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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.
December 31, 2024
Every year comes to have its own character, and sometimes it's unknowable in advance. But sometimes it's possible to forecast that character in advance. For 2025, it appears that the defining word will be "persistence". ■ It's easy to find reasons to be discouraged about any number of challenges. It always has been. But in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence ... The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." ■ In most cases, it's better to be able to walk five miles than to sprint for only one. The act of sticking to the pursuit of a worthy goal builds character, and not just in the abstract. Most problems take a long time to develop, and untangling them naturally takes a long time as well.
December 30, 2024
Honor Jimmy Carter by fixing housing rules
The two Presidents to live the longest in post-Presidency were Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Hoover outlived John F. Kennedy, dying in 1964, 31 years after leaving the White House. Carter, having just passed, made it a remarkable 43 years. ■ Other than their longevity, both are remembered far better by history for what they did as humanitarians than for their time in the Oval Office. Hoover had the relative misfortune of making his humanitarian mark prior to the White House; Carter became known for his humanitarianism after leaving office, particularly for his dedication to Habitat for Humanity. Recency bias is real, and it favors doing good works after finishing the dirty job of President. ■ In honor of Jimmy Carter, every municipal government in America should affirmatively repeal one restrictive zoning ordinance or regulation that holds back the development of housing. The aggregate effect, if everyone were to do it, would be a worthy boon to affordable housing -- more valuable in total than any wave of housing that Habitat for Humanity could possibly build. ■ Housing built with volunteer labor can do good things at the margins, of course, but it simply cannot have an impact as large as framing the right legal and regulatory environment to encourage the construction, improvement, or redevelopment of safe, dignified, and affordable housing at a very large scale. ■ City councils and county supervisors, heed the moment: Legalize duplexes and extend tax advantages to four-plexes! We need more "missing middle" housing. Promote manufactured housing and let it qualify for conventional mortgage financing! Manufactured homes are better-built and much less costly than site-built houses, but they're hard for first-time buyers to get. Encourage the building of ADUs! California has gained tens of thousands of new homes by streamlining the process to let people build them statewide. ■ Local governments can pick just about anything to improve and they'll make people's lives better. That would be the most fitting possible tribute to former President Carter: Not to motivate thousands of Americans each to show up for one day of lending their low-skill labor to a worthy cause, but to improve the aggregate conditions for housing affordability for millions of people at once.
December 29, 2024
NPR offers a retrospective on the Y2K bug that caused colossal worry a quarter-century ago, unhelpfully dismissing the outcome by saying that the Y2K bug "didn't live up to the hype". The event still resides in living memory for enough people still involved in the computer sector that some have quite vocally skewered NPR for the tone of the article, with others noting that Y2K occupied a unique intersection between society's dependence upon technology and the relatively juvenile stage of technology management at the time. ■ It is very hard to make the general public understand that technological issues are worth confronting head-on. Much of what saved us from Y2K disaster took place behind the scenes, and things are a quarter-century more complex today than they were then. ■ Yet some of the problems emerging now are potentially just as dreadful as the Y2K bug. Microsoft, for instance, has declared that it will end support for Windows 10 on October 14th of the coming year, having already ended support for Windows 8 and what came before. A plausible case can be made that Microsoft can't continue to secure anything older than Windows 11, so forcing customers to upgrade is the only safe way forward. ■ But the move will absolutely put a lot of Windows users in a much less safe environment, since they either cannot or will not upgrade their hardware and operating systems. This will leave them using platforms which are no longer receiving security updates, which effectively turns every newly-discovered security flaw into a zero-day vulnerability. And a lot of important things still run on old equipment. ■ The American cultural mainstream is pretty soft on its appreciation for sustained maintenance. More often than not, people prefer "fix on failure" to preventative or predictive maintenance approaches. Chewing gum and baling wire keep a lot more things together in the physical world than they should. ■ As bad as that is in the physical realm, it's vastly worse in the digital world. It's not about gears wearing down or grease slowly drying out -- things that typically fail slowly. Digital maintenance is often (literally) a binary issue: It is either correct or not, vulnerable or not, protected or not. The only grace period is how long it takes for bad actors to find the holes. ■ We learned the wrong lesson from Y2K: The bill for lots of deferred maintenance came due on a high-profile date, and a lot of frantic work fixed the problem and saved the day...but the general public never realized it. And in not making a bigger deal about the rescue, we missed the opportunity to reinforce a message about sustained attention and responsibility. The next disaster, unfortunately, won't come with such a memorable deadline as Y2K.
Lost in the very strange debate over whether mainstream American culture has "venerated mediocrity" is a vital distinction about America's extreme devotion to laissez-faire as an ethos. ■ The worst advice commonly given to new graduates is "Do what you love and the money will follow". That's a recipe for a very high rate of disappointment -- not to mention, also one for turning a lot of very good hobbies and recreational interests into drudgery. But a very close second in the bad-advice race is "Do whatever will make you the most money". This advice, often doled out both directly and indirectly by well-meaning parents and other influential adults, proposes a perilously imbalanced lifestyle. ■ The right advice goes like this: "Do whatever maximizes the gap between how you're rewarded and what you have to give up to get it." Maximizing that difference is what economists would call utility maximization. ■ Every occupational choice comes with some form of reward: Usually it starts with money, but the basket of rewards also includes things like social status, personal pride, joy in the work itself, potential for growth, leisure time, job security, and more. ■ Likewise, every occupational choice comes with trade-offs: How long it takes to obtain education and training, the stress of the job search, foregone opportunities to try other careers, and all of the ordinary stresses and drawbacks that come from devoting some 40 hours a week to performing a task in exchange for a paycheck. ■ If the only thing that gets measured is the size of the salary, then it's like looking only at a company's revenue figures and ignoring the expenses. Doing so would be daffy, yet many people pressure young people into doing just that -- not just in America, but around the world. ■ America's secret superpower is the sense of freedom to experiment, to try lots of things (especially in youth), and above all, to fail early and often without that failure derailing an entire future. The more introductory courses and extracurricular activities a young person tries, the better: Some won't click at all, but a few might. ■ And it's especially when those low-stakes encounters pay off that Americans benefit most from our culture -- like Bill Gates discovering computers in a club atmosphere while in junior high. The growing backlash against all-absorbing youth sports (and the crowding-out effect those leagues have been having on other free-ranging childhood endeavors) is a sign many parents understand implicitly that an over-structured adolescence is overrated. ■ It may seem contrary to logic, but it's precisely the way America avoids high-pressure circumstances for young people that liberates them to find the things that maximize the gap, rather than just chasing what pays the most. Does that sometimes lead to laziness and sloth? Sure. But it also leads to an efficient allocation of skills and resources, chosen by the people who will live those lives and careers, rather than by their parents (or, worse, their government).
December 28, 2024
(Hyper) Local on (More Than) the 8s
When the Weather Channel debuted on May 2, 1982, it was a novel innovation in telecommunications. Up until that point, anyone without an oversized thermometer mounted outside their window had to either wait for a periodic weather check from a radio station or place a call to the local time and temperature line. ■ Then the Weather Channel, with all the convenience of a click of the cable converter box, the viewer could be assured of getting current conditions every ten minutes. That local temperature report, in most cases, was almost certainly just a rehashing of the hourly weather roundup from the local office of the National Weather Service and thus could be as much as 59 minutes old and no more precise than whatever conditions prevailed at the nearest airport. But what was eventually branded "Local on the 8s" still felt a lot more predictable than what had come before. ■ It hasn't been all that long in historical terms, but the difference between the turn of this century and today in terms of the density and freshness of weather observations is at least as dramatic as the move from the phonograph to streaming music services. Dozens of personal weather stations are available for $200 or less, many capable not only of measuring temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, and rainfall, but also of reporting those results automatically over the Internet to data aggregators like Weather Underground. ■ West Des Moines, Iowa (population about 70,000) is blanketed with dozens of such stations, a situation not at all unusual for an affluent suburb. Compared with "Local on the 8s", the resulting granularity of data is astonishing -- temperatures reported to the tenth of a degree, current to the very minute, and precise to within half a mile of just about anyone in an urbanized area. ■ Is that level of precision necessary? Absolutely not. Is there anything meterologically advantageous to having sensors spaced no more than a half-mile apart? Apart from reporting on rare severe weather events, probably not. And yet it's a massive triumph, both technologically and economically. ■ The fact that a mid-sized metropolitan area can easily contain hundreds of personal weather stations -- virtually all installed voluntarily and at private expense -- is a symptom of a real economic triumph. A pure luxury good ends up becoming widely affordable, and in furnishing their data to aggregators, the buyers create a useful public good that any of their neighbors can access for free.
December 27, 2024
One of the best sight gags in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" (a movie spilling over with such jokes) is a throwaway. As Clark Griswold illuminates the world's most over-the-top set of Christmas lights, the power dims all over Chicagoland -- and for a split second, the audience is treated to a hand flipping the switch to activate a (misspelled) Auxiliary Nuclear power supply to keep up with the Griswold family light show, as though nuclear power plants were simply sitting idle all around, just waiting to be activated. ■ The Energy Information Administration reports that 18.6% of all US electricity comes from nuclear power plants, while renewable fuels -- led by wind -- are up to 21.4%. Nuclear power generation figures really haven't changed much at all this century: The total change between total megawatt-hours produced in 2001 and in 2023 is less than 1%. ■ Wind, on the other hand, is up by a factor of 62 over the same time period, and utility-scale solar (which was utterly negligible in 2001) is hot on wind's heels. Once we account for small-scale solar generation, total solar generation is almost as big as hydroelectric. ■ These are subtle successes that ought to be celebrated. Even if it's not possible to simply flip a switch to spin up an "auxiliary nuclear" reactor, we may even be getting closer to the widespread advent of small-scale modular reactors, which when used in coordination with the growing renewable sector, could help us chip away even faster at the remaining 60% of electrical generation that comes from carbon-emitting sources. ■ Big, slow changes are hard to celebrate well, unless there are obvious milestones built around them. But the fact that so much has been done to make the generation mix evolve in a good direction, with so much growing promise coming from solar and so much potential to do more with nuclear, ought to be enough for us to applaud: "It's a beaut, Clark!"
December 26, 2024
"Shadow fleet" cuts power cables in the Baltic
While most of Europe is still celebrating the Christmas holiday, Finnish border guards have been busy detaining a ship from Russia's "shadow fleet" over some strong evidence that it dragged an anchor in order to cut an undersea power transmission line between Finland and Estonia. Telecommunications cables have been cut, too. ■ It's a good time to have Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, in the seat as vice president of the European Commission and its chief foreign-affairs representative. Her statement on the incident was direct and plainspoken: "We strongly condemn any deliberate destruction of Europe's critical infrastructure. The suspected vessel is part of Russia's shadow fleet, which threatens security and the environment, while funding Russia's war budget. We will propose further measures, including sanctions, to target this fleet." That's the kind of talk that ought to be the standard everywhere. ■ If you are involved in any way, shape, or form with anything that might be considered critical infrastructure (power, water, telecom, gas, or whatever else keeps civilization functioning), this incident is a bright flashing sign to lock down whatever you can. Do it in the physical world. Do it in the cyber sphere. This behavior is both intentionally escalatory and in the process of getting worse. ■ It's clear that the Kremlin is out to use attacks on critical infrastructure to achieve asymmetrical gains against the countries that favor a rules-based order in the world. It's easier and cheaper for bad actors to go around causing damage and creating chaos than it is for good actors to protect their assets. Painful as that disproportionality might be, it's the unfortunate reality. If this is how they're acting on Christmas, we shouldn't expect anything better by spring. We need to plan for much worse.
December 25, 2024
Safety briefings and Christmas greetings
In a delightful long-form takedown essay reviewing an over-the-top airline safety video from 2013, humorist Daniel O'Brien asks a question that is more serious than not: "[G]iven that no lives were provably saved, at least one of the performers sued the production and it potentially made passengers less safe all in an attempt to help a now-dead airline GO VIRAL on a now-mostly-dead social media website [...] Who was this for?" ■ Airline safety briefings unexpectedly share something in common with Christmas church services, and it's a matter that applies in several important areas of life: How do you communicate a high-value message to an audience that is highly variegated and whose motivation to pay attention ranges from "extremely alert" to "potentially already napping"? The same factors apply to issues of public health, weather awareness, cybersecurity, and no small number of other topics. ■ It's a tough and surprisingly under-studied field. As O'Brien notes, when certain stylistic and production techniques are put to work, it's entirely possible that the end result can actually leave the audience less informed than before they sat down. From what little we do know, there are three big points to keep in mind. ■ The first is to ensure the audience knows what's in it for them -- and is given fresh motivation at least every five to seven minutes. (Minds wander quickly.) The second is to connect new information to old knowledge: Starting from scratch takes a lot more active thought than having a familiar point for jumping off. (This is why metaphors are so often helpful.) ■ The last point is to keep the whole affair simple. An audience that has heard the same fundamental message at least a dozen times before won't take well to condescension, and it's likely to bore easily. Yet, at least for some of those messages, when people don't listen, very bad things can happen. But when the message gets through, lives can be saved.
December 22, 2024
A hot rumor is usually too much for a tabloid-style paper to pass up, and the rumor that Jeff Bezos is about to have a $600 million wedding has proven too much for the Daily Mail to resist. Predictably, Bezos has denied the story. ■ Just as predictably, critics have latched on to the story to decry the very possibility that anyone could have access to such wealth that a $600 million event is even a possibility. We can have endless arguments about whether lavish weddings are in good taste, but critics need to get one thing clear: Second-order effects matter. ■ Even if you have a moral objection to the accumulation of wealth, probably the best thing the ultra-wealthy can do for society is to spend lavishly, especially on events and experiences. If someone is planning a $6 million wedding, let alone a $600 million one, they're not out to cut corners and drive down profit margins for their vendors. They're out to put as much cold, hard cash into the hands of florists and bakers and drivers and housekeepers and decorators and pilots and wait staff and dry cleaners and photographers and bellhops and stylists as possible. ■ That's the redeeming quality of conspicuous consumption: Lavish spending puts people to work. And unless everyone is taking home a new Lamborghini as a party favor, then an extravagant event is an extremely efficient transfer of wealth from the ultra-rich to lots of working people. ■ The best response that the opponents of wealth could possibly have to a rumor like this isn't "We shouldn't have billionaires", it's "Why stop at $600 million, Jeff? What's keeping you from dropping a cool billion on the most important day in your life?" Why wait for the tax collector to conduct redistribution slowly and inefficiently, when a rich person's ego can redistribute their money faster?
December 21, 2024
The most reliable way to the top in many occupations is often portrayed as a monomaniacal focus on that career success -- doing whatever it takes to continue climbing the ladder. Young attorneys are told to devote everything to becoming partners, actors move to Los Angeles and do whatever it takes to get by, and athletes endure grueling training and practice regimes to make it to the next league. ■ Yet it's not really good life advice. Everyone knows the adage that nobody ever laid on a deathbed wishing they'd spent more time at the office. Work is inevitably a big component of most people's lives, but it's hazardous to let it choke out choices that make for a more complete view of life. ■ Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson just got a chance to perform a cameo in a Broadway musical. The appearance fulfills a life-long aspiration, even if it's not a career pivot. ■ It's good for high-profile people to have well-rounded interests. It's good for regular people, too. Interests become sources of identity, and having a self-identity that takes the shape of a blanket woven from many different threads is a way to steer clear of becoming one-dimensional. ■ Different sources of identity can overlap, fill gaps, and even create conflicts and internal contradictions that we have to sort out. That's a healthy part of the human condition, especially if it helps one see the texture and color in others' humanity. We ought to beware those who want to be seen only in caricature as a single thing; either they're hiding things that should matter to them, or they're missing out on vital aspects of what should be a normal and complete life.
December 20, 2024
The chaotic race to hold off a government shutdown ought to serve as a spur for the public to demand something that might seem contrary: To demand an expansion of the House of Representatives. ■ The reflexive response goes something like, "Why should we pay for more politicians when we don't like the ones we already have?". But the problem we need to solve is that as House districts grow ever larger by population (remember, we've been fixed at 435 seats in the House for a century, despite enormous population growth since then), the costs of getting elected (and re-elected) have risen. Those costs are both direct (as in the cost of campaign ads) and implied (since any individual incumbent feels greater pressure not to endanger their own re-election by taking chances). ■ Is there room to do it? Yes, we could make space within the existing chamber to fit a lot more Representatives. (If airlines can squeeze passengers into ever-smaller seats, surely we can pack a few more elected officials into a room for debate.) And the additional support staff required could fit into some new buildings, if we were to be smart about it. ■ Among many arguments for making the House bigger -- among them, making the Electoral College more proportional without tweaking the Constitution -- one we shouldn't overlook is the value of getting a variety of new perspectives and sources of expertise into the room. We have a lot of lawyers (30% of Representatives have law degrees) but not a lot of people with more varied backgrounds, like auto-repair shop owners and psychologists. ■ In a world marked by increasing complexity, a dose of multidisciplinarity among the voting members would make Congress better. Change is unlikely, of course, unless and until the members see it in their own self-interest to expand the House. But it's worth pressing the issue from the outside, since our frustrations are often more systematic than not.
December 18, 2024
What democracy really looks like
The short-lived attempt to impose martial law on the Republic of Korea was a remarkable news event -- not least because it happened on a timeline with which even social media tools could scarcely keep pace. The president who attempted the stunt has been suspended and faces the first court hearing about whether to remove him permanently from office before the end of the month. He's also going to be investigated by a Corruption Investigation Office. ■ The incident was a lesson for the world about the elements of democracy, especially under stress. Since at least 1999, American protesters (usually on the left) have adhered to the idea that big gatherings are the best way to show, in their words, "What democracy looks like". And while there is nothing wrong with the exercise of the Constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of peaceable assembly, mass gatherings are only useful in certain circumstances. ■ The 1963 March on Washington, for instance, was a powerful symbol because it showed just how many people were ready to redeem, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., the "promissory note" written into the nation's founding but long denied in practice. It was also an event resulting from a very long crescendo of determined, persistent action against unjust laws prevailing in the South. ■ In South Korea's case, it's entirely possible that mass gatherings may have been effective, ultimately, in repelling the attempted autogolpe. But South Korea got something much better: Its legislature responded with steadiness and firmness to a fundamental appeal to civic duty. ■ They said no, in no uncertain terms. And they did it even though guns had been drawn. ■ That, even more than any gathering, is "what democracy looks like". It looks like officials putting the interests of their laws, their future, and their honor ahead of personal hazard. That isn't always a given: Some politicians are cowardly, craven, or selfish. ■ Korea's legislators have modeled for the world exactly what it means to serve as leaders -- to put their duty and honor in front of their fears. "Public service" can become a hollow cliche, but we have just witnessed what can happen when people authentically believe in putting others before themselves.
December 17, 2024
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have published a joint statement telling the people of New Jersey to stop panicking over rumors of drones flying overhead. It's no small dismissal for them to say, "There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space." ■ Panics happen from time to time, and it's not especially surprising that people are looking into the sky at night and misinterpreting what they see. Lots of airplanes are flying overhead, almost all of the time. Especially along the Eastern Seaboard. ■ What we don't need is a nation full of Yosemite Sams firing off their guns (or even their high-powered lasers) at things they don't understand. ■ The United States certainly does need a sensible, well-calibrated approach to protecting civilians (especially at large gatherings) from the hazards of malicious uncrewed aerial vehicles. Ukraine has demonstrated just how useful drones can be in combat operations. ■ But vigilante behavior is virtually always in error, and the odds are much too great that Americans taking matters into their own hands (including members of Congress). Almost everything can be given a reasonable explanation to those who are reasonable enough to listen. We don't need the unreasonable among us taking amateur anti-aircraft potshots.
December 15, 2024
Don't leave talent on the sidelines
An approving profile of Pearl Young, the first woman to work in a technical role at the predecessor to today's NASA, notes that her gender made her a target for supervisors in the 1930s who complained of her attitude. "Attitude", of course, is the kind of complaint that is just plausible enough that it can't be dismissed out of hand, but it's vague enough that it can't really be proven either true or untrue. ■ It's generally worth noting who is so insecure in their status that they turn to non-falsifiable complaints about others in order to try to hold on to their own positions. Young's co-workers might have been aggrieved by a workplace attitude, but they also might have resented seeing a woman competing with them in the workplace. ■ Few things seem more likely to reflect the actual state of nature than to assume that raw talent is distributed widely throughout the human population. It would be close to madness to assume that any gender, ethnicity, or other inborn trait puts any individual closer to some kind of special claim to genius than any other. ■ This means that the bigger the net cast by a society to try to capture great talent, the more of it they should find. Arbitrarily and systemically excluding women from the scientific and technical fields, as was a widespread practice in the US until not all that long ago, was an incredibly stupid "own-goal". And yet it's still practiced by some of our rivals yet today. ■ For instance, China still doesn't have more than a handful of women in its space program, even in 2024. This doesn't mean they would be better off with a system of quotas to raise that number; the disparity is the evidence of some much deeper problems. ■ But if a group is selected from a large population that ought to have widely-distributed talent and the resulting picks look badly skewed to the notable exclusion of significant groups, then it's a strong symptom that the selectors are probably leaving much of the available natural talent on the sidelines.
December 14, 2024
NATO's secretary-general wants a message to go to the leaders of European countries: "Tell them they need to spend more on defense so that we can continue to live in peace, tell them that security matters more than anything". In the words of Ulrike Franke, "No one wants to hear this. No one wants to say this. But it's crucial that this becomes part of the conversation." ■ It's true; nobody wants to be told to spend lots more money on tools they hope will go unused. But it's a paradoxical relationship: Build up a lot of weapons, and (at least in one dynamic) the odds of having to use them go down. Fail to armor up raises the odds that a vicious adversary will take advantage of the relative weakness. ■ "We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years. Danger is moving towards us at full speed," says Mark Rutte, the secretary-general. Some might dismiss his alarm because he has an incentive to encourage preparedness. But we shouldn't discount his warning any more than we might ignore the advice of a cardiologist worried about a patient whose cholesterol is on the rise. ■ What's it going to take to get the most sluggish partners to wake up to the threat, a thousand-day land war in Europe?
December 13, 2024
One of the most information-dense graphics in all of weather, and it's one that ordinary people can gain a lot from learning to read
"All of north India has been pushed into a medical emergency"
Air pollution, long a chronic condition in places like Delhi, has become an acute problem this year, leading one high-ranking politician to declare that "all of north India has been pushed into a medical emergency". It's a problem culminating from combustion engines, construction activity, agricultural fires, and other sources. Even fireworks are part of the debate. ■ Anything significant that happens in India already tends to have consequences for a noteworthy share of the world's population, but in this case, India is simply experiencing an acute encounter with a problem that plagues almost all of us from time to time. Just this summer, wildfires in Canada's west caused spikes in doctors' visits in Baltimore, Maryland. ■ In a parallel with that other inescapable necessity, water, the best way to fix air pollution is to prevent its creation at the source. But failing that, it seems like there's still a lot of public-health ground to gain by figuring out how to economically clean large volumes of outdoor air and ultra-purify indoor air. ■ Neither consideration is anything new; people have talked about ideas as far-out as building giant fans to blow the smog out of Los Angeles. But if non-point-source pollution looks like a big problem for water quality (and it is), then it's an even bigger problem for air. By nature, gases tend to spread. Whatever pollutants start bumping around with air molecules become very hard to capture again. ■ But given that lots of what gets us sick is just floating around amid our indoor air, there ought to be more energy going into improving air quality even for places that don't have Delhi-level pollution. ■ It does go to show what a misstep it has been for America's public consciousness to think of problems like air and water pollution as "environmental" issues. Sure, there's a sense in which they are; but what really matters is that they are health issues that harm and even shorten human life. That should command a lot of energetic attention.
December 12, 2024
A fire in Minneapolis started in a lot that was vacant of any permanent structures, but apparently crowded with tents and other temporary shelters. By the time it was extinguished, the fire had consumed the encampment and spread to a neighboring house -- one which had evidently been maintained with care. A second house nearby was also damaged. A similar event happened in the same neighborhood about two weeks ago. ■ Urban fires used to be grave and frequent threats in America. The Great Fires in Chicago (1871) and San Francisco (1906) are well-remembered, but lots of other American cities had huge and devastating fires, too, including Pittsburgh in 1845 and Atlanta in 1917. ■ Building codes have made a huge difference, as have professional firefighting crews. A huge difference is made by automatic fire sprinkler systems, which like modern fire departments, depend upon the public water systems that supply water faster than any tanker truck could deliver it. ■ But if people are living in informal or makeshift arrangements (like a tent encampment), then many of the protective advancements of modern living are lost. It's one of the reasons why people shouldn't have a knee-jerk response when asked to reconsider using the word "homeless". In a very real sense, the people in the Minneapolis encampment probably considered their tents "home", so they weren't really homeless -- but they were literally "unhoused". ■ The condition of going unhoused may have been voluntary or involuntary. There are plenty of social, economic, and health factors involved. But the consequences of living in conditions of heightened danger -- like using propane tanks to fuel their heat sources, which are at high risk of exploding in a fire, as happened in Minneapolis -- ended up harming people both inside and outside the encampment. ■ Nothing resolves these problems better than housing supply. A generous supply of housing that is safe and dignified is, in a very real sense, a matter of public safety, even if that isn't always obvious. Reasonable minds can differ on how to achieve that supply, but no one who wants to secure the benefits of modern safety practices should ignore the most important upstream factor. ■ Markets are very good at filling voids, even for goods like low-cost housing, but they often run into opposition from people who use zoning ordinances and other tools of political pressure to try to stifle that supply. The fires in Minneapolis show how the consequences can turn out to be dangerous for everyone.
December 11, 2024
Andrew Carnegie famously donated an enormous fortune to the construction of more than 2,500 free public libraries around the world, the majority of which were built in the United States. Carnegie's library campaign comprised one of the largest philanthropic gifts in history, when adjusted for dollar value, and it would be hard to imagine the consequential value of that gift. Free public libraries are treasured institutions that have the potential to create enormous welfare benefit for individuals and for society as a whole. ■ The philanthropic choices of wealthy people have always attracted great attention. And the inevitable question that must be weighed is: Can wealth do more good now, or should it be endowed for future use? ■ That's an especially challenging question, philosophically, because the kinds of people who accrue enormous wealth generally show a predisposition to delay gratification and a strong belief in the power of compounding. In the words of Warren Buffett, you want to build a snowball by finding a lot of snow and a really long hill. ■ But it's hard to ensure that a foundation designed to do philanthropic work (like giving away an enormous personal fortune) will remain true to its founders' intentions -- or that it will adapt appropriately as times change. What might have been a good charitable cause in 1924 might be entirely outdated in 2024. ■ Thus it is interesting to note the choice of the Kiewit Foundation, a philanthropy established on $150 million donated in 1980, to wind itself down by its 50-year mark, giving away $500 million in remaining assets in an enormous blitz. ■ The Kiewit Foundation has focused mainly on causes in and around Omaha, and some of its beneficiaries have relied a great deal on its support, so the transition could prove difficult for some. But on the larger scale, it's probably best for the wealth to be put to work sooner rather than later, since, like Carnegie's public libraries, the real benefit isn't in the first-order spending but rather in the second-order consequences of the spending that then leverage future possibilities. ■ In the Carnegie case, society benefits directly from having the books, but it benefits even more from the human potential that is unleashed or expanded by those books. In the Kiewit case, it's still to be determined which investments will take up the balance of what is to be distributed. But if they spread the investments around among a reasonable number of well-considered possibilities (say, perhaps, two dozen or so), and if good management is involved at the non-profits who get the funds, then even if a few of the initiatives turn out to be duds, at least a few of the remainder ought to be big enough victories to make the investment a permanent inflection point for the community overall.
December 10, 2024
Senator Bernie Sanders, who remains crankily "independent" while still trying to sway the Democratic Party by caucusing among them, has offered some unsolicited senatorial legitimacy to the efforts of the incoming Presidential administration. Sanders opines: "The defense budget is bloated. Defense contractors engage in fraud and waste. That's why we should cut military spending by 10%. I hope Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will support that effort." ■ It's a literally disingenuous claim. Sanders doesn't want to cut military spending because he thinks that 10% of the spending is fraudulent. He wants to cut that spending because he is broadly opposed to military power projections abroad. That is an opinion shared by others, even if it is troublingly wrong-headed at a time when the Communist Party that runs China is acting aggressively towards our friends and allies and Russia is engaged in a violent invasion of Ukraine. ■ To think that a world from which the United States withdraws or retreats is a safer one is to imagine that, somehow, the many things we ought to know about human nature do not exist. There will always be some balance of power in the world; the question is merely whether forces of good will control that balance. ■ If the problem were really one of fraud and abuse, then the solution wouldn't be a 10% across-the-board cut anyway: Fraud and abuse are controlled by spending more, not less, on auditing and enforcement. But that's an inconvenient fact of accounting. Undoubtedly, there is some wasteful spending to be found in the defense budget, just as there is waste to be found elsewhere. But the Constitution gives the power of the purse, in no uncertain terms, to Congress. ■ It is up to Congress to decide how much spending is the right amount, and by how much to oversee that spending. That isn't the province of any made-up departments of the Executive Branch. To pretend otherwise is deeply dishonest dealing.
December 6, 2024
Bits and bytes of Woodward and Bernstein
One of the many unusual aspects of content generated by artificial intelligence is that it is not eligible for copyright protection under current interpretations of US law. This happens to coincide with another exception in copyright law, which holds that facts cannot be copyrighted. Due to this loophole-within-a-loophole, virtually every piece of factual news reporting is rather suddenly up for grabs via a backdoor route to the public domain. ■ That's because artificial intelligence is being used to generate (one hesitates to use the word "write") "news" stories, and the essence of generative AI is that it draws from the available written content in the world to create new material based upon the old. All it takes is for an AI tool to recognize factual content, and it is more or less at liberty to generate an offshoot or derivative piece of content -- which it can do in virtually unlimited volume, without sleep, until the end of time. ■ Facts, though, can be costly to obtain, and real judgment remains an exclusive advantage of thinking human beings. That hasn't stopped the companies backing AI technology from dabbling with experiments in the news business anyway. And it's only set to grow in intensity: One thing that human beings (who possess the eyeballs whose attention pays the bills for online services) are always likely to crave is new information about the world around them. ■ Lacking judgment is no small handicap: Computers might get pretty good at predicting what will generate clicks, but that doesn't mean they'll ever know when they've uncovered the next Watergate. ■ But if big computing companies, in the rush to try to generate any kind of profit off of AI experiments that they can, bluster their way into the news business with such force that they choke out the painfully dwindling number of journalists still on the job by "re-packaging" what the true shoe-leather reporters uncovered and wrote, then we're not only heading towards a future where everywhere is a news desert, we're also en route to a day when few human beings will have any practice (or resulting intuitive judgment) left to know when something advertised as "news" really is news.
Nevermind what the government has been saying and how it has been acting for many years now: Americans are being told to switch to encrypted messaging services rather than old-fashioned texts between friends and family. It's a significant reversal, instigated by the revelation that China's government and its affiliates have seriously compromised the security of America's telecommunications infrastructure. ■ So, all that stuff we used to hear about the importance of having backdoors for law enforcement? Forget it! Now it's all encryption, all the time! ■ It's all a matter of finding the lesser among evils -- or, perhaps, of making weighted-risk assessments of the available options. It may be bad if domestic law enforcement can't crack criminal cases because people were encrypting messages and rendering wiretaps useless. It's probably a whole lot worse if a hostile adversary can plug into the essential lines of communications that we've always used with almost no hesitation because what's domestic feels secure (even when it's not). ■ End-to-end communications encryption is rising to the surface as a matter of vital national interest, but it's also time to start considering what to do with data when it's "at rest" -- not traveling from place to place, but residing on the user's devices. We're going to regret not taking storage encryption more seriously than we do now; depending on what else our adversaries have already compromised, it may already be too late for much of what is stored.
December 5, 2024
America's enormous prosperity is so vast and such a part of the background of ordinary life that we don't often have the ability to see how much it pervades even the smallest aspects of our national experience. This can ultimately be hazardous, especially if it causes us to become disengaged from the sources of that prosperity. ■ Take, for example, the incredible network of four-lane highways that connect so much of the country. Roads have been important to commerce for as long as humans have gathered in settlements, and four-lane divided highways are basically the pinnacle of what a road can be: Fast, useful, and comparatively safe. ■ America has so many of them that some go lightly traveled. In places, a motorist might have a whole lane to travel with no other vehicles around for a mile or two ahead or behind, even in broad daylight. But while those highways are so common as to be seemingly everywhere to an American, there are US counties with more four-lane highway miles than entire nations abroad. ■ Even the Trans-Canada Highway, which one might expect to be the biggest and widest in its country, still contains segments of only two lanes. (And Canada is one of the rich countries!) Meanwhile, there are multiple four-lane routes across mid-sized states like Iowa, built at typical costs of around $10 million per mile. ■ When prosperity seeps into every aspect of life experience like that, it can become hard to notice without intentional focus. That is in many ways a blessing, but it also means we have to be on guard against the blissful ignorance of the conditions that make prosperity possible: Trade (mostly free), standards (wisely set), and competition (lawfully maintained), among others. These goods don't appear merely by accident.
December 3, 2024
Feedback loops in political economy
An enlightening paper on political attitudes in the United States reveals that zero-sum thinking has a deeper effect on many people's preferences than any conventional partisan alignment. It's a conclusion based upon survey data collected from a sample of more than 20,000 Americans, and the results are convincing. ■ Even more eye-opening is the observation that zero-sum thinking, which is quite convincingly related to economic conditions in one's youth, is also demonstrably related to previous generations' experience within a family. If your parents or grandparents (and maybe even great-grandparents) experienced economic mobility, there's probably an effect that shows up, measurably, in your attitudes today. ■ The research certainly helps to build a case for seeing economic growth and progress as an important pillar for what we historically called a "liberal" world order: One based on liberties and freedoms for all. Setting up false rivalries between groups (an exercise in zero-sum thinking) is a long-standing weapon of those who want to use power in bad ways. ■ It's also a mild case for supporting those programs, initiatives, and institutions that help young people to appreciate constructive and non-competitive activities in their youth. If our political attitudes in adulthood are partially formed by whether we see the economic pie as a thing that can grow or not, surely we are also formed by whether our recreational and developmental activities convince us to see everything as matchups between teams, one of which must lose in order for the other to win. ■ It's all quite insightful, and probably unexpectedly helpful in illuminating why some of the conventional assumptions about the two-party political system in the US seem to be falling apart before our eyes. Feedback loops can be very real -- and have very long periods.
December 2, 2024
While the news of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend placed considerable attention on the President's decision to pardon his long-troublemaking son, another prominent father passed judgment of a different sort on his offspring. Warren Buffett, who has a nearly $150 billion fortune to his name, announced a plan to entrust the charitable distribution of his wealth to his children when he passes away. ■ Buffett's announcement is unusually frank in its assessment of how his children came to this point: When his first wife died and left behind a $3 billion fortune, "they were not ready to handle the staggering wealth that Berkshire shares had generated". That was in 2004, when they were in their late 40s and early 50s. ■ "Not ready" says a lot, even if it's objectively true that taking over a $3 billion fortune would test the judgment of most people. Barack Obama became President of the United States at age 47. Dwight Eisenhower was 53 years old on D-Day. Plenty of big decisions have been made at middle age. ■ To his credit, though, Buffett has sought to be clear-eyed about his own offspring and their preparedness for big responsibility -- which now includes giving away his enormous fortune (about 50 times larger now than $3 billion) when he dies. "I've never wished to create a dynasty or pursue any plan that extended beyond the children", writes Buffett. "I know the three well and trust them completely. Future generations are another matter [...] And tomorrow's decisions are likely to be better made by three live and well-directed brains than by a dead hand." ■ It's a lesson worth considering in contrast with many other prominent parental choices, including the exercise of a Presidential pardon. Everyone must make their own choices in adulthood, but nobody should be held more responsible for forming a future adult than their parents. The eighteen years (or so) of childhood are both an eternity and an instant. But, actuarially speaking, most people will know their own offspring far longer as adults than as juveniles. Every bit of effort that goes into producing good people from the start matters to what character emerges when they come of age.
December 1, 2024
Sentences that would have once been incomprehensible
The broadcasting journal TV Technology reports with no apparent surprise: "Twin Cities PBS (TPT) said it will premiere 'Broadcast Wars,' an original documentary about local broadcast news in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The program will be available on Nov. 26 at 7 p.m. as a two-hour film on TPT 2 and as a three-part streaming limited series available on the PBS App." ■ For one thing, the thought that the rivalries among different news operations within a major (but not top-ten) market would merit a documentary would almost certainly have shocked anyone living through the time period that is the focus of the project. Producing anything of a scale close to that of a feature film would have been a massively expensive project in the 1980s or times before. "60 Minutes" was a groundbreaking television show in part because only the major commercial networks had the resources to do big feature projects -- certainly not local Public Television affiliates. ■ Then there's the matter of distribution: To anyone living in the Reagan Era, it would seem incomprehensible for a media outlet to develop an ambitious production like a three-part, 120-minute documentary and then distribute it mainly via the Internet, with the thought of possibly broadcasting it later on a digital TV subchannel little more than an afterthought. ■ And then there is the matter of the unspoken subtext: That the era when local television news really, really mattered would someday be a matter more suited for historical documentary than hot topic of current conversation. And yet, that's how it is: Local TV news still matters and still brings in a lot of revenue, but streaming and other digital platforms are where to find the real growth. ■ Self-respecting communities still need journalists and documentarians. The Minneapolis-St. Paul television market is big and robust, and due to geography, it dominates most of the state of 5.7 million people. That would put it roughly between Denmark and Finland in population, both of which can easily claim to have distinctive cultures (including media) of their own. The same could and should be easy to say about Minnesota. ■ But there is also no doubt that the environment generally has become harder for "local" media of all types, as classified advertising has evaporated (massively undercutting the traditional workhorse of newspaper revenues) and conventional synchronous viewing and listening have been widely displaced for television and radio. How we work out what comes next -- which isn't just a business or media question, but a major social one as well -- will have no small impact on the shape of the future.
The massive death toll caused by Russia's continued assault against Ukraine really is hard to fathom. The Kremlin could stop the pointless dying in an instant.
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