Gongol.com Archives: June 2024
| June 2024 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | ||||||
June 1, 2024
An arrest is not a conviction. The recent case of golfer Scottie Scheffler is a fair reminder that an arrest is an action undertaken, in the moment, by a law-enforcement officer. And sometimes, arresting police officers make mistakes, get carried away, or simply lie about what they witness. ■ Prosecutorial standards can be inconsistent. The movement to pardon or commute sentences over non-violent drug-related offenses is a reflection of growing acknowledgment that some communities have faced harsher penalties than others for the same offenses. ■ People can go on to be law-abiding, constructive citizens after spending time in the correctional system. Martha Stewart did hard time after a felony conviction, but she seems not to have pickpocketed or otherwise bilked close friends like Snoop Dogg in the nearly two decades since. ■ We are equal under the law. Besides a deadly Civil War to resolve the question, America has enshrined that standard of equal protection in the 14th Amendment and in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Equality means plainly that no citizen is without the protection of the law, nor is anyone above it. ■ The right to a trial by jury is a fundamental one. Americans can request the decision of a jury, screen the jurors for objectionable outlooks, and tailor arguments to try to appeal to their individual biases and predispositions. ■ Juries can be wrong. They can be unsophisticated. They can be imperfect in any of the ways that any collection of a dozen people might be. But juries selected at random from voter registration lists are structurally about as consistent with the principle of self-government as anything else we do in practical civic life. If the ordinary juror can understand the facts, the law, and the testimony presented, and emerge convinced of a defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, then that conviction is just about the most honest assessment a community can possibly give to the behavior of the accused.
June 3, 2024
Maximize housing production now
The concept of home has a powerful hold on the American mind. The objective of our national pastime is to arrive at home plate. A majority of the states have some version of the castle doctrine enshrined in state law. Americans spend upwards of $11 billion a year on motorhomes. ■ Perhaps this effect is especially pronounced in America because so many people are either actively or vestigially aware that they descend from refugees or other immigrants driven from their homes somewhere else. Half a dozen generations removed from the Great Famine, some Irish Americans can still be found invoke holy protection of their homes with St. Brigid's crosses. Many other cultures behave similarly. ■ With rising mortgage interest rates appearing to have real consequences for homeownership rates, we should reckon with the range of factors that tend to drive up the cost of homeownership. We don't do very well at laying out high-density transportation options near high-density living options. Our predominant zoning patterns discourage innovations in the "missing middle" of housing. Financing conventions have long penalized economical options like manufactured housing. ■ Many of the problems come down to local choices and regulations, which in turn are often driven by inertia, fear of policy innovation, and a general lack of imagination. But maximizing the supply of safe, dignified, and affordable housing isn't just consistent with a sort of atmospheric Americanism; it's also well-established that stable housing contributes meaningfully to a number of important health measures. ■ Stories like profiles of the homeless high school valedictorian should urge us to a greater awareness of the need to press hard for the policies that would maximize the supply of housing options that provide security, safety, and stability -- even if they start from a modest base. If the sod house can have a place in American myth, surely we can find ways to open up wider paths to suitable options for the modern world.
June 4, 2024
This used to be a much more dangerous country
There exists a class of viral videos best described as "People in lesser-developed countries doing eye-wateringly dangerous work". Thanks to the social-media algorithms that reward intensity of reaction rather than intrinsic quality, videos like "Excavator operator on completely unstable slope tries to free giant boulder at enormous personal risk" are rewarded with millions of views and priority placement in the news feeds of ordinary users. ■ Above all, we should not reward the creators of these videos. Just because an activity is recorded doesn't mean it needs to be shared. And just because the subject of a video manages not to get killed or gravely injured while, for instance, building a path along a sheer mountain cliff, doesn't mean that it should get clicks, likes, or views. Those only encourage the production of more such videos. ■ Just about the only good that can come of circulating those videos among people in countries with more advanced economies (and better protections for worker health and safety) is, perhaps, an appreciation for just how dangerous life was even for the people of our own countries -- and families -- just a couple of generations ago. It is not OSHA, per se, that make American workplaces safer than they were in the past, but rather the conditions of measurement, reporting, public pressure, and viable workplace alternatives, among others. ■ In 1931 (less than a century ago), 17,000 American workers died on the job. In 2022, that number was 5,486 -- less than a third of the earlier figure, despite a near-tripling of the total population. Today's number is still too high, but prosperity, technological advancements, and public pressure on legislators and regulators have served to reduce the rate by a great deal. ■ Similar changes are essentially inevitable elsewhere, as economic standards rise, choices expand, and, critically, public demands are taken more seriously by government leaders. America used to be a vastly more dangerous place in ordinary life, but highly meritorious improvements have changed that. We should avoid danger voyeurism, no matter how often the algorithms try to serve it up.
June 5, 2024
History isn't just for the victors
The aphorism goes, "History is written by the victors". That's adjacent to the truth, but it's not quite right. History is, in fact, written by those who endure. ■ In the case of D-Day, history really has been written by the victors -- and for good cause. 80 years ago on June 6th, the Allies ignited the beginning of the end for the Axis powers. Once rightly vanquished, the Nazis had nothing to contribute to the writing of that history. But modern Germany takes a part in continuing to write and acknowledge the history of that day. ■ There are plenty of other historical victors, though, from whom we hear little or nothing. Genghis Khan exists mainly in hazy myth today, and his Mongol Empire left behind little of its own impression on the literary history of the world. ■ In times closer to our own, the Communist Party won the struggle for control of China. But what happened 35 years ago, at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, can't be expunged from history. The protests were real, the Tank Man was real, and the instinct to believe that individual human beings matter and that their liberties are inherent isn't erasable. ■ Even if the regime (the side of the apparent victors) seeks to purge its own history even from AI chatbots, the attempts to write history-minus-the-truth only end up highlighting the gaps. Human resistance to oppression will endure -- and those who endure will ultimately have the say in what history records.
June 7, 2024
A woman is in a dispute with the city of Chariton, Iowa, over her intention to keep a goose as an "emotional-support animal". At other times, from other places, we've heard of emotional-support boa constrictors, emotional-support pigs, and emotional-support alligators. ■ The idea of emotional bonding with certain familiar species of animals -- dogs, cats, horses, perhaps the occasional parakeet -- is nothing new. Dogs have been our pets for tens of thousands of years. And it's entirely possible that some people achieve satisfying attachments to animals of far-flung breeds. ■ But the claims to "emotional support" from far-flung members of the animal kingdom, known neither for their intelligence nor their warmth, strains credulity. There is, for instance, an entire Facebook group devoted to the titular claim that Canada Geese Are Jerks. ■ Modern life is indeed more complex than lift at any time in the past. We have to navigate many questions and challenges daily just in order to survive, and that can tax people whose mental composition isn't optimal for that complexity. ■ Perhaps, though, that should indicate to us something about the need to equip ourselves, both as individuals and as a society, with the tools to adapt and endure the struggles and hard times that come our way, rather than retreating into the imagined "emotional support" of species for which indifference to humans would be an improvement over their natural instincts. ■ Everyone needs mental tools to persist through especially troubling times, and sometimes just to get through ordinary days. But those tools are ultimately internal in nature, not things we can project onto other creatures and then relay back to ourselves, certainly not upon pains of losing access to housing.
June 8, 2024
An employee at an airport shop in Fort Lauderdale is charged with grand theft after a passenger tracked her luggage to his house after it went missing from the baggage carousel. This incident would be an excellent one out of which to make a very big example: Throw the book at the thief, and make sure that airport employees nationwide hear about it. ■ In particular, the victim's method of tracking down the luggage needs to be part of the story. She tracked an Apple Watch that was inside the suitcase. ■ Deterrence needs to be credible in order to be effective. Appropriate deterrence in this case requires that airport employees know and believe that there is both (a) a significant chance that anything they steal can and will be tracked, and (b) a high probability that they will face extremely unpleasant penalties if caught stealing. ■ The odds that the accused thief was working alone seem slim. Travelers are stripped of many of their normal defense mechanisms when they enter airports -- having to trust any number of unseen baggage handlers, security screeners, and other individuals along the way, all while themselves having to jump through many hoops to accommodate what oftentimes feels like little more than security theater. A single stolen suitcase may not seem like much, but if the authorities don't drop the hammer on all of the culprits involved, they risk undermining the essential trust that travelers must have in their handlers.
June 9, 2024
When the president of a nuclear power goes about smugly saying of Europe, "They are more or less defenseless" against such weapons (as Vladimir Putin has just done), then it is high time to be sure of two things. ■ The first is to be entirely clear in mind -- and in resolve -- to put to use every prudent tool of deterrence or detection available against such weapons. From the moment that a second country in the world had developed nuclear weapons, the deployment of those weapons has been a gamble. And in the context of any gamble, the actions of counterparties affects the overall calculation of risk. For the now-mostly allied nations of Europe, there is no real substitute for unapologetically finding ways to decrease the offensive value of a potential adversary's nuclear weapons. ■ The second is to be sure that it becomes uncomfortable to be voluntarily in the aggressor's orbit -- and welcoming in ours. Putin's thinly-veiled threats were made at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an event at which a BBC reporter "saw delegations from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America". ■ Russia is actively engaged in a plainly unprovoked war of aggression and invasion against Ukraine, and now its president is pleased to threaten the remainder of Europe. No country should find itself comfortable sending a delegation to an economic conference there. It should be clear that until it withdraws from Ukraine and ceases to menace its neighbors, it is a pariah state, and its poor standing should be considered contagious. ■ That requires, though, a carrot to balance out the stick: Just as the US and the USSR raced each other to align other countries with themselves during the Cold War, we should be eager to use trade, engagement, and diplomacy to make it much more comfortable to be in our orbit than to be showing up to make deals in St. Petersburg. Until they can throw a conference and have nobody show up, there's a lot of strategic work to be done.
June 10, 2024
Elon Musk is threatening to ban iPhones from his companies if Apple goes through with plans to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT into the best-known Apple devices. It is one of many prominent artificial-intelligence-related headlines capturing a disproportionate share of public and news media attention right now. ■ Musk points at privacy concerns as the root of his reaction, and his ventures do indeed depend heavily upon proprietary information and processes. Apple says that almost everything new that it intends to enable in its devices will be computed on the device itself, essentially answering those privacy concerns from the very start. If little or nothing is submitted to or processed by cloud computing, then the device might arguably be seen as little more than a private extension of the user's own mind. ■ But what the controversy cannot really address is a more fundamental question: What is the ultimate calling for these technologies? We call the whole basket of them "artificial intelligence tools", but to a considerable degree, the large-language models aren't really generating new ideas. In many cases, they are being used to draw useful connections -- to some extent, even to synthesize the questions that human users ought to be asking. ■ Ultimately, though, as with human creators, the lasting merit will be found in generating thoroughly novel ideas. We will know something new and different is happening when artificial intelligence can come up with an eighth basic narrative plot that hasn't been previously explored. Until that time, it will mostly function to reassemble the information that humans have already cast into the world -- which will be of little comfort to those who, like Musk, believe their information is too valuable to let leak.
June 11, 2024
When is a frankfurter not a hot dog?
Joey Chestnut, the world's most renowned competitive eater of hot dogs, has been told he is not welcome to attend the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest this year unless he repents of his endorsement deal with Impossible Foods. ■ Chestnut, who is in a position as a perennial favorite and double-digit-year champion of the event to throw his weight around a bit, says his absence "will deprive the great fans of the holiday's usual joy and entertainment". It will still be Independence Day, after all, but the contest would certainly look different without him. ■ Not that it's anything but an entirely commercial endeavor, anyway. The holiday is rightly celebrated by re-reading at least a few lines of the Declaration of Independence; the hot dogs are just garnish on the day. But other than opening the door wide for Impossible Foods to get some free publicity for their plant-based frankfurters, the decision as reported may unintentionally elevate the meatless hot dogs. ■ If you're a sports-car company and a popular driver wants to endorse a motorcycle brand, you can openly say, "Motorcycles are totally different from sports cars, and there's lots of room for both!" But if you consider motorcycles peers or even rivals for a category like "The experience of driving fast", then you might actually be giving yourself a harder time in the long run by saying that there's a conflict between competing in one and being a spokesperson for the other. ■ The entire thing may be a self-serving fabricated controversy anyway -- that much remains to be seen. But it seems like the most prudent move for the incumbent makers of beef-based dogs is to "otherize" the vegan alternative as much as possible, rather than implying that they are competitors in the same class.
June 13, 2024
The shareholders of Tesla have ratified an unfathomably large compensation package for Elon Musk -- one, in the words of the company's proxy statement, "equivalent to 12% of the total number of shares of our common stock". In dollar terms, NBC News calls it a $56 billion reward. ■ Warren Buffett has thought about executive compensation probably more thoroughly than anyone alive today. And for at least two decades, he has argued (as did his partner, Charlie Munger) that stock options should be expensed when used as tools of executive compensation (as shareholders have consented to doing for Musk). And there is no escaping the knowledge that $56 billion is an inconceivably large sum for an individual. ■ Musk has been one of the most dynamic figures on the world business scene in at least a lifetime, if not in a century or longer. But if one adopts the Buffett view of compensation -- that it should all be counted as expense, no matter what form it takes -- then the plain question that must be asked by the rational owner is this: By comparison with compensating one person $56 billion, how much would the company have benefited from hiring 56,000 engineers at $1 million each over the same period of time? Or 5,600 elite professionals at $10 million each? 560 at a still-eye-watering $100 million apiece? ■ If options are properly viewed as a real expense (as they should be), then one of the very first rules of economics applies: The real cost of something is what you give up in order to get it. And a titanic compensation package granted to an individual must always be weighed against the value of using the same total sum to compensate a larger number of people with smaller increments. Not small, but simply smaller. ■ Shareholders are free to consent to whatever compensation packages they see as necessary to achieve their desired results as company owners. But as a matter of intellectual rigor, they shouldn't unwittingly assume that they've gotten a better deal by rewarding one rather than 5,600 or 56,000.
June 15, 2024
A number of "major London hospitals", as the BBC called them, were targeted in a significant cyberattack thought to be the work of a Russian criminal group. It went beyond a case of ransomware, where data was held hostage, and escalated instead to a case where the actual operation of the hospitals' computer systems themselves were held hostage. ■ Hundreds of appointments and even operations were cancelled. The attackers took aim at a pathology services group, which brings vital services like blood tests to a screeching halt. ■ Cyberattacks exist in a domain that is uncomfortable for the existing frameworks of law: The same attack can be a crime (they're after money), it can be terroristic (what else would you call it if armed gangs took over the blood labs at a hospital?), and under some circumstances it can be viewed as warfare. In this case, the attackers are thought to be in Russia -- where cyberattacks are not just performed for criminal gain, but also to advance malignant state interests. ■ The need for informed policy-making -- with increased awareness and comprehension among elected officials, civil servants, and voters, too -- is extremely high, and growing higher by the day. There is no use in standing by and hoping that the problem resolves itself or goes away.
June 16, 2024
Dissolving a small school district
The board of a small Iowa school district has voted to initiate a process to dissolve the district next year, subject to voter approval at a public referendum. The Orient-Macksburg school board acknowledged that it was a "difficult and emotional decision to make", but the vote was unanimous. ■ It's not uncommon for educational policy to be discussed in dull, over-broad terms. The public hears endlessly about "small class sizes" and the need to "pay teachers more", but the broad terms are rarely enough to address what's really optimal for students and their well-being. Sometimes, for instance, scale becomes a limiting factor. Rural Iowa school districts have been consolidating for decades because the smallest ones found themselves economically unsustainable -- no matter how much their local communities wanted to keep them around, whether for travel convenience, sentimental reasons, or local identity. ■ In 2020, America was abruptly forced to reassess what goes into schools and what we expect out of them. And to some extent, we've begun to reckon with certain important truths. Among them: Most kids very much need to be in social environments with their peers, most learning can be individuated to some degree (especially with the aid of thoughtfully-applied technology), and in some cases, class size doesn't matter one iota (see, for instance, the infinitely scalable coursework delivered by MIT OpenCourseware or the Khan Academy. Sometimes a great recorded lecture is vastly preferable to a poorly-prepared small-group lesson. ■ Consolidation isn't going away for rural places: America was on an urbanization trend even from the beginning, and it's still taking place today. The changes won't always be comfortable, but that doesn't make them any less important to address thoughtfully. Catchy slogans aren't often going to do much to help.
June 17, 2024
Having long ago made antagonistic and legally indefensible territorial claims to nearly the entire South China Sea, the ruling regime in China uses provocative claims against its neighbors to test those potential adversaries. This most lately includes a claim of a collision between a Philippine vessel and one of their own, a claim which the Philippines rejects as "deceptive and misleading". ■ Though it is not part of NATO, the Philippines is an ally of the United States under the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. The United States has behaved imperfectly towards the Philippines in the past, but the treaty alliance looks stable -- particularly because both countries share strong self-interests. ■ Other countries, even distant ones like Sweden, recognize the situation too. China has newly declared intentions to detain foreigners who "trespass" into their claims. Given the size of the claims and the obvious interference with rivalrous legal claims by other countries -- including freedom of navigation, in which the United States is profoundly interested -- it's setting up a potentially explosive environment. ■ Nobody who possesses any sense wants to see an escalation of hostilities in the South China Sea, nor anywhere else in the broader Pacific. It's not the kind of situation that ends well for anyone. But how we best prevent that escalation depends on the reactions of our counterparts. ■ In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt told Congress in his State of the Union, "The strong arm of the Government in enforcing respect for its just rights in international matters is the Navy of the United States. I most earnestly recommend that there be no halt in the work of upbuilding the American Navy. There is no more patriotic duty before us a people than to keep the Navy adequate to the needs of this country's position." ■ No small number of experts on the matter are concerned that we are, 120 years later, falling short of Roosevelt's call to duty. It's the kind of matter to which attention should have been given in earnest 20 years ago. But the next-best time to "yesterday" is "right now".
June 18, 2024
Fake working caught up with more than a dozen employees of Wells Fargo, who were fired for "simulating" activity on their computers in order to look like they were working when they were not. It's the kind of situation that isn't exactly new in its own right, but is much more widespread now that working from home -- at least in a hybrid format -- is now a post-pandemic normal in many companies, both large and small. ■ "Many foxes grow grey, but few grow good", wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1749. That was a long time before anyone worked from a laptop at home, but deception and laziness were nothing new even then. ■ It's possible to have substantial unease about an employer using panopticon-like tricks to watch their employees, while also having contempt for those who would take a paycheck in exchange for the mere illusion of activity. Two things can be bad at the same time. Bossware is creepy and cheating is wrong; both/and, not either/or. ■ There is a good chance, though, that the problem had even more to do with the particular tools being used to simulate activity -- Amazon is happy to sell the would-be un-worker a mouse jiggler for as little as $5.09. ■ But what else is that USB-enabled device capable of carrying? The very same kind of company that would openly sell a device for someone who would cheat for a paycheck is most certainly also the kind of company that might well be open to delivering a malicious payload onto the customer's (work) computer. ■ This is how black-hat hacking happens: Get people to insert dodgy USB devices in their computers without considering the consequences of the hidden payloads that might be on board. If a device is capable of standing in for your keyboard or your mouse, it's certainly also capable of being turned into a keystroke logger, in the perfect spot to record passwords, proprietary information, and other things that insiders shouldn't be giving away. ■ It's easy to make the story about lazy workers or Big Brother at the office. But it's an opening to much more than that: Everyone has a role to play in cybersecurity, and the Wells Fargo incident makes for a very good time to shine a light on that fact.
June 19, 2024
It's nothing more than a meme, but the advice it delivers is solid: "Stop chasing your dreams! Humans are persistence predators. Follow your dreams at a sustainable pace until they get tired and lie down." There's humor inside the advice, but it's wrapped in a shell of truth. ■ Perhaps it's because so much of our country's founding story is tired up in the word "revolution", but America has a chronic under-appreciation for the value of persistence. Not the big, sparkling reveal, but the long-term maintenance of what was unveiled. Not the launch of a new app or a splashy IPO, but the quiet and often nearly invisible incremental growth that keeps things going. ■ We need to tell our kids -- and ourselves -- that it's important to find the right path, but also to endure long hikes on it. There need to be waypoints along the trail, but looking forward to something distant is a vital skill. It really is a biologically human thing to keep hunting after a reward for a long, long time. ■ The Summer Olympics will shine a spotlight on many tales of long pursuits. The ones most suitable to television coverage will include hardships and emotional trials. Viewers will be invited again and again to "Meet the Athletes". ■ But we need to see beyond sports and beyond tragic and heroic tales. We have to see beyond them in order to value the long climbs everywhere in life, with uncertain rewards and feats of endurance. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "Think of three things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account." ■ Revolution and overnight success are both overrated. Be sure you're on the right course, then be relentless.
June 20, 2024
June 21, 2024
Commerce Department says drop Kaspersky immediately
The Commerce Department is shutting down Kaspersky's antivirus and cybersecurity software and service sales in the US. The government says the company is too closely tied to the Russian military and Russian government to be trusted -- even the US-based wing of the company. It all goes into effect within a hundred days. ■ It's an extreme move. The Commerce Department even acknowledges that, noting that its investigation "found that the company's continued operations in the United States presented a national security risk -- due to the Russian Government's offensive cyber capabilities and capacity to influence or direct Kaspersky's operations". ■ The company, unsurprisingly, denies that it's a threat, but what else would they be expected to do? ■ It's a disappointment, strictly from a technical perspective: Kaspersky used to be the best antivirus maker around. For a long time, its software was the fastest and most effective on the market. ■ But by its nature, cybersecurity software has to be trustworthy above and beyond any technological merits. The more access software or a service has to the inner workings of a computer system, the more important trust becomes. A total ban may seem ham-fisted (and it may even be an overreach of legal authority; the whole act is groundbreaking), but the threat is very real and the consequences of leaving our soft underbelly exposed could be grave.
Half of US auto dealers affected by cyberattack
The attack went after a company that provides backend services to half of the country's auto dealerships
The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been ordered to leave the area, a cargo ship has been sunk by an explosive floating drone, and the crisis imposed by the Houthis is costing the whole world real money.
An alternative to posting the Ten Commandments
"America" editor Rev. James Martin poses a challenge: If religious rules are going to be posted in public, why not the Beatitudes?
Flash flooding in northern Iowa
Forecast anticipates up to 7" of rainfall across big portions of northern Iowa, southern Minnesota, and reaches of Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
June 22, 2024
Unbending, unflinching purpose
Theodore Roosevelt only got to deliver one inaugural address as President. In that sole inaugural, Roosevelt urged on his fellow Americans: "There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright." ■ Political apocalypticism is cheap and easy. It's the common root of "Burn it all down" and "This is the most important election in our lifetime", not to mention any number of other unhinged and unrestrained views. But it's neither new nor novel, nor are the conditions that some people believe offer justification for their extreme views. ■ Uncertainty is nothing new. Roosevelt served two terms, but had only one inaugural -- because his predecessor was assassinated. In fact, though he was only 42 when he became President, Roosevelt had lived through the assassinations of three Presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. ■ Rapid technological change is nothing new. We think that smartphones, electric cars, and reusable rockets are examples of dramatic change (and they are), but young President Roosevelt lived through the invention of the telephone (patented in 1876), the automobile (built in 1885), and the airplane (proven in 1903). Whatever the breakneck pace of change we experience today, it doesn't actually exceed what was happening then. Roosevelt even witnessed the introduction of municipal electricity (in 1882). ■ Economic change is nothing new. We've seen global financial panics and stock-market bubbles, but Roosevelt lived through a five-year great depression starting in 1873, long before the one we treat as the singular Great Depression today. And he'd lived through three other economic depressions, in 1884, 1890, and 1893. And all of those were worsened by a weak social safety net and the complete absence of a Federal Reserve System (founded in 1913). ■ Nor is dramatic cultural change anything new, either. We may have Spotify and Netflix at our disposal, but Roosevelt had lived to see the first recording devices for music and speech (1877) and the very first movies (1894). And that is to say nothing of the enormous social consequences of the long-overdue end of slavery in the South. ■ And yet, within 40 years of his inaugural address, the America over which Roosevelt presided would go on to victory in two world wars, unfathomable economic growth, and head-spinning technological change. That's what happens when you refuse to fear the future and face problems seriously, with an "unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright". There was no room for despair then, and there's no room for it now: Only a serious sense of resolve will do.
June 23, 2024
Stopping HIV transmission with a drug
When Magic Johnson revealed his HIV diagnosis to the world in 1991, even he thought it was a death sentence. For many people, it already had been, and there was no certainty at all about the future treatment of the virus. It had been headline-grabbing news just two years prior for Princess Diana to have hugged a young AIDS patient. ■ Pharmaceuticals have done amazing things in the years since -- Magic Johnson is still alive and tweeting to this day. Television commercials even advertise to a market for people living with HIV, which suggests that it's a demographic with at least some degree of critical mass. ■ But even with all that progress in mind, it is stunning to encounter the news that a drug trial was prematurely cut short because the drug had proven so overwhelmingly effective that it became unethical to keep anyone in the placebo group. A randomized trial of more than 5,000 women and girls in South Africa and Uganda came back with zero cases of HIV infection among more than 2,100 women receiving the drug. ■ The doses only need to be taken semiannually, so it's basically in vaccine territory. It's not exactly a vaccine in the normal sense, but since it's a shot that prevents the transmission of the virus, it has effectively the same result. The old wisdom about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure is as true today as ever, so this news is profoundly good.
June 25, 2024
No small number of students still apply for college admissions or for scholarships via written essays. As with any sorting test, the written essay has its imperfections and its drawbacks. Yet it also offers a reasonably fair set of conditions under which the applicant can demonstrate their clarity of thought. ■ Writing isn't the only skill that matters, but it is almost universally demanded of people in the professional class. In part, we expect writing because we expect to have our time respected: Most people read much faster than anyone can naturally speak (or listen). ■ Whereas even a gifted speaker can stumble, meander, or misquote when called upon for an extemporaneous reply to a question, writing offers the respondent an opportunity to think through a persuasive case and otherwise organize their thoughts before subjecting them to scrutiny. ■ While it will be a welcome development to have a Presidential debate without a noisy audience to tip the scales of public perception, it remains the case that the best alternative to televised Presidential debates would be to demand live-written responses to important questions (maybe even the same ones as get asked aloud during debates). ■ We typically conduct televised debates with the gravitas of a game show, when instead they ought to be treated as the most consequential job interviews on Earth. From time to time, maybe we need the comic relief of a "youth and inexperience" moment to serve as a cultural bond. ■ But if we really wanted to plumb the minds of our candidates, we'd do better to hand them some blue composition books and a set of sharpened No. 2 pencils. No aides, no ghostwriters, no pollsters. Just the candidates and their own ideas.
June 27, 2024
In the scheme of human development, the First Amendment is a triumph. It wasn't obvious to the world then that humans possessed an intrinsic right to air their thoughts in the forms of speech, print, or protest. Nor is it sufficiently obvious to the world now; some reputable indicators have shown the balance of freedom in retreat for two decades worldwide. ■ Yet even James Madison, contributing author of and advocate for the Constitution, recognized that good things could often be imperfect: "[T]he purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the greater, not the perfect, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused." ■ One "alloy" of the First Amendment is that it artificially subsidizes a surplus of speech: Particularly, it encourages the over-production of speech about politics. Not about ideas, per se, but about contests and figures -- the "horse race", above all. ■ Other subjects are often even more important. Science and technology, economics, international relations, and many others can be far more important. But they are complex and require expertise. They rarely lend themselves to the kinds of "team" alignments without which it can be hard to get audiences interested. ■ Meanwhile, there are often small but intensely interested parties who have strong incentives to constrain the boundaries of discussion. Experts, gatekeepers, public relations representatives, activists, and others are ready to pounce in the name of accuracy, fairness, or simple self-interest. Some even get litigious. ■ With horse-race politics, though, we recognize and respect a nearly unassailable right to speculate, criticize, and even fabricate. Everyone can have an opinion, nearly any opinion is legally safe to declare, and no special knowledge is required to either start the discussion or to join it. Public figures make for easy caricatures and the aspect of team rivalry is easy to spur. ■ That second-order consequence of over-supplying mostly meaningless content is not an argument for diminishing the First Amendment, of course. But it's vital to notice the consequences. A tendency towards maximum freedom for political speech can leave the public square overstuffed with the discoursive equivalent of empty calories -- and a bit light on the "vegetables" of issues away from politics.
June 28, 2024
The European Union is on the verge of selecting Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas as its new High Representative for Foreign Affairs, a role whose closest American counterpart is the Secretary of State. It's a major office even in ordinary times, and these times are not ordinary. ■ Lots of news coverage defaults to calling Prime Minister Kallas a "hard-liner", but that phrase ought to come under further scrutiny. First and foremost, compared to what? ■ She leads a small country with a transformative modern history, with a large and obviously belligerent neighbor literally across the fence. What alternative is there? Estonia has about 1.2 million people (fewer people than Maine), and a little less land area than West Virginia. Russia is bigger by orders of magnitude. ■ Instead of "hard-liner", it seems like "steadfast and serious" is a better description. She lived under Soviet occupation, so clarity about standing with strength against her troublesome neighbor is a virtue, not a vice. ■ Based on her record and rhetorical history, this looks like one of the best moves the EU has made in recent memory. It has begun looking at absorbing Ukraine into its membership, and only a firm stance in defense of every frontier will suffice. Pejoratives like "hard-liner" may be easy to grasp, but they run the risk of implying that a softer alternative is available or even preferable.
June 30, 2024
The last two hundred years or so have seen a radical improvement in the economic conditions of most of the human race. It was only around 1830 when the first steam locomotives began to displace horses as the power hauling trains on tracks. Everything else we would consider "modern" in the world has arrived since that time, from telecommunications to electricity to potable water to penicillin. It's all been part of a two-century explosion in economic growth, attributable to technology, trade, ingenuity, and human will. ■ Two hundred years really isn't that long in the scale of human history. John Quincy Adams was elected in 1824 and lived until 1848 (when he was still in government, serving in the House of Representatives). That meant his life overlapped with that of Grover Cleveland (born in 1837), whose own life lasted until 1908 -- the same year Lyndon Johnson was born. And every President alive today possesses memories of Johnson's Presidential era. ■ Whether we measure political "generations" or simply the genealogical ones, we only need single digits to reach back to a conclusively pre-modern time. Yet the truly radical improvement in humanity's ability to satisfy material needs almost unfathomably well (compared with those pre-modern times) hasn't been matched by a concomitant improvement in our ability to satisfy other vital dimensions of human life, and that creates an unmistakable but often-overlooked tension in life experience. ■ We and our relatively recent forebears have, for instance, effectively decimated the rate of child mortality -- a spectacular human achievement by any standard. Yet while there have been considerable improvements in child-rearing since that time, it would be hard to argue that we've made comparable progress in knowing how to raise children to be well-rounded, self-confident, and prepared to live fulfilling lives. Much progress has been made, of course, but lots of parents still hit their kids, the Surgeon General has campaigned against a "loneliness epidemic", and extremely alarming indicators of fragile mental wellness among adolescents and teenagers must not be overlooked. ■ While those are only a few examples, many other such gaps can be found between the spectacular improvement in material circumstances and less-impressive improvement in sociological and psychological measures of wellness. We should acknowledge that the gaps are often disorienting. ■ Yet we also have to recognize that improvements in both material and non-material conditions are mostly iterative; they build on what came before, and have to be maintained with intentionality and discipline if they are to be passed along. We shouldn't so much despair that our progress on matters other than material conditions has lagged as we should take confidence from the astonishing economic and technological progress of the last two centuries that enormous improvements in other human affairs are possible -- and aspire to achieve them.