Gongol.com Archives: July 2024
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July 2, 2024
As of late March, just a little more than three months ago, more than 80% of the state of Iowa was rated at some level of moderate drought or worse. In October, that value was greater than 95%. ■ A few places in the state are still "abnormally dry", but the drought has been erased statewide. Drought, though, has been replaced by catastrophic flooding; Spencer, Iowa, lost 1,000 homes to a flood that evolved basically out of nowhere. Not far away, places like Correctionville, Iowa, North Sioux City, South Dakota, and Mankato, Minnesota experienced comparable levels of devastation. The drought-to-flood reversal wasn't literally overnight, but it was fast enough to defy normal human expectations. (For an even faster deterioration of conditions, see the record-smashing intensification of Hurricane Beryl. ■ These are climatological manifestations of a maxim worth remembering in lots of other areas of life: Things are rarely as bad as they seem, but they can get much worse much faster than we can imagine. As humans, we seem predisposed to over-estimating how bad things are in the moment right before our eyes, and to under-estimating how much preparatory work needs to be done from day to day to keep the worst from happening. ■ There are plenty of people who take those preparations too far, but usually only in isolation: Think of climate catastrophists, doomsday preppers, and death-of-democracy keyboard warriors. The problem with a singular fixation is that it tends to result in blindered thinking, like that of the climate activist who wants economic "de-growth" or an intentional decline in the population, but who won't entertain the possibility of advanced nuclear power generation. ■ The drama of a "solution" isn't a good measure of its sensibility. Figuring that out and intentionally finding ways to build constructively, iteratively, and persistently toward the more prudent long-term solutions that bear fruit with less fanfare.
July 3, 2024
It can be difficult to imagine an event like a hurricane as much more than an abstraction on a map or a dramatic video clip of wind and waves. But Hurricane Beryl's collision with Jamaica will almost certainly shine a light on a more complicated scale. ■ A hard-hitting natural disaster, like a hurricane depositing rainfall amounts of 12" or more, places a heavy burden on the basic infrastructure upon which everything else is built: Roads, power supplies, drinking water, and sanitation. ■ Much of the western shore of Jamaica, for instance, is bound together by a two-lane highway, the A1. It is vital, but it is also vulnerable: Narrow, and often just a few feet away and feet above the sea. There are river crossings where a flash flood could undermine or wipe out a narrow bridge and disrupt access for months. ■ As with so many economic problems, it is a matter of the chicken and the egg: It's hard to pay for infrastructure without economic growth, and it's hard to get economic growth without good infrastructure. Jamaica's per-capita GDP after inflation hasn't really changed since the mid-1990s. And the strength of the country's tourism sector could become a liability if visitors simply cannot make it to vacation destinations. ■ We should always worry about the first-order effects of a natural disaster -- the immediate human impact, in terms of lives lost and lives affected. But we should also take note of the second-order effects: How much capacity is required to bounce back from a major hit, and how resilient the reconstructed infrastructure will be in anticipation of future disasters.
July 4, 2024
It was in the context of an annual meeting of shareholders during which Warren Buffett was asked about his confidence in the American economy in light of the "CNBC" threats: Chemical, nuclear, biological, and cyber. The question was raised in 2015, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks and a few years after Mitt Romney had been mocked for pointing at Russia's government as a leading source of threat. ■ Buffett's response, though it was offered as business analysis rather than a patriotic rallying cry, remains applicable today, almost a decade later: "The economic system is enormously powerful; there will be fits and starts, but imagine what a flyover tour of the country would have looked like in 1776. Everything that's been developed since that time is profit." ■ "People fret about a 2% economic growth rate," continued Buffett, "but with a 1% population growth rate that still results in major growth over time. But great growth can be negated by the work of madmen, and we need an extremely vigilant security operation in the US. The country will do extraordinarily well if we ward off those threats or at least minimize their impact." He's been proven right economically: Despite incredible setbacks like the Covid-19 pandemic, the US economy is 16% larger on a per-person basis than when Buffett was asked. ■ But economic growth isn't the only measure that counts. It's a massive contributor to human welfare, of course, but so are factors like personal liberty, cultural development, and the capacity for individuals to flourish to the greatest extent their own gifts and abilities will allow. ■ And on that measure, Buffett offered words that are about as patriotic as anything ever said on American soil: "The luckiest person in history on a probabilistic basis is the baby born in the US today." The challenge to all of us who are heirs to the American experiment is to ensure that the trend continues -- so that the baby born in 2024 is luckier than the baby born in 2015, and that the baby born in 2033 is luckier still. ■ None of it is assured; that speaks to a process of self-improvement, not an inflexible outcome. Every Independence Day should be a reminder to strive to overcome imperfections -- "God mend thine every flaw" -- and to apply our own self-control in the pursuit of becoming better.
July 5, 2024
Voters may be right to get bored
After controlling the government there for 14 years, the UK's Conservative Party has been stomped by its rival, the Labour Party, in the election of a new Parliament. It's the kind of hard turn away from the status quo that the Conservatives will undoubtedly have to undergo some kind of process of reflection -- probably one involving a "post-mortem" report to "chart a new course forward", or something similar. ■ The people of every country are entitled to self-determination; it isn't for outsiders looking in to decide what government is right or wrong for them to freely elect. (Unfree states may be a different matter entirely.) But we can certainly look at them with interest, and perhaps take lessons from them. ■ A lesson worth taking from the British election is that voters are prone to bouts of restlessness. It doesn't seem likely that the fundamental philosophical expectations of the British people changed in a landslide -- public opinion can and often does change rapidly on particular issues, but people's basic temperamental expectations of their leaders do so far less often. ■ That restlessness is probably, on balance, a good check on power. If free people can be reliably counted upon to just want change for its own sake from time to time, that not only helps to discourage abuses of power but also to encourage periodic waves of reform, both within parties and across aisles. ■ It often requires some real sclerosis for a party to take the kind of beating that British voters just gave the Conservatives, but the basic mechanism of voter restlessness is useful in any democracy for placing a check on power, even when that power is exercised well.
July 7, 2024
2024 is a cartographically interesting year for two reasons: The Summer Olympics and the record-breaking number of people choosing elected leaders -- more than half of the world's population. For both reasons, this deserves to be the year of the cartogram. ■ Conventionally, we display maps according to physical shapes and political boundaries. When we do it with the entire globe, this tends to create substantial distortions that make places near the poles appear disproportionately large. (The Mercator projection is famously the most egregious violator, but even "good" projections still create distortions.) ■ But even when we find ways to mitigate the physical distortions, another huge distortion remains. When we illustrate political boundaries (around countries or individual states or provinces within countries), we end up prioritizing the margins. Margins, though, are just that -- edge cases. ■ The margin between Montana and Idaho is relatively recognizable, for example, but if we're representing people and what they do, it's not very important. What's important is to see where people are concentrated. Population clusters are important and density is important -- not the arbitrary boundaries drawn by things like rivers and longitudinal meridians. ■ Cartograms solve this by representing populations in equivalent units, then roughly placing them in proximity to one another. Thus, a cartogram of the United Kingdom represents London much larger than it appears on a geographical map -- because that's where all the people are. Similarly, a cartogram of the United States makes New England and the East Coast much bigger than Montana and Idaho, because that's where the population is weighted. ■ It's obvious how this makes election returns easier to process and understand, but it also makes global events like the Olympics more comprehensible. Land masses like Siberia don't win gold medals; the people who live in individual countries do. And what a lesson it would likely be for many people to realize that, contrary to most physical projections on the world map, countries like Nigeria and Indonesia and Pakistan are members of the top-ten club for population. ■ Even the finest, most balanced Winkel tripel projection showing their physical boundaries can't reveal how big they are in terms of human lives: The metric that should matter most. Given the scale and scope of events taking place this year, 2024 ought to be the year when cartograms make a splash onto television, computer, and smartphone screens everywhere.
July 8, 2024
Countless breathless commentators have opined about either the unlimited potential or the unspeakable dangers of artificial intelligence. So far, the evidence is entirely mixed: Some examples of AI, like using machine learning to assist in complex scientific problems like protein folding, weigh on the good side of the scale. Others, like some of the bizarre hallucinations served up as authentic search results, weigh heavily on the bad. ■ As with all technologies, the extent to which AI is good or bad depends upon the values of the people using it. And it's being used badly by many, to be sure -- the evidence points to widespread abuse by people submitting partially or completely AI-generated, nonsense-stuffed papers to academic journals, just for example. But there is a wide scope of possibility for it to be used well, particularly if it's put to use as an aid to human thinking (rather than as a substitute for it). ■ Human minds are wired to try to solve puzzles. It's why we see shapes in the clouds and form superstitions -- our brains are very good at making connections, even when they are not justified. Artificial intelligence tools could be put to extremely good use in breaking complex problems into human-friendly pieces. ■ Small puzzles are attractive -- millions of people play Sudoku or Wordle or Jumble or the New York Times Crossword. It's when problems seem too big or lack obvious constituent parts that people shy away. ■ That's where AI should be asked to step in. It's probably not ready yet, either in terms of sophistication or data and human safety. Lots of problems are complicated specifically because there is no existing path to a solution, and others bear heavily enough on personal choices that we need to be wary of turning over too much intimate detail to systems with insufficient safeguards. ■ But AI is likely not too far removed from the stage when it could analyze large problems and recommend bite-sized component pieces -- puzzles, really -- that could appeal to our natural instincts. These puzzles could make work seem more interesting and big personal questions seem less daunting. That would be a highly human-centered way to put high technology to use.
July 10, 2024
Learn from the past without living there
In a poem predating Confucius, an ancient Chinese author wrote, "In the old capital they wore / T'ae hats and black caps small; / And ladies, who famed surnames bore, / Their own thick hair let fall. / Such simple ways are seen no more, / And the changed manners I deplore." ■ Poetry is invariably hard to reproduce in a new language since something of the original is always -- quite literally -- lost in translation. But the recurring theme of "In Praise of By-Gone Simplicity" is a familiar one: The poet longs for the good old days, romanticizing how much simpler they were. ■ That sentiment seems pretty quaint, considering those "good old days" must have been more than 2,500 years ago. Literally everything about those times is certain to appear simpler than today. But that perspective also illustrates the intrinsic fallacy of mistaking simplicity for virtue. Life was less complex 100 years ago, much less 2,500 years ago, yet no sensible person would trade places with the occupants of the past just to escape complexity if they truly realized what else they were giving up. ■ Reflexive, unthinking nostalgia is a mistake. Yes, things get more complex with the passage of time, but they also tend to get much better, even if there are setbacks and obstacles along the way. We have to recognize plainly that it's nothing new to imagine that the past was better than it actually was. Nor is it new that some people will long for that past even in the face of reason and evidence. ■ Nostalgia is nothing new in human nature. As time marches on, it's always up to the present generation to appreciate the present, learn honestly from the past, and aspire with intentionality to a better future. Plenty of lessons can be extracted from the past without us having to take up residence there.
July 11, 2024
The leaders of the NATO member countries gathered for a group photo at the White House to mark the opening of their summit meeting, and it has been remarked that even if some partners in the alliance still lag behind the expectation that they should spend 2% of GDP on defense (Luxembourg, Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, and Canada are the farthest behind), the fact remains that the persistence of a voluntary alliance among so many countries is itself a good thing. ■ Too many people try to judge the world by fixed points when what always matters is the direction of travel. There is no perfect destination, no Utopia, no end state of human affairs. And to fixate on the hope of arriving at one is a guaranteed way to end up frustrated and dissatisfied forever. ■ In particular, there is no end state for international security, no matter how attractive the mirage of a permanent peace might be. There is no such thing as security-as-destination. There is only the difference between growing more secure and becoming less secure. ■ An alliance isn't about an unchanging end state: The trends are what matter. The NATO alliance is a tool for growing more secure, and people who don't appreciate that direction of travel are likely to make grave mistakes about what to value and which strategies to embrace.
Putting out the neighbor's fire
Unsurprisingly, the NATO summit has involved discussion about furnishing support to Ukraine in its time of need. Even if you could snap your fingers and end the war and occupation tonight, Russia and Ukraine would still share a land border more than a thousand miles long. That's greater than the distance from Chicago to Denver. Ukraine's survival even after the war will depend on strength.
July 12, 2024
We're still learning about inflation
Anyone who learned economics prior to the turn of the century may be forgiven for anchoring their expectations of certain variables in places that may no longer make sense. For instance, the prevailing wisdom of the time -- even among those authoring then-contemporary textbooks -- was that the natural rate of unemployment was probably around 6%, and that lower rates would trigger inflation. It seems like that figure may be closer to 4% today. ■ We're experiencing inflation, but more likely due to the shocking things done to expand the money supply in and following the pandemic of 2020 than the rate of unemployment. And there's evidence to believe that we're still processing some of the lingering side effects of massive interventions conducted in the 2008 financial panic. Lots of people and institutions pulled way back from old, more excitable habits: Things got weird around 2008 and then stayed that way. ■ Economist Greg Mankiw makes a pretty compelling case that there is still a relationship between unemployment and inflation, but that it's very hard to make much use of either side of the trade-off in time to make monetary policy respond usefully: "The problem is that because we don't know the natural rate of unemployment with much precision, it is hard to disentangle supply and demand. That is true even with the benefit of hindsight, but the task is even more formidable in real time when data are preliminary and incomplete." A lot of this may sound like inside baseball to people who don't follow economics in detail, but perceptions of inflation are casting a huge shadow over the 2024 Presidential election. ■ Prudent management of the money supply is the chief job of the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to be managed apolitically and in the best interests of the country as a whole (which generally seems to be the case). But when people exhibit strong feelings about forces they don't fully understand and mostly cannot control, it's a subject worth lots of study.
July 15, 2024
If a belief in human agency goes any farther than pure lip service, then everyone who possesses ordinary mental faculties faces a common challenge: To come up with some form of belief system by which to make the important decisions in life. The process is usually messy, since a belief system will ordinarily touch on aspects of life ranging from politics to religion and spirituality to family life to civic notions of duty and justice. ■ The process isn't even laid out in a straightforward way: Americans nominally obtain legal adulthood at the age of 18, whether they've wrestled with any of those questions or not. Religions and cultural institutions choose a range of ages upon which to confer adulthood. The tax collector, meanwhile, can start dipping into paychecks early on, putting a spin on the alert youth's understanding of fairness quite early on. ■ Some people then go on to achieve notoriety or even fame for their choice of belief system. This attention doesn't often seem to follow those who arrived at their belief systems slowly and organically. We seem to have far more stories resembling Saul on the road to Damascus. The phrase, after all, is "zeal of the convert". ■ Even though a person may sincerely hold beliefs -- new or old -- it doesn't necessarily follow that other people need to defer to the seriousness of those beliefs. Zeal and sincerity don't necessarily make a belief right or wrong. ■ That seems important to recall in times when emphatic opinions are never beyond arm's reach. Real honesty about a belief comes with an obligation to paint a boundary around its limitations. Just as people need to recognize their individual circles of competence, we need to recognize the boundaries around belief systems. Nobody should be trusted with their belief in a thing until they also know what tempers their belief in that same thing.
July 18, 2024
No place like an affordable home
The Economist notes an abrupt change in one of the most significant ways American households deal with what is (for most) their biggest expense: Housing. In 2020, homeownership was cheaper than renting for 84% of the country. Today, renting would be cheaper than buying, they estimate, for 89%. ■ It's a large change in both magnitude and speed. A variety of inflationary pressures along with rising interest rates and a reluctance on the part of existing homeowners to sell (when they're sitting on cheap 30-year mortgages) make up the recipe for the effect. ■ A good definition of "home" might be: A place where one can be incapacitated safely. When a person is sick, impaired, or merely asleep, they need to be somewhere they can be reasonably sure of their own safety. If we're in a condition when it's overwhelmingly likely to be cheaper for "home" to be a place that is no more secure than a 6- or 12-month lease, then we ought to take that as a good indication that we are not producing enough new housing stock. ■ Thomas Jefferson left an imprint on American culture that favored land ownership as a means of national well-being and security: "[S]mall land holders are the most precious part of a state". But fixating too much on the land and too little on the simple conditions of "home" may have deprived us of housing solutions that cover more of the gap between rented places and big suburban tracts with giant lawns that don't do much good. ■ For some, rented homes will always make sense, either for economic reasons or for other causes. But we as an interested public shouldn't be satisfied with a state of affairs that leaves ownership of a home farther out of reach than renting.
July 19, 2024
A snafu on a Microsoft cloud computing platform forced the country's major airlines to ground flights, attracting undesirable consumer and regulatory attention to the airlines -- and at least some attention to Microsoft itself. The real culprit was a faulty backend update from CrowdStrike. ■ As cloud computing continues to expand the number of online activities that people can do while on the move, there's no end in sight to the increase in demand for that computing power. Especially for things that people need to do while on the move -- like retrieving information about airline reservations -- cloud computing is the logical place to turn. ■ But we overlook at our own peril the fact that "cloud" doesn't mean "trouble-free". One of the selling points for cloud computing services is that the vendor has to do the work to keep the conputer infrastructure functioning, while the customer rests easy. Sometimes, that goes wrong. And when the systems involved are critical to lots of different systems, the damage can be widespread. ■ Chances seem very good that the cloud computing infrastructure in the United States will become a hot target for an adversarial government to attack sometime in the foreseeable future. What consequences that will have, we can't know. But they are likely to be troubling and expensive. Incidents like this one ought to be taken seriously as previews of much larger things that can go wrong.
July 20, 2024
Every year around the beginning of May, tens of thousands of people head to Omaha, Nebraska, to spend hours in an arena listening to a nonagenarian respond to an unscripted Q&A session. Warren Buffett is no ordinary old man, of course, and it is nothing short of astonishing that he remains mentally sharp and physically energetic enough to remain at the head of one of the world's largest companies. ■ But more of the questions he answers tend to be about matters either only indirectly related to the business or unrelated to it altogether. Audience members recognize not just that he is smart, but that he is unusually wise. And it is his sagacity they value. The questions tend to begin with the words "How would you..." or "What would you do...", because the inquirers want the benefit of hard-earned advice. Even if he were to relinquish all control of the company tomorrow, people would still plan to come next year -- because he is viewed less as a manager than as a masterful source of advice. ■ It has been pointed out that Bill Clinton, who finished his second term as President nearly a quarter of a century ago, is still younger than both of the major-party candidates expected to run for President in the fall. Bill Gates, having accumulated nearly unfathomable wealth and still barely old enough to qualify for full Social Security retirement benefits, is now free to spend his time studying whatever interests him -- advising, marshalling resources, or convening experts wherever he can. Gates is the same age as Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the framework of the World Wide Web, and merely one year younger than Ruby Bridges, through whom the schools of New Orleans were desegregated. ■ These individuals are notable because they, and many others like them, are still living and should be seen as sources of sage advice even though their individual moments in the spotlight are long over. And they are relatively young enough that, if they were to live as long as Warren Buffett, they could be resources for society perhaps into the middle of this century. ■ Yet we, as a society, are terrible about convening them in forums where they can be queried by generations younger than them. Perhaps as a result of that failure, altogether too many American leaders try to remain in the center of the action for far too long. ■ The median age in the United States Senate is in the mid-60s -- meaning that former President Barack Obama, who is just about to turn 63, would be in the younger half of the age bracket if he were to return to the Senate. That Dianne Feinstein died while still in office at age 90 reflects poorly on how we select for leaders while retaining the counsel of our seniors. ■ If there were any perfect answers, they would be obvious already. But the problem is clear enough: It should not be extraordinary for someone like Mitt Romney to voluntarily step aside and move into consultative roles before time takes them out. We ought to look for social models that treat wisdom as a valuable and renewable resource -- not as something to be extracted from individuals who keep working full-time until dying at their posts. ■ Perhaps we could start by convening a few of our wiser elders someplace for an annual Buffett-style Q&A. We as a society shouldn't turn our backs on what they have to tell us -- but we shouldn't behave as though they have to remain in the starring roles long after others should have begun moving into the spotlight.
July 21, 2024
Which generation claims the Vice President?
The Democratic Party appears to be coalescing around Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of the widely predicted but still surprising wake of President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw from his run for re-election. As is so often the curse of Vice Presidents, she has been close to the spotlight for the last four years -- but remains in many ways unknown to the mainstream voter. ■ It is obvious that age, in the relative sense, will be a central issue in her likely head-to-head campaign against an opponent nearly 20 years older. That will be especially likely considering that age is the central factor behind President Biden's withdrawal. ■ Aside from the comparison in individual ages, there will also be an inescapable generational component to the contest. Vice President Harris was born in October 1964, technically making her one of the very last Baby Boomers. The standard definition places the crossover point from Boomers to Generation X the year following her birth, in 1965. But just as there is some fuzziness around the margins of Generation X and the Millennials (sometimes called a "micro-generation" of "Xennials"), the same is true of the Boomer-to-Xer crossover. ■ President Obama may have been seen as cooler than the average Boomer, but having been born in 1961, he was solidly in that generational cohort. With her own campaign to shape -- and potentially her own White House to run -- it will be quite a sociological study to see whether Vice President Harris takes on more of the style of her near-seniors (like President Obama) or her near-juniors, like former House Speaker Paul Ryan (born in 1970), Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (born in 1971), or former Senator Ben Sasse (born in 1972). ■ Generational distinctions are often softer in reality than they are made out to be on paper, but there are certain characteristics about the younger cohort into which she might fit that reveal themselves both on the campaign trail and in office. Which personality emerges and prevails under the conditions of a significantly accelerated campaign?
July 22, 2024
CNN estimates that it took a single day for Vice President Kamala Harris to lock up the Democratic nomination for President. It helps to start on the ticket.
America needs an NTSB clone for deaths involving police
An Illinois woman was shot and killed by a police officer in her own home after calling 911 to report suspicions of a prowler. She seems to have alarmed the officer after moving towards a pot of boiling water on a stovetop. ■ The sheriff's deputy who shot and killed the woman is facing murder charges and has been fired by his department. But entirely beyond the criminal trial process that is taking shape, some institution needs to be responsible for assessing the circumstances that led up to the incident and making clear recommendations for avoiding similar circumstances in the future. ■ The US needs an agency modeled after the NTSB, with a charge to investigate the causes and circumstances of civilian deaths when in contact with police and to supply recommendations to reduce the number of those incidents. Like the NTSB, it needs to be separate from and independent of any other regulatory or law-enforcement agencies, so that it can furnish thorough and objective advice to the public and to policy-makers -- not to prosecute, but to avoid unnecessary repeat failures.. ■ If we don't like an outcome, it's up to us as a society to study and measure the causes, and then to take deliberate action to change the course of events. Failure to do so only ensures that more undesirable events will occur. The deaths of people in their own homes after they have called for help surely must rank high on the list of undesirable events worthy of concerted effort toward a correction.
July 23, 2024
As efforts continue to fix computer systems broken by a faulty update pushed by CrowdStrike, recognition seems to be spreading that our computer technology may be more fragile than the popular imagination has heretofore believed. Microsoft says that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected, though the impact was amplified by the fact that many of those machines were doing critical work in sectors like air transportation. It's been so traumatizing that members of Congress have already requested a hearing with CrowdStrike's CEO. ■ Mistakes will happen, but so will deliberate attacks. That this event was the result of the former should still compel some serious thinking about the potential for the latter. Cyberwarfare is a whole new domain, and America has well-equipped adversaries who are determined to make asymmetric use of their tools, to cause damage and inflict pain. ■ What makes the cyber domain especially challenging is that everywhere is on the front line. It both flattens and scrambles geography, so that an attack may come from anywhere and cause trouble anywhere else. ■ Yet it is often geographically attributable: The US has, for instance, identified specific buildings in China that are used for cyberwarfare, and Russia is known to send attackers abroad to conduct on-site attacks. The scale of the trouble is hard to exaggerate, and adversaries will be tempted to use ever more of the cyber weapons they develop. ■ It is also possible (perhaps even likely) that some Americans may decide to engage in cyberwarfare for themselves, possibly even for patriotic motives. And that raises a problem from the past. In his 1906 annual message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt warned that when Americans mistreated foreigners, "The mob of a single city may at any time perform acts of lawless violence against some class of foreigners which would plunge us into war. That city by itself would be powerless to make defense against the foreign power thus assaulted", and that "The entire power and the whole duty to protect the offending city or the offending community lies in the hands of the United States Government." ■ Applying Roosevelt's question to modern claims, what happens if a group of computer science students at an American university decides to apply their skills against the Russian army to hamper an attack against Ukraine? Or against China as retaliation for a provocation against the Philippines in the South China Sea? Or against Israel as a protest against a military action in Gaza? Or against Hungary for mistreating asylum-seekers? ■ The targets may be allies or adversaries. The causes may be righteous or unjust. But the tools are now available everywhere to do damage almost anywhere -- so it's much easier to step over the line from private behavior to international incident, and while we have some legal framework for handling such cases, it's hardly complete. We need a holistic understanding of cybersecurity to take root -- encompassing questions of defensive and offensive behaviors, civil and criminal legal boundaries, military reach, and more. Thus far, we have little of the above, and the CrowdStrike incident should serve only to highlight the scale of what could be the grim consequences if the next incident is intentional.
July 24, 2024
President Joe Biden offered something of a valedictory address to the American public, explaining his extra-ordinary decision to voluntarily step aside from seeking re-election. The wisdom of that decision, and in not making it much sooner, will remain for history to ultimately judge. ■ In his speech, the President claimed that "I'm the first President of this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world." If measured by the strict standard of being engaged in a declared state of war, the claim is true. But words matter, and they matter in no small degree when they are used to obfuscate reality. ■ Someone, probably with state backing, has been assaulting the computer networks of utility systems on American soil. Ships of the US Navy are shooting down missiles in the Red Sea and attempting to provide cover for cargo vessels in a hot zone. Russian and Chinese aircraft have just conducted what appears to be a joint maneuver perilously close to Alaskan arspace. ■ In the strictest of terms, we are not "at war". But for the short-term and intermediate-term future, at least, we should expect to remain engaged in a lot of conflicts that may fall short of the definition of war. But they're definitely not peace, either, and we need to resolve not to use language to obscure the facts. ■ We would deal differently with peace, if we could have it, but others seem bent on keeping us from enjoying that. Their determination to cause trouble will have to be matched by our resolution not to lie to ourselves about the condition of reality.
July 25, 2024
Substantial layoffs at John Deere's plants in Iowa
After issuing a preview warning just over a week ago, John Deere has announced layoffs at three important Iowa locations -- Waterloo, Johnston, and Dubuque. A total of 170 workers are being severed from the company, only weeks after hundreds more were let go from the plants at Waterloo, Dubuque, and Davenport. ■ The company's last annual report looked strong -- sales were up, net income was up, and net equity had grown generously. But John Deere says that it's seeing "a 20 percent decline in sales from 2023 to 2024", and it warned employees at the tail end of May that layoffs were coming. ■ Something structural must be hidden inside the figures; the reported sales figures are down (more dramatically for the latest quarter than for the one before it), but when a company goes well beyond the front-line production floor and gets rid of staff functions, then management is signalling that it thinks hard times are going to stay. ■ "Layoff" remains an undesirable euphemism; it generally tends to suggest that the fault lies with the employer rather than the employee, but that's hardly any comfort to someone stuck looking for a job. And while Waterloo, for instance, isn't exactly the company town it once was (even bigger layoffs in the 1980s saw to that), it's still a place where Deere accounts for 8.4% of all jobs in the county -- even more than the local hospitals, the public schools, or the University of Northern Iowa. ■ If those jobs really aren't coming back anytime soon, what is terrible news today for the laid-off employees and their families also represents an ugly warning to the community at large.
July 26, 2024
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.
The paradox of digital publication
Compared with at some prior generations, Americans today enjoy a spectacular amount of free time: An average of more than five hours per day. Among teenagers, almost five hours per day are spent on social media alone. If adolescence is (as commonly believed) a time of long-term habit formation, it seems likely that we should brace for a long-term future in which social media influences "adult" culture nearly as much as it influences "youth" culture. ■ Only a few centuries ago, information was produced in small volumes and moved slowly. The renowned Great Library of Alexandria, accidentally burned by Julius Caesar's army in 48 BC, may have contained around 400,000 manuscripts. In the time when every manuscript had to be copied by hand, that made it (probably) the world's largest collection. Hand-copying was extremely slow and the labor involved placed a severe constraint on the amount of work that could be printed. ■ Along came Gutenberg's printing press in 1448, and suddenly both the speed of dissemination and the quantity of it could be vastly expanded. Today, the Des Moines Public Library contains 365,000 printed books -- about the same as the Great Library of Alexandria. ■ Digital publication effectively destroys all of the previous barriers to both speed and reach -- digital publications can be distributed instantaneously and infinitely. There are 70,000 copyright-free books just on Project Gutenberg, and another 41.8 million scanned print items available on the Internet Archive. And those are just the libraries, counting none of the billions trillions of items published to the various platforms of the Internet. ■ While that liberation from material constraints probably is mostly for good, society will regret it if we don't reflect thoughtfully on that rapidly escalating share of time spent on social media (the content value of which will tend to start low and quickly fall to nearly zero) and how it could displace the attention paid to higher-value work (like what might be worth curating for a library collection or editing for publication in a periodical). It's especially problematic because the incentives in place now reward producing even more content even faster, with the biggest rewards often accruing to those who mercilessly exploit the phenomenon of the "curiosity gap" rather than directly enlightening the audience.
July 27, 2024
The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games drew huge ratings for NBC: About 29 million viewers. That's a big increase over the Tokyo Games, which undoubtedly pleases the company's executives -- but a huge audience is really a statement of legitimization. ■ The Olympic Games as we know them only matter because we agree that they matter -- it's not automatic; it's a choice. There are other global competitions -- world championships, World Cups, even X Games. There were athletes well before the first modern Olympics in 1896, and something else could conceivably be bigger than the Olympics someday. ■ That the Olympics are treated as the pinnacle is entirely a function of the consent of audiences and athletes alike. And in that is a lesson for the rest of life that is much bigger than any story about sports. It's a lesson that abstract concepts have to take real forms, and those real forms have to be legitimized by choice. ■ A flaming piano floating down the Seine isn't peace; it's a performance. But kicking Russia out of the Olympics for barbarically invading Ukraine is a concrete step in the name of peace that accrues to the credit of the International Olympic Committee. ■ The Games have a decidedly imperfect history of taking concrete actions on ideals like peace. But the more they do, the more they earn the legitimacy of a watching world.
July 28, 2024
It's close to an iron law of human affairs that the more appalling the behavior of a strongman regime while in power, the harder they will cling to power. And the more desperately they cling to power, the more dreadful onlookers should assume their behavior has been. ■ Venezuela's regime -- a continuation of the Hugo Chavez bloc that took power in 1999 -- is politically illiberal and economically incompetent. It takes some remarkable mismanagement to chase 7.7 million people out of a country of 31.2 million, and to take the world's largest oil reserves and turn them into an economy that has contracted by 70% in about a decade. ■ But that regime is claiming it has won a presidential election, even though things look so corrupt that nearby countries like Costa Rica and Chile are effectively disputing the claimed results. Pre-election opinion polls made it fairly clear the opposition would win. ■ People get tired even of good governments after a while. (Even Winston Churchill got the boot shortly after victory in World War II.) Bad ones last for even shorter. The known truth about Venezuela's government is atrocious. What the regime is trying to keep from being held accountable for doing is likely even worse.
July 29, 2024
Google is promoting its artificial-intelligence offerings with an ad about sending an AI-generated fan letter to an Olympic hero. The ad seems harmless at first. But, like the output from an AI tool, it should have been checked by a human being for tone as much as for substance. ■ Few companies have done more to make high technology widely accessible than Google. Search tools, Gmail, YouTube, and many other features are available practically worldwide at no direct consumer cost. ■ But there's a problem with the perception that artificial intelligence is a field where fast dominance is the most important thing. We're in territory so new that we've hardly seen most of the perils yet, and the technology is advancing seemingly by the minute. It's a time to have both human hands on the wheel. ■ The Google ad, though, says nothing of the sort. Every business can be expected to hype its own products, but there has to be room for reason. ■ People should feel free to ask AI for algorithms and step-by-step guides to fill the gaps in their personal knowledge (e.g., "What are the elements of a great fan letter?"). But nobody should ask AI to have human experiences for them (e.g., "Write a fan letter to Simone Biles telling her how much I look up to her"). No matter what stage we occupy in the hype cycle, it's too soon to give up on basic, deeply humane matters.
July 30, 2024
Ryan Burge, a political scence professor at Eastern Illinois University, has written a poignant reflection on a turning point in his other job. On weekends, he has served as the pastor of a small American Baptist church in a nearby town. ■ But, as has been the case across nearly the entire religious landscape in America, attendance has been in chronic decline. And in Burge's case, the community has shrunk enough to have forced the church to close. ■ American culture faces a real tension, not fully understood: We've effectively crushed material want, achieving a massive level of measurable prosperity entirely unimaginable to generations that came before us. But we've done next to nothing to achieve progress towards addressing immaterial wants. ■ Therein lies a crushing problem: You can go to Walmart and satisfy practically every material need you have -- filling shopping carts full of goods that are safer, more dependable, and more advanced than anything found in the past, for a fraction of what comparable goods cost anyone in real terms (like hours worked) in the past. ■ Yet at seemingly everywhere turn, more symptoms of inadequacy in the quest to deliver on non-material needs: "Deaths of despair", a "loneliness epidemic", political and cultural figures elevated to god-like status while their biggest fans choose labels like "spiritual but not religious". ■ Religion may not be the tonic for those non-material wants, but it would take a radical departure from human nature for us to have somehow evolved past the age-old appetite for something serving up behavior, belief, and belonging -- the three characteristics of organized religion. These particularly matter in their relation to big questions about meaning and morality, and big life events like birth, marriage, and death. ■ One of the two likeliest outcomes is that organized religions will learn to adapt to changing expectations (and, probably, learning to shed some of the flaws that have discouraged or turned away so many former adherents). The other is that new forms of cultural and philosophical groups will emerge to occupy some of that social space once dominated by churches. There are already examples of people who, to varying degrees of seriousness and earnestness, have adopted Harry Potter, the Jedi from Star Wars, and the Big Lebowski as the inspirations for organizing philosophies of life. ■ A vacuum of this type cannot last forever; human nature compels people to search for big answers to important questions. And individuals cannot "belong" on their own, so the attraction to some form of group behavior is inevitable. The matters in question may be transcendent, but the changes (whether existing institutions will evolve or be replaced by others) will be made by people.