitter private, changed its name in the hope of turning it into an all-encompassing lifestyle brand, and implemented policy changes that have opened the door to giving thoroughly antisocial voices all too prominent a platform. Mark Zuckerberg has deftly managed to turn Facebook into a publicly traded company while maintaining strictly dictatorial voting control, all while collecting vast amounts of data on the behavior of more than a billion users -- and their intellectual property. ■ To be wary of their intentions and behavior is a rational act. But as with virtually all human behaviors, their choices -- even the ones that may be selfish or even malevolent -- land on a spectrum. There are gradations to "bad", ranging from things we dislike to things that are purely evil. What constitutes a poison is often determined by the dose. ■ Robert Reich doesn't like their behavior. But for a person who has held a Cabinet office and has access to such an ample megaphone, he demonstrates a chronic disingenuity when he reaches for an applause line on social media. Consider this pronouncement on Reich's Bluesky account: "So it's dangerous for China to have the ability to access our data and manipulate us via social media apps. But it's okay for America's billionaires to have the ability to access our data and manipulate us via social media apps. Do I have this right?" ■ It is, of course, entirely fine to have concerns about how user data is treated -- whether it's in the hands of Facebook or Twitter/X or Snapchat or (as is the subtext of Reich's comments) TikTok. It is not, however, fine to pretend as though there is a true equivalence between what happens with data in the hands of American companies -- subject to supervision by the FTC, the SEC, American courts, and many other domestic legal structures -- and what happens with it in the hands of Chinese companies. ■ Facebook didn't conduct the OPM hack. Twitter wasn't responsible for the Equifax breach. Snapchat isn't running Volt Typhoon. All of those sinister acts -- and many others -- have been conducted by arms, agents, or allies of the government of the People's Republic of China (or, more precisely, of the Communist Party which controls China's government, military, and police). ■ TikTok and its parent, ByteDance, can protest all they want, but their social media platform is plainly considered a state asset by the government of China. ByteDance may be a state-owned enterprise or not -- those facts are hard to make plain. But even that ambiguity alone is enough to cast a very long shadow of doubt over any claims they might make to independence. ■ This doesn't make the TikTok ban a good policy. Nor does it make it a bad one. It simply means that Reich's pseudo-clever attempt to draw a false equivalence is far outside the bounds of reality. No matter what an American might think of Musk or Zuckerberg or any American social-media executive, recourse against them exists, should they commit misdeeds. That recourse may be slow and imperfect, but that's the way of law. ■ China's government, by contrast, exists far outside the reach of American law. It has shamelessly exploited that protection from consequences and weaponized data theft on an incomprehensible scale. And it wouldn't squeal so much about TikTok if it didn't have a hand in its operation. Reich is an objectively intelligent person. But in coloring people he doesn't like with the same brush he uses to paint a known malicious adversary, he's conducting himself like a useful idiot.
The first "Cold Weather Advisory" touching both Iowa and Nebraska
January 16, 2025
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization best known for the Wayback Machine, a storage point for billions and billions of snapshots of web pages collected for almost 30 years. The "Wayback Machine" is an incomparable archival resource that preserves the ephemeral history of the digital world that would often otherwise blow away forever. ■ But the Internet Archive has taken on a much larger portfolio than just saving copies of old web pages. It's become a repository for noteworthy video recordings and genealogical source materials, among other treasures. ■ Perhaps most extraordinary among their collections, though, is the software emulation section, where it is possible to not just read the information about old computer programs, but to actually play them (over a web browser) in almost exactly the same condition they would have appeared originally. ■ It may not seem like it should matter that one can play Mortal Kombat or ride the Oregon Trail in its earliest form, but they are authentic preservations of cultural experience -- just as much as a way to re-live history as any other interactive museum experience. And the skill of figuring out how to emulate old computing devices may turn out to be the only way for us to recover data stored on old floppy disks and magnetic tapes. ■ A lot of history -- especially that part preserved only on electronic media -- is lost through neglect, obsolescence, and even mold. Some of the technical experts who sustain the archives are colorful characters in their own right, and their work is well worth supporting. In a world where the digital-first mentality is literally driving history out of print, electronic archivists and librarians are doing irreplaceable work today.
January 15, 2025
If it hadn't been for a particularly ungraceful snub of the Vice President by the husband of a returning Senator, it's likely that few Americans would have noted that the 119th Congress has been in session since January 3rd. Hearings are underway, bills and resolutions have been submitted, and leaders have been elected. ■ The election for the Speaker of the House garnered more attention than usual this year, but the entire seating of the new Congress receives a mere fraction of the attention paid to the farewell activities of the outgoing President and the inaugural preparations for the next. The latter shouldn't so dramatically overshadow the former. ■ The Constitution of the United States addresses the formation of Congress first, in Article I. The Executive Branch is created in Article II. By a reasonable interpretation of the plain language, that should be an indication that we should show at least as much enthusiasm when Congress gets its work underway as when a new President is sworn in. ■ But the unfortunate way in which the Presidency has been treated more and more as an imperial office -- and the steady surrender of real Congressional expertise and legislation to the whims of executive orders and administrative rule-making -- has given the public the impression that the individual person of the President matters more to the direction of the country than the makeup of the Congress expressly elected to represent their interests. That isn't a party problem; both major parties have taken an active part in enlarging and extending the Presidency and in neutering the Congress. ■ It is a national problem instead. And it is one in which it is hard to imagine change coming about without steady, committed effort. Things shouldn't change dramatically just because the Oval Office changes hands; that's not how checks and balances are supposed to work. The House of Representatives is supposed to be where we get our whims and tempers out, the Senate is supposed to put the brakes on bad ideas, and the President is supposed to reject the worst of the bad ideas that still get through, while primarily doing what he or she is instructed to do by Congress. The State of the Union address should never have turned into a campaign-style stump speech; it's supposed to be the report of an agent back to the principals who have the authority to fire him or her. ■ Some complain that they think the Constitution is inadequate to the task of running the United States in its current size. To the contrary, the Constitutional order -- the very thing that officers of the government are sworn to uphold -- is entirely capable of scaling itself effectively, provided that we choose to observe it rigorously. But the demand to do that can come only from the voting public.
January 12, 2025
Four voices that should shut up
Whenever a calamity of shocking proportions comes about, four entirely predictable voices are sure to pipe up. One blames the victims, usually for vaguely defined moral failings. One calls the tragedy a judgment from God. Another blames it on "late-stage capitalism". And the fourth uses it as a case for hoarding weapons and preparing for the collapse of civilization. ■ All four of these voices ignore one of the foremost characteristics of human life, if not the most important aspect of all: We are a cooperative species by our very nature. We are not the strongest, nor the biggest, nor the fastest members of the animal kingdom. But we are endowed with the ability to communicate, cooperate, and organize among ourselves -- and to do so quickly, spontaneously, and voluntarily. Wild animals don't lift cars off crash victims or resuscitate heart attack patients in mid-flight. ■ The knee-jerk reactions either ignore or deny this reality at their own peril. If your philosophy depends upon denying aid when others are in need, then you'll find yourself without friends sooner rather than later. If you blame all bad things on godly judgment, then you'll probably succeed mostly in converting people to disbelief in God. If you wave your arms and vaguely decry the social systems around you, then you'll mostly find yourself isolated inside your own ideological rigidity. ■ And if your plans for a nightmare scenario consist of shooting people rather than cooperating with unlikely allies, then in the unlikely event of an apocalypse, you'll probably make it just long enough for an even bigger warlord-wannabe than yourself to discover your cache of stuff and take it for his own, with you left behind as collateral damage. ■ No social order is perfect. Democracy needs to be maintained within the rule of law. Shortcomings of market economies need to be corrected through regulation or intervention. Peace must often be maintained by stockpiling (and occasionally showing off) the weapons of war. ■ But in any contest among economic or political systems, what perpetually emerges on top is whichever alternative does the most to facilitate freely-chosen cooperation. When people have agency and get to choose what skills and resources they can share, we often share better and more productively than when told what to do. ■ It's rarely flawless; human choices never are. Thus, no social, political, or economic system will turn out perfectly, either. But the application of free, uncompelled choices -- in markets, elections, and in day-to-day life -- more consistently gets us to better outcomes than anything else. The voices that scream otherwise are best told to shut up.
January 11, 2025
With the Palisades and Eaton fires alone accounting for the incineration of more than 37,000 acres and at least 12,000 structures, the Los Angeles fires are nearly incomprehensible in scope. Yet they seem oddly personal because so many household names have been affected: Anthony Hopkins, Ricki Lake, John Goodman, Paris Hilton, Jeff Bridges, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Billy Crystal are all named as having lost their homes to the fires. ■ The high concentration of entertainers in the area means that we will likely hear other stories like what happened to music producer Bob Clearmountain, who lost his home recording studio and who thinks many others have been lost, too. There's a good chance that many original recordings themselves have been irreplaceably lost, just like what happened when some 500,000 master recordings were destroyed in a 2008 fire at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. ■ At first, it seems strange to lament the likely loss of recordings in a time when Taylor Swift grossed $2 billion on ticket sales in one concert tour. For many people, the experience value of a concert can be priced far higher than the ongoing enjoyment value of a recording. ■ Still, great musicians should create gobs of recordings so that posterity can sift through them. Not everything has to be "A" material to still be worth saving! Imagine what a corpus of work we might have gotten from Beethoven or Mozart, had they been armed with modern tools for recording and transcribing music. Each wrote more than 600 pieces when they had to do all composition by hand. By hand! ■ To leave behind an enormous body of work isn't the only thing that matters in art, to be sure. But just like Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" re-imagined Beethoven's original without replacing the original, consider a world in which someone digs through the titanic unreleased archives of hundreds of songs recorded at Paisley Park and finds some random Prince riff that's never been developed before, then turns it into an original (if postmortem) collaboration. That would be a richer world than one in which a fleeting composition had crossed Prince's mind and been lost forever. ■ This need for talented artists to record what comes to their human imaginations will only become more important as AI slop takes up ever more space. The potential for computers in the hands of custodians -- rather than click-hunters and engagement-farmers -- to help enhance and grow our humane cultural footprint is great. But it won't get very far if the recordings are lost or the ideas are never recorded in the first place.
January 10, 2025
It's an arresting headline from the pages of the journal Science: "Ants best humans at test of collective intelligence". The story is a distillation of a research study conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, which found that groups of ants trying to solve a puzzle-like spatial problem did better than humans solving an identical (but scaled-up) version of the same problem. ■ The reported conclusion is tantalizing, but there's a problem: "To make the comparison as meaningful as possible, groups of humans were in some cases instructed to avoid communicating through speaking or gestures, even wearing surgical masks and sunglasses to conceal their mouths and eyes." ■ That's no small caveat. By "leveling the playing field" in such a way, the researchers denied their human subjects the use of what makes our intelligence collective. We are a cooperative species, but our cooperation depends upon communication. Not just among ourselves, either -- part of what makes our relationship with dogs so special is that they know how to follow our gaze. That's an enormous factor! We can't share our intelligence effectively without a combination of both our extraordinary verbal skills and our advanced nonverbal skills, too. ■ Perhaps if ants had the same evolutionary advantages, they'd be even better at collective intelligence than humans (again, "on a level playing field"). But if you take away from humans some of the most defining features that make us human, then it should be no surprise that the denial leaves us looking pretty stupid. ■ Communication doesn't always make our decision-making better; we have social media, TV talent shows, and no small number of democratic election results to disavow us of assumptions otherwise. We would be fools, though, to underestimate the scope of communication as part of human intelligence or to disrespect the importance of communication as a skill.
January 9, 2025
The denunciation of first and often last resort is to call an opponent "stupid". It is a word that gets applied everywhere from the playground to the bully pulpit, a catch-all for dismissing someone else as being too dense to "get it", whatever point "it" may be. ■ Besides being unoriginal, "stupid" is a pretty faulty ground on which to dismiss anyone. After all, some people may be stupid about many things, but everyone is stupid about some things. That's the inescapable curse of living in a complex world: You may be smart about corporate income tax strategies, but do you know how a small modular reactor works? You might be able to recognize a three-phase Delta transformer from 50 yards away, but do you know what a normal white blood cell count should be? Maybe you speak five languages, but can you explain the CIA triad in cybersecurity? ■ No one can entirely avoid being stupid, at least about some things. And in many cases, an individual has little control over either their innate intelligence or their exposure to a wide range of subjects. Even when we want to know, we often encounter gatekeepers who depend on making their own knowledge seem mysterious. ■ But we could stand to revive a much more useful rebuke: "Unlettered". Unlike "stupid", "unlettered" is a matter of at least some choice. Never before have there been so many things to read on so many subjects, in so many translations, and across so many formats. ■ We can even "read" even when normal reading would be impossible. A phone can translate written text instantaneously and artificial intelligence can convert entire manuscripts to customized reading levels. Where audiobooks are lacking, text-to-speech synthesis can step right in. To read -- in a world where literacy rates have never been higher -- has never been a more accessible act. ■ Yet there is no intelligence so stupid as the one which thinks it knows best by mere instinct and does not need to learn. And that offense -- to be unlettered by choice -- is far more deserving of scorn than to merely be stupid. Stupidity can easily lead us astray, but it is not always a matter of choice. Being literate but deliberately unlettered is. And it's a shame.
January 8, 2025
Americans may not be particularly close readers of the minutiae of terms and conditions, but all competent adults at least ought to be aware that they exist for most goods and services that we exchange with one another. In particular, the most hotly-contested subset of terms and conditions -- especially with online services -- is typically the privacy policy that governs how user information may be bought and sold. ■ Indeed, if you want to get people riled up, get them arguing over what Facebook is allowed to do with their personal information. The level of consumer sophistication on the subject is often very low, but the feelings run extremely high. Nobody wants to believe that something personal to them can be bought or sold without their express consent. ■ Yet from the same population that holds strong feelings on what Mark Zuckerberg can do with the knowledge of your favorite brand of toilet paper, no small number of people have jumped aboard a bandwagon that says the citizenship of people in foreign places can be bought and sold without their control, like trading Baltic Avenue and Park Place in a game of Monopoly. ■ People everywhere have a right to self-determination; it's the violation of this principle that makes Russia's invasion of Ukraine so vile and obnoxious. Citizenship isn't to be traded like a matter of commercial real estate. ■ In a rational world, the United States would have a clear, published, and widely-known set of conditions for any established civic entity to apply for accession. There's a published policy for how to join the European Union; we should have a plain and rational way to join the United States, too. ■ To do so would tend to have a stabilizing effect on the world, which is the least we could do as a benevolent superpower. Regarding others as little more than pieces on a game board not only subjects us to scorn from abroad, it undermines the goodwill upon which we depend for alliances and trade in a tightly-connected world. We must not be more cavalier with the citizenship of others than we are with our own privacy rights on social media.
January 4, 2025
The perfect domestic buyer isn't coming
In issuing an order prohibiting Nippon Steel from buying United States Steel, President Biden claims to be acting on an "unflinching commitment [...] to defend U.S. national security". In theory, domestic ownership of major manufacturing operations may be favorable to national security, at least in the sense that their decisions may, in some sense, reflect a set of values which may include a greater sense of the national interest. ■ But the order has many of the markings of a choice to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Nippon Steel had made promises to invest in facilities in Indiana and Pennsylvania that would have measured in the billions and might well have done a considerable amount to secure the long-term health of US operations. There is no such guarantee that any alternative buyers (should they even be found) will do the same. ■ There is no shortage of investment money lying around: Private-equity companies are estimated to have done more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars in deals in 2024. The $15 billion offer from Nippon Steel would barely move the needle on the $320 billion of cash and Treasury bills burning a hole in Warren Buffett's pockets at Berkshire Hathaway. If a better offer were coming from stateside, we'd know it already. A perfect domestic buyer just isn't forthcoming. ■ What is the concern, after all? That, in a time of international crisis, Japan will abruptly abandon us as an ally? Of all the unlikely scenarios in an uncertain future, Japan making a hard turn against us is about the unlikeliest. The US is a huge trading partner for Japan, a defense treaty partner for well over half a century, and the source of Japan's nuclear umbrella. ■ The only plausible scenario that could threaten the mutual partnership in the short- to intermediate-range future is the unlikely prospect that China might conduct an invasion of Japan. Nothing is really impossible, of course, but were it to come to something as drastic as that, not only would the US be involved in repelling the invasion, but occupied-Japanese ownership of US Steel would become a mere formality, which Washington could waive through an emergency nationalization. ■ It's old and tired thinking to treat Japanese ownership of distressed smokestack industries as a hazard to American national security. If Nippon Steel can run US Steel better than domestic ownership while reinvesting heavily in facilities and promising at least ten years of stability, then blocking the deal is, on balance, the bigger threat and an entirely unforced error by the White House.
A community really thrives when it has a steady source of profitable "exports" that mean its people aren't just exchanging goods and services among themselves. And it further prospers when it can grow its own local enterprises from scratch, usually on the backs of skills developed or demanded by the flagship employers.
January 3, 2025
The weather forecast for the Midwest is looking terrible, but all credit is due to the National Weather Service in Omaha/Valley for its extremely creative public messaging about the event.
$80 billion in computing power
Microsoft is planning to spend $80 billion on data centers before the end of the fiscal year -- an amount that ought to make people sit up and take notice. As an infrastructure project, it's huge. ■ $80 billion is more than the $65 billion in electrical grid upgrades promised by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. It's comparable in scale to one of our biggest industries -- roughly the value of net aerospace exports from the US. ■ It's more than the market capitalizations of businesses that are household names, like Ferrari, US Bank, Marriott, BP, or 3M. Most notably, $80 billion is more than the gross domestic products of at least seven states. ■ But Microsoft says it "is on track to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world". AI is the subject of immense hype and enormous amounts of overstatement. But $80 billion is an extraordinary amount of real money. ■ If the figures are true (and as a publicly traded company, Microsoft is subject to reporting requirements that will bear them out), it's an investment -- or perhaps a speculation -- of historic proportions.
Finding the January 6th bomber
It's been four years since someone left pipe bombs at the headquarters of the two major political parties, and the FBI still hasn't identified the presumptive terrorist. They've published an estimate of the perpetrator's height (5'7") and a halting security camera video of one of the drops.
January 1, 2025
Protections on intellectual property (primarily patent and copyright law) are valuable means of encouraging people to generate original thoughts in a world where copies, rehashes, and knockoffs can be profitable. Originality still matters, whether it's in the development of new technological advances or the production of new works of culture. ■ But especially as the artificial intelligence "learning" models have been set loose to gather data on almost everything that has ever been published online, it's good to see that intellectual property ultimately enters the public domain, just like several items have just done with the turn of the new year. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and the Marx Brothers film "The Cocoanuts" have both entered the public domain with the turn of the calendar page. ■ There's going to be a lot of tension for the foreseeable future, between those humans who create novel ideas and those humans who corral computers into generating new material of their own. Public-domain content is especially important under those conditions. ■ We probably privilege intellectual property too much; copyright doesn't really do much economic good to most copyright owners beyond the first couple of decades, and it's hard to believe that copyright terms of nearly a century really reflect the Constitutional intent "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". ■ If life expectancy is around 80 years, then a 95-year protection term isn't effectively "limited". The 14-year, once-renewable terms of 1790 probably had the right general idea. AI models are getting away with effectively converting everything to public-domain work (but keeping the value to themselves), while real people are kept from using material that by any reasonable estimation ought to have entered the actual public domain long ago. ■ Anything that connects new thinking to old works -- including putting old human-made content to renewed work in the hands of new humans -- is a way to extend the threads that remind us of the continuity of the human condition. The more that people feel atomized and isolated by cultural and social conditions, the more important it is to be reminded that we're all part of a vast chain extending back through the millennia.
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