Gongol.com Archives: August 2024
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August 1, 2024
It's almost ritualistic how often news coverage of the Olympics zeroes in on stories of friendship -- of teammates with extraordinary bonds, of bonding in defiance of doubters, of friends who travel the globe to support their Olympians. Friendships formed in the midst of great challenges take on a special character, of course, since friendship is quite nearly always the result of shared experiences. The more extraordinary the experience, the more unusual the stories can be. ■ But this ritual ought to give the rest of us pause to consider whether sub-Olympian friendship gets the elite attention it deserves. Friendship is a skill, after all: It may feel effortless to be in a friend's company, but it takes at least some measure of effort to keep a friendship alive. ■ Perhaps we could start by helping people to recognize their own friendship typologies early on. We subject young people to all kinds of tests -- college-entrance exams, physical-fitness tests, career-finder aptitude surveys, and more. And few things are stronger clickbait than quizzes that promise some kind of self-knowledge at the end. ■ Where, then, are the tests to help people authentically figure out for themselves which of their friendship skills are weak, strong, pronounced, or hidden? Some people are great at loyalty. Others are terrific listeners. Some bring life to every party. Others always know the right way to help when it's needed. Some people will go anywhere they are invited. Others recruit new friends into existing groups. ■ Too often, though, we don't know how to leverage our strengths and overcome our weaknesses. For instance: Some people are natural ringleaders, but may not realize how much others unwittingly depend upon them to do the leading and may misinterpret that dependency as others not fully reciprocating their efforts. Others may engage constantly over phone calls, chats, or social-media posts, but not realize that others aren't always comfortable sharing personal news other than face-to-face. ■ A great deal has been said and done to discourage bullying and to place high social status on kindness. These are good marks of a society trying to become healthier. Practically all of us are born wanting to be liked by at least some others -- but we should also recognize that although human interaction may come instinctively, friendship is a life skill at which most people can (and should) try to grow.
August 3, 2024
A recent episode of the "Drum Tower" podcast from The Economist addresses the phenomenon of official Chinese government-run boarding schools in Tibet. The place of Tibet within the modern state of China is a fraught question already -- Tibet has many of the marks of a distinct "nation", in the sense of having a recognizable culture, with religious and linguistic characteristics that are different from their neighbors. But Tibet isn't a nation-state, since it doesn't get to govern itself (as anyone familiar with the rallying cry "Free Tibet" is already aware). ■ As the podcast reports, the Chinese government has been engaged in a campaign to build boarding schools in Tibet and to fill them using coercive techniques. The schools, notably, are taught in Mandarin rather than Tibetan. ■ Children are enrolled in the boarding schools from kindergarten age -- which means that in many cases, they begin immersion in a language other than the one spoken at home from the very beginning of their literate ages. A charitable argument would suggest that learning Mandarin is a key way to unlock future economic potential within the broader Chinese state. ■ The less charitable interpretation is that by displacing and undermining the children's home language from a tender young age, the Chinese government is pursuing an agenda to cleave the children away from their family and ethnic identities. It's a familiar model: The American and Canadian governments are being held to account for the culturally devastating practice of sending American Indian/First Nations children to boarding schools in order to force them to undergo assimilation. ■ Parents have a strong instinct to consent to whatever appears to be in the long-term best interests of their children, even when that is in tension with what appears to be in the interests of the family unit. That's what makes the practice so sinister, in effectively forcing families to choose a practice to surrender their links to their children in exchange for the likely best hope for their children to have economic opportunities in the future. It's a cruel way to subjugate a people.
August 4, 2024
The wrong kind of unconditional love
In an utterly dismaying twist, two of the "prisoners" swapped back to Russia in exchange for Western hostages like Evan Gershkovich were children who didn't even know they were Russians. Their parents had been posing as Argentines living in Slovenia, and the children themselves were actually born in Argentina. ■ It's a story that closely tracks with the "deep cover" story told in "The Americans". But these are real lives being affected -- not a couple of fictional characters on a television show. Now uprooted from not only the homeland of their birth but also of the country where they had been residing, they are now semi-public figures in a country to which they had no realized connection until they boarded an airplane days ago. ■ Consider the cruelty in that: Their parents, the only people with whom the children have any unsevered connection in the world, had them as unwitting accomplices in a spy game. And even though the one thing every child deserves to believe is that their parents love them unconditionally and above anything else, these children already know that their parents love the Russian state more than them. ■ Some of the people welcomed home in the prisoner exchange earned a hero's welcome by enduring punishment for doing the right thing. These two children, not yet even teenagers, are only now beginning a punishment for the crimes of their parents. No child should ever have to wonder about the authenticity of their parents' love.
August 5, 2024
The risk is digested when you buy
The panicked state of global stock markets has made for some real turbulence as cliche-addicted financial writers fill their column-inches with predictable phrases like "flight to safety" and filler about "risk". It's all a rather silly way of looking at things, since any one-day decline of 3% in a stock-market index projects out on an annualized basis to the market zeroing-out completely, which is an obviously impossible proposition. ■ Even the phrase "sell-off" is awfully misleading, since by definition, every stock sale by one party was a stock purchase by another. It's easier, though, to make a big story out of emotional reactions rather than cool logic. ■ In 2015, Warren Buffett told the assembled shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, "We've been very cautious about what we've done because of the people among our families and friends who are invested in the company. We could have played harder at times, but I'd rather be 100 times too cautious than 1% too incautious. People looking at our past would say we've missed plenty of good opportunities." ■ People who think that "safety" is found in selling stocks -- especially when they're in a tizzy -- get it completely backwards. The time to make "safety" a priority is when you buy an asset: If you're quite positive that you've paid a price that is less than (or, at least, no more than equal to) the intrinsic value of that asset, then you can sleep soundly, no matter what everyone else does around you. ■ That's the kind of caution Buffett was talking about: Letting anxiety prevail before a purchase (sometimes to the point it keeps one from "playing harder" and taking a chance on what might turn out to be profitable later), so that there's no cause for panic after the purchase. Everyone is liable to make mistakes in that process, but people who look first to the intrinsic value of all investments -- from stocks to real estate to even education -- and only secondly at price have no need to be alarmed.
The polluted condition of the Seine has been bad enough to cause some physical distress for Olympic athletes who came into contact with the river for their competitive events. That, in turn, has been the cause of some loss of face for the French, who are otherwise viewed as a wealthy and advanced country. ■ While the French situation is a matter of pride over a choice to use a river (when alternatives could have been available -- Toyko built all-new, man-made venues for the 2020 Games), there are still 1.5 billion people on this planet who don't have access to basic sanitation services, like toilets or latrines. That's unconscionable in this day and age. ■ As many as 4 million people suffer from cholera every year, of whom as many as 143,000 may die. Meanwhile, an estimated 1.7 billion cases of dysentery are suffered each year. ■ These are thoroughly preventable diseases; the basic technologies to rehabilitate polluted water and to purify raw water in order to make it drinkable have been proven for well over a century. So while France is losing face over its polluted river, much greater real suffering takes place outside of the spotlight every day because basic sanitation and potable water services are not yet universal.
A meme that circulates on Facebook groups with names like "Baby Boomer Fun Events" proposes that "Younger Americans will have trouble believing this," but "there was once this guy named Walter Cronkite, who would read the news on television every weeknight. He didn't seem to have an agenda [...] He would just read the news, and then we would all just make up our own minds about what we thought." ■ It's a charmingly sentimental statement -- and the claim isn't all that far from what Cronkite himself probably would have said about his own coverage. Cronkite seems to have authentically thought of himself as a neutral, unbiased source of news and information. ■ But even if Cronkite did a respectable job of trying to report without fear or favor, it's misleading to believe that he was as neutral as the ideal might have suggested. ■ When Cronkite decided the running order of the stories to be covered on his evening news broadcast, or used his authority as managing editor of the broadcast to devote more or less time to a story, or chose to quote one source rather than another, he applied a set of values and made a judgment. ■ Inevitably, those judgments reflected values and opinions. And they were subject to the constraints of a newscast constrained by time and resources: News tends to be covered more thoroughly by television when there's a camera nearby. When Cronkite would sign off by saying, "And that's the way it is", it gave a false impression of comprehensiveness. Whatever one might think of Dan Rather's other faults, his use of the much more restrained "That's part of our world tonight" actually did a better job of reflecting the limits of reality to the audience. ■ Media literacy in Cronkite's day, as well as our own, requires the audience to realize that no tale of the day is complete, no single perspective is definitive, no report can hope to uncover all of the motivations behind events, and no journalist (no matter how aspirational or high-minded) can be completely without bias. ■ Reporters generally can and should strive to be both thorough and fair, and reasonable efforts should be devoted to earning the trust and goodwill of a fair-minded public. But audiences, too, need to realize that even Walter Cronkite wasn't really "just reading the news".
August 7, 2024
France's folly with the River Seine continues, with another river swim being cancelled over high levels of bacteria in the water. On one hand, the distant observer has to admire the ambition of the Olympic organizers who thought they could clean up the river in time. On the other hand, it's hard not to wonder how they managed to so severely underestimate the scale of the problem. ■ The best way to keep water clean is to keep contaminants out in the first place. It's much better to prevent pollution at the source -- which often means addressing what we know as non-point-source pollution, which mostly consists of runoff from agricultural and other diffuse sources. ■ Non-point-source pollution is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons; while it's easy to point to a factory discharging polluted water from a pipe into a sewer or a nearby creek and order them to clean up their act, it's much harder to tell lots of farmers, ranchers, homeowners, and businesses to stop doing damage by the acre. ■ Thus, the farmer who over-applies some fertilizer over here, the homeowner who blows some grass clippings into the street over there, and the store that over-salts its parking lot in the wintertime down the way each contributes a little bit to a pollution problem which, in the aggregate, devastates the water quality in the next river downstream. ■ The Seine could, in theory, be cleaned through the state-of-the-art technologies already widely known to the field of civil engineering. But the flow rate of the river is considerable -- at some times, higher than 500 cubic meters per second. That's almost half a billion gallons of water per hour -- or 11.4 billion gallons per day. ■ To clean all of it to a swimmable standard would mean treating something like 38 times the typical daily flow through the water reclamation facility that serves Washington, DC, which is one of the largest in the US, or about eight times the peak flow through Chicago's Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, which is widely regarded as the largest in the world. ■ For many years, the prevailing belief was summed up in the phrase, "Dilution is the solution to pollution". That was short-sighted and incomplete. In the long run, even diluted pollutants have a way of becoming concentrated (see, for instance, the problem with mercury levels found in tuna). Taking pollutants out is possible -- but it requires an enormous scale of investment and energy. It's far better to keep out the unwanted stuff in the first place.
August 9, 2024
Sometimes, we become so used to the syntax of professionally-written, objective journalistic headlines that we have to re-read them to really digest what's happening. The viewpoint neutrality so highly valued can create a smokescreen for sinister motivations that are worth revealing. ■ For example, today we have this headline from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: "Death Toll In Ukraine Supermarket Strike Rises To 14 As Rescue Effort Suspended". RFE/RL is a respectable, reputable source of news, and this headline would pass scrutiny as being factual without lending moral judgment. ■ But when drained of that moral judgment, the headline also loses a critical component of its humanity. The real story behind the headline is encapsulated in this alternative: "Russia launched a missile to blow up a supermarket in Ukraine and kill the innocent people inside. 14 of them are now dead." ■ Still factual, but projected through a lens of moral expectations. And what that latter headline would say is scathing.
August 10, 2024
Upon finishing in record time for a European runner and fourth place overall in the 3000-meter steeplechase, French Olympian Alice Finot found her boyfriend, dropped to one knee, and proposed marriage with a symbolic Olympic pin. ■ Predictably, a certain breed of Internet commentator emerged to decry the move as emasculating and unacceptably non-traditional. Where cheers are in order, they have nothing of merit to offer. ■ The Olympics are, at very long last, half-female, as they long ago ought to have been. And just as the sports world has long had some catching-up to do, so does love. ■ Setting the European record was Finot's victory, and she chose to share the moment with the person she loves most. There are those who would object under any circumstances to any marriage proposal performed in front of a crowd, but proposee Bruno Martinez Bargiela, too, is an established competitive athlete, so it wasn't out of line for their relationship. ■ As for the charge of emasculation, he's had nine years to decide if the relationship is right for him (and to get out if it's not). So has she. We, as onlookers, should be much happier to live in a world where a woman feels free to propose marriage than one in which she has no right to decline an arranged or forced marriage. What people do freely and voluntarily should be theirs to choose. ■ It's a feel-good moment among many at the Olympics, and anyone looking in ought to be happy to cheer them on. If love is love, and if everyone has a right to it, then proposals should be for everyone, too.
August 11, 2024
Up with prudent skepticism, down with chronic cynicism
Microsoft has come right out and said it: "[G]roups connected with the Iranian government have [...] laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and [...] launched operations that Microsoft assesses are designed to gain intelligence on political campaigns and help enable them to influence the elections in the future". A lot of Americans have resisted the notion that foreign governments might have tried to influence elections in the past, and by extension have implicitly rejected the notion that it might happen again. ■ Psychologically, something about American triumphalism has converged with some deeply unhealthy electoral self-interests to produce a kind of cynicism about anything that others might try to achieve via influence campaigns. Thus, words like "hoax" get thrown about without enough people truly taking the threat seriously. ■ But the fact is that the foreign interference campaigns are already well underway. The Trump campaign got maliciously hacked for spicy confidential materials. Russia previously did the same thing to the Clinton campaign. ■ We have to take our heads out of the sand on ____ counts: First, ordinary people need to get on board with a cybersecurity mindset that acknowledges that the front lines in these battles are everywhere. It's happening right now, and it will never relent. Second, VIPs need to observe a much higher level of security practices -- to the point where following them actually starts to hurt a little bit. Anything less will leave them vulnerable. ■ Third, we need to set a cultural standard of expectations that we will shun those who share ill-gotten secrets and adopt a prudent skepticism of anything we see reported online -- more skeptical of established names than we may have been in the past, and ten times more skeptical of those names that don't have a track record. ■ Iran and Russia both have been creating "pop-up" outlets claiming to report American news and opinion. Of course they will continue to do the same, as will other state actors -- and they will openly appeal to Americans' worst instincts to confirm our own existing biases. We have to demonstrate the media literacy to know that (a) not all content is authentic, and (b) even some authentic content is worth avoiding if it was obtained wrongfully.
August 12, 2024
Audacy, the large radio operator that owns the license to broadcast WCBS on 880 AM in New York City, has announced the end of the station as it has been known for almost 60 years. The landmark all-news format and the network-flagship call letters are both to be retired as the signal is turned over to an all-sports format. ■ Many, if not most, of the extremely large radio station operators have been ruthless in their approach to the medium over the quarter-century since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ripped the lid off of old limits on the number of stations any single operator could license. The biggest players engaged in the equivalent of a land rush, often paying irrational, debt-fueled prices to get big before their rivals could. ■ How irrational were those prices? Consider that the largest operator in the country has run at an operating loss of $944 million so far this year on revenues of $1.7 billion -- and that's before coughing up $191 million in interest payments. Interest costs have dwarfed any operating profits for at least three years straight. Audacy, which comes in second by revenues, has had such a bad run that it "reorganized" out of Chapter 11 earlier this year. ■ The fundamental problem is the debt burden, which in turn has caused managers (and owners) to treat radio stations like an extractive industry -- like mines to be stripped -- rather than as renewable, sustainable operations -- like farms to be tended. To be sure, technology has ushered in radical changes in audience listening patterns, but enlightened management could have leveraged heritage station identities (like WCBS) to capitalize on those changes, rather than torching the storied names and leaving hard-working people unemployed. ■ Choices were made that got us here. And "here", far more than it should be, is a place where a public in dire need of dependable and trustworthy sources of news and information no longer know which outlets to trust, because so many of the names they used to know have been cast off like garbage.
August 13, 2024
A short segment of pedestrian and biking trail in a rural area best known for a sauerkraut festival is about to open to a great deal more fanfare than would seem proportional to the size of the trail itself. But the enthusiasm is high because the stretch of trail is all that's left to complete a loop connecting the High Trestle Trail with the Raccoon River Valley Trail in Central Iowa. ■ The result is a continuous loop of trails that can be ridden for loops of 72, 86, or 118 miles at a time -- all on dedicated pathways. It's a great boost to the quality of life in Iowa, giving people good reasons to be active outdoors, enhancing the profile of the state's natural conservation programs, and bringing intentional (but low-impact) visitor traffic through small communities. ■ America's infatuation with cars has been exhaustively documented, and nothing is likely ever to eclipse the allure of the Great American Road Trip. It's hard to exaggerate just how vast and comparatively wide-open most of the United States remains to this day, particularly by comparison with the familiar allies and friendly countries of Europe. ■ It is a good turn of events that local and regional efforts to build trail networks have earned respect in some of the same ways that four-lane highways have long accrued it: As important features that are generally expected in forward-looking communities. There is still considerable room for growth, but the initiatives in Iowa have gathered a momentum of their own.
August 14, 2024
The most important nearly-thankless job
Duty is performed in many and varied ways, from the adult child caring for an aging parent to the reliable precinct poll worker to the soldier defending a forward operating base far from home. We Americans live in a political system that celebrates liberties, but which depends far more upon the tug of duty than it's comfortable to admit. ■ One of the highest duties in the entire country is carried out almost thanklessly in plain sight. The members of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee, particularly the Chair, execute quite nearly the most important work short of commanding the armed forces. ■ Excitement over the fresh good news about inflation (it's at long last below 3%) will undoubtedly echo much louder than any thanks for the dutiful members of the Fed. That may be a mistake. An independent central bank is essential to the welfare of our enormous economy. But it only remains independent in part because it earns legitimacy through performance. ■ The temptation politicians feel to challenge Fed independence is a strong as it is predictable. Most of the benefits of capturing control over the money supply are felt up-front, while the pain takes longer to sink in. ■ That's why selfish and shortsighted politicians so commonly threaten to take over the Federal Reserve's central job of managing the money supply. One of the key duties of the Federal Reserve is to be responsible when politicians are not, even if it brings them scorn. ■ It's not as though Fed leaders have nothing better to do. It's hard to imagine a group of people who who could fill their time with highly-paid work (if they wanted it) than those economic gurus. ■ But, mainly, they serve dutifully, and our political and economic systems rely heavily on that sense of duty. We should far more often and far more vocally be grateful for their service, but we probably won't. We would all be quite literally poorer without their efforts.
QR codes to help those in need
The plan adopted by the City of Des Moines to post signs prohibiting panhandling at intersections is probably prudent. Notwithstanding the protests of groups like the ACLU, it is plainly a first-order hazard to the panhandler to stand in close proximity to speedy traffic. ■ But even if we could do more to make street-adjacent areas safer for pedestrians of all kinds (and there's ample reason to do just that), panhandling also creates a second-order problem for motorists by creating an intimidation hazard. Try to spot the difference between a panhandler and a potential carjacker: Can you really be quite sure? ■ Above all, panhandling is simply not a good way to deliver welfare. Not everything needs to be institutionalized or turned into a program, to be sure, but just as it can often be more effective to donate cash to a food bank (which can then take advantage of bulk pricing) than to donate food directly, so too can well-managed organizations actually deliver direct assistance to those in need through accountable programs, and do so more efficiently than the individual may be able to help themselves. ■ Cities should put up signs in known panhandling hot spots, offering a QR code to permit motorists to easily donate to an assistance fund for those in need, rather than handing cash through the window. That would allow people of goodwill to take instant action when conscience moves them, while simultaneously discouraging people from putting themselves in physical danger by standing near the street.
August 16, 2024
An Irish swimmer may have been the last Olympic victim of the dirty water in the Seine, going to the hospital after competing in a 10-kilometer open water swim -- instead of getting to be a flag bearer at the closing ceremonies. He certainly didn't want anything to do with the river again. ■ The whole Seine debacle highlights the enormous role that energy plays in water quality. Would it be theoretically possible to treat all of the water that flows down the Seine? Perhaps. The same could plausibly be done with any river; it's all a matter of scale. ■ But there's no getting around this: Healing polluted water takes a large amount of energy. Water is dense: A single cubic foot of water contains just shy of 7.5 gallons, and every gallon weighs 8.34 pounds. That means a cubic foot of water weighs more than 62 lbs. ■ Every time water is lifted, pumped, clarified, filtered, or aerated, at least some of it has to be displaced. That comes at a high cost of mechanical energy, and that almost entirely involves passing energy through electric motors. ■ In the long term, the best thing that can be done for the good of reducing water pollution (other than preventing that pollution in the first place) is to generate enormous quantities of cheap, non-polluting electricity. With enough of that energy, almost any sick water can be healed. And healing the water is preferable to healing humans who get sick because of it.
August 21, 2024
Bob Newhart may have passed away a month ago, but his voice echoed loudly at the Democratic National Convention. Not in words or political meaning, but in the influence he left on delivery. ■ Newhart's style was powerful in its restraint -- his deadpan delivery was killer, his signature joke was in the silent moment of half a phone call, and one of his finest sketches hinged entirely on a quiet buildup to the words "Stop it!". But because Newhart was so restrained, he had to strategically employ a stammer to create comedic tension; he would have sounded too polished and unreal without it. ■ Audiences could hear Newhart's stammer echoed by former President Barack Obama in his speech to the DNC. Obama's tendency towards linguistic precision and polish is legendary, and it's been documented since at least his Harvard Law School days. But, like Newhart, he inserted a stammer to build tension where his natural inclination would have been to glide smoothly from one word to the next. ■ For Obama, it's an adopted affectation, not a natural expression. It's funny to see an imperfection borrowed from comedy put to work by a former President as a political tool, but such was the expansive impression Bob Newhart left on the culture. He gave the world decades of comedy, but even 94 years of life seems like it was too short.
August 22, 2024
Outlets like Five Thirty-Eight and The Economist are firing up their predictive models for the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election, especially as the anticipation of the major party conventions is giving way to the mythical shift in public attention that supposedly takes place every Labor Day. But even though the polls and models are nothing more than statistical projections, people want certainty. ■ Matt Glassman of Georgetown's Government Affairs Institute laments, "People keep asking me who's going to win the election and I keep saying it's a coin flip and then they say 'yeah, but who do you *think* is going to win' and I thought about explaining the coin flip prices in what I think but I've decided to just randomize saying Trump or Harris." ■ Americans generally loathe statistical thinking anywhere but in the realm of sports betting. Everywhere else, we congenitally expect certainty (even if it's false certainty) and assume (often correctly) that we'll find an ad-hoc way out of every situation. It's certainly not a new development: Look at how completely unprepared our forebears were for WWII. Our standing military was tiny, even as it was clear the world was burning. But after fundamentally ignoring the risk all the way through bedtime on Dec. 6, 1941, the issue was forced and America mobilized in a way that led to crushing industrial dominance. ■ Similar things could be said even dating back to the Revolutionary War. It's been well-documented that George Washington was anguished by the desperate lack of resources his Continentals faced in trying to defeat the British. We have always tended to believe more in destiny than in odds. ■ To this day, people want investment funds that guarantee a specific retirement age, weather forecasts that are precise to their neighborhoods, and products that never require maintenance. And even though it has quite often worked out for us in the end, it's worth pondering whether we would be a better country if we kept the optimism but squared ourselves better with uncertainty. There's a reason Eagle Scouts often stand out well into adulthood: "Be Prepared" is effectively a countercultural motto. Were we to do a better job of hoping for the best but weighting the odds in case of the worst, perhaps we'd be even better-off than we are today.
August 23, 2024
Something peculiar about human psychology makes most of us tend to find most matters easier to learn when it seems like the subject is being presented playfully or without consequences. The cognitive load of a college lecture seems high, while the same content presented as a reenactment on the History Channel seems easy to digest. It's not the content so much as the context that triggers a response. ■ This can lead to serious misguidance, of course: Just because something is presented engagingly doesn't mean that it is right. Lots of cues cause people to believe more than they should: A presenter with a booming baritone voice seems arbitrarily credible, which is why Dennis Haysbert makes for a great insurance spokesperson. Accents can do the same thing; Americans will believe just about anything delivered with Britain's Received Pronunciation. ■ Another cue that can mislead is a brand name. People like to be awed by celebrity. And one of the most spectacular hijackings of a brand name has come to a close with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. withdrawing from the Presidential race. Kennedy inherited one of the most valuable brand names of all time -- enough to launch him to double digits in the polls (as high as perhaps 20% at the beginning), without having meaningful electoral experience or coherent policy ideas. ■ The reputational effect of his candidacy was bad enough that his siblings used the word "betrayal". It may not have been fair for his ambitious parents to saddle him with the weight of a "junior" name, but he made his own choices to bring disinformation and crackpottery to the spotlight of American political life. The civic dialogue is better off without his voice.
August 24, 2024
The Economist magazine is advertising for a South Asia bureau chief, to be based in Delhi. It's not a new beat for the magazine to cover; there is already a Mumbai bureau and frequent coverage of India in the publication, generally. But it's unusual among its peers in the English-language news media. ■ Few US news outlets bother to staff bureaus in India. NBC has a shared bureau in New Delhi, while ABC and CBS have no such offices. The New York Times has a New Delhi bureau and CNN anchors its South Asia coverage from there as well, but by and large the foreign bureau is a rare find, including in India. ■ As a consequence of the sparse coverage, even a news junkie in America hears very little from day to day about India. Yet it's so big (India has eclipsed China as the world's most populous country) and so important to power relations that its absence is problematic. Is India, for instance, on the side of Ukraine or Russia in their current conflict? India is America's second-largest source of immigrants and one of our top-tier trading partners. ■ It's hard for important knowledge to break through if news isn't being covered, and India is becoming no less important to the balance of power and the future of the world generally than it was before. It's good to see a major outlet like The Economist sustaining its commitment to coverage of the subcontinent, but it would be good for others to follow their lead.
August 25, 2024
Cats aren't the only curious ones
In 1965, the government of Manitoba decided to lean into the Space Age theme by stationing spherical, Sputnik-like trash cans along highways around the province. It was a clever idea fed by a whole program of highway signs and other promotion. ■ Something as humble as a trash can may not seem worthy of extra design attention -- but that's only because we take the idea of trash disposal too easily for granted. We shouldn't do that. ■ Civilization depends on a whole mesh of effective modern sanitation programs, for conventional solid waste, recycling, composting, and hazardous wastes, as well as sanitary sewage, storm sewage, non-point-source water pollution, and all forms of air pollution. Fail to deliver any one of those, and the quality of life suffers. Drop the ball on some of them and things start to fall apart instantly. ■ A little bit of human-friendly design can help to keep these infrastructure services -- the backbone of modern living -- in the forefront of public attention. It doesn't have to happen all the time, but relegating these services to the shadows is an unforced mistake. ■ In places where resources are constrained, clever ideas pop up easily; that's why land-scarce Amsterdam has a clean and appealing system of underground trash collection. But even in places with lots of space (like Manitoba), the public deserves clever, well-designed contributions to their infrastructure. ■ People deserve to be excited (or at least delighted) by the ordinary, and clever ideas like the Orbit shouldn't belong only to the past. Curiosity gets us to do useful things, like putting trash in its place. It's a resource worth cultivating.
August 26, 2024
Brand-name nonsense is still nonsense
An article in Investor's Business Daily -- a nominally reputable news outlet -- screams out the headline "Warren Buffett's panic sale of Apple stock cost $6.2 billion". ■ Anyone is free to write a story like this in pursuit of clicks. But that analysis is so wide of the mark that it betrays a total unfamiliarity with how Buffett makes investment decisions. ■ The IBD writer notes that Apple's stock price rose after Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, sold off about half of its Apple stock holdings. Factual enough, perhaps. But Buffett's approach doesn't depend upon timing future events (like changes in stock prices). ■ Fundamentally, it's an investing philosophy based upon doing the work and taking the preponderance of the risk up-front; buying when the intrinsic value of a company is meaningfully greater than the market price. A Buffett sale is generally an indication that the market price exceeds his estimation of intrinsic value by so much that it's time to let go. ■ Dwelling on stock price performance after selling is a bit like speculating on the outcome of a baseball game if the starting pitcher had stayed through nine innings. Sure, plenty of things are possible -- but a manager goes into a game expecting to get something like five innings out of a starter. On a bad day, he might get replaced sooner. Once in a while, you might see a shutout. At the extremes, you might even get a perfect game. ■ But the "intrinsic value" of the starting pitcher is generally found in those first five or so innings, and anything far beyond that is great good fortune. Knowing when you've already gotten far more than you deserved to expect and walking away while you're ahead doesn't make you a sucker for not squeezing every last strike out of a pitcher or every last dollar out of a stock price. That's not "panic". It's prudence.
Ukrainian machine gun vs. Russian missile
(Video) Put it on the sizzle reel for Ukraine's NATO application. A large Russian air attack against civilians in Ukraine has once again disrupted the lives of millions of people who weren't doing anything wrong. This isn't the behavior of an aggressor that will contain its ambitions; it's the behavior of barbarians who won't stop until they are forced to do so. Send Ukraine whatever it needs to make that happen.
You dump the gold standard, quit relying on tariffs, and jettison highly restrictive immigration quotas, and what do you get? The progress made by American free enterprise since the 1920s.
A water buffalo got loose in suburban Des Moines. Someone call Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.
August 28, 2024
Bad training kills valuable time
David Burbach, who is an associate professor at the Naval War College, notes that his career requires him to welcome the new school year with a "1.5 hour active shooter training video for a transcript that takes 10 min to read in full". Different people learn via different modes, of course, but it should enter at least someone's consideration that most college graduates -- especially those with post-graduate degrees -- have, almost by definition, learned how to digest lots of information from written texts. Thus, if required to undergo 90 minutes of training that can be read in ten minutes, members of that audience are likely to be so bored by the low information density of the recorded training that they might actually end up resisting the content they are supposed to be learning. ■ The excruciatingly low quality of training for adults in low-stakes learning environments (like workplace safety training and required continuing-education programs) is practically a crime. Online videos -- especially when clumsily animated, as so many are -- mostly take bad teaching habits and make them worse through low information density. ■ A fast talker can reach sustained rates of about 150 to 200 words per minute, though when those words are delivered for an audience, they are often imperfectly chosen. This rate is safely below even the conservative estimates of up to 300 words per minute that adults can generally read, which itself is much lower than what a college-practiced "skimmer" can generally glean. ■ Not all written content is of the same quality, of course. Some is garbage (even when it wasn't written by artificial intelligence). Some is sublime. But with careful thought and editing, it's rare to find content that can't be delivered at least as well in text form as can be delivered in a video -- after all, what is the transcript of a video but a text? ■ 90% of online training videos would be better as carefully-scripted, spokesperson-direct-to-camera recordings, interspersed when necessary with pictures and videos. And 90% of those would be better if the scripts were just converted to attractive printed pamphlets, laid out thoughtfully for optimal knowledge transfer (for instance, in the Edward Tufte format). ■ Alas, low-stakes learning is all too often treated as nothing more than an afterthought or a chore to be grudgingly completed by all parties involved, even when it involves matters of life and death, like airline safety briefings. If we were to really embrace "lifelong learning", as well we should, perhaps we would invest better in delivering better content for people to absorb once they're outside of conventional classroom settings. Assuming that most people graduate sometime in their twenties and work for around forty years, wouldn't it make sense to put at least twice the thought into that full-life-cycle education as we put into "school" education?
August 30, 2024
Rules, not gentlemen's agreements
One way or another, the United States and China will have to coexist as major global powers. It is certain to be a rocky relationship from time to time, but occasional diplomatic encounters -- like the US National Security Advisor's meeting with the Chinese president -- are likely to be fruitful on the whole if they help to keep avenues of communication open between the countries. But what is actually said still matters. ■ In his campaign book for the 1988 Presidential election, George H. W. Bush wrote, "One of the lessons I'd learned in two diplomatic assignments, at the United Nations and in China, was never to underestimate the importance of symbolism. Not image -- that's something else entirely. Image has to do with appearance, how you look to the world. Symbolism has to do with messages, what you want to tell the world." ■ Xi Jinping's words at the meeting went like this: "In this changing and turbulent world, countries need solidarity and coordination instead of division or confrontation." At a glance, that sounds unobjectionable; who wants "division or confrontation"? ■ But it's the kind of platitudinous nonsense one might say when they really mean, "Stay out of our sphere of influence". And that's clearly how China's rulers see matters. The Soviet Union liked that "spheres of influence" idea, too, and for the same reason: If rivalrous great powers can agree to split up the world and stay out of one another's claims, that looks a lot like "coordination" and prevents "confrontation". ■ That's not how a world order based upon rules is supposed to work, though. Different nations agree on rules by mutual consent, and stand behind those rules everywhere. ■ And differences of opinion about the implementation and consequences of those rules can easily lead to "confrontation" -- much more of it than if powerful countries merely "coordinate" and agree to let one another force "solidarity" upon weaker neighbors. But the observance of rules, even if it's sometimes messier and less immediately satisfying to the expansive ambitions of the powerful, is a more just way to regard self-determination for all. ■ Conflict within rules-based boundaries can be contained. It's when a power insists that "coordination" looks like absorbing a neighbor, muscling out another's naval claims, and making incursions into another's airspace that we come to realize what's really being said behind the symbols.
A man who went hiking up a 14,000' mountain on a Colorado company retreat got separated from his group and lost off the trail. He ended up stuck, lost and alone, overnight, and was "lucky to be alive" when found by a search-and-rescue team. ■ It isn't uncommon to hear cheery marketing and recruitment materials alike using phrases like "work family". But the fact plainly is that a work team isn't a family, and it never will be. Even real families that work together have to consciously address the differences between work and familial bonds, if they want to remain healthy at either. ■ Words matter, and using "family" language for non-family activities can set misleading expectations about things like duties of care. Even Cub Scouts are taught to practice the buddy system when out on a hike. Any company outing to a mountain should have come with the same expectations. ■ As awful as it would be to find oneself left behind on a mountain, it's probably less tragic than what happened to the Wells Fargo employee who died at her desk in Tempe, Arizona, not to be found for four days. ■ A freak incident, perhaps. Regardless, it should come as an emphatic reminder that you can work with friends, you can work with family, and your friends can ultimately become like family -- but at no time should any of us be seduced by the spin that work and love are to be judged by the same standards. Even when love isn't involved, we owe one another duties of basic responsibility that neither a nanny state -- nor a corporate "parent" -- can ever supply.
August 31, 2024
The advent of college football season takes on epic proportions in much of the United States. It does so more than ever, now that the Big Ten Conference literally stretches from sea to shining sea. The cultural touchstones are many, from tailgates to team colors at work on Fridays. ■ This, though, may be the first college football season of a new era -- for nothing directly to do with football. It is the first season to follow a year in which the biggest names in sports belonged at least as often to women as to men. It's a tidal shift. ■ Thanks in part to their proportional over-performance at the Summer Olympics, but also to other striking moments in the spotlight, it's no longer the "women's sports" enthusiast but rather the ordinary fan who recognizes names like Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Caitlin Clark, and Sha'Carri Richardson. Not just one of them, but all of them. ■ Forty years ago, women were outnumbered two-to-one by men on the US Olympic team. Women were barely an asterisk in Congress at the time and headed just two Fortune 500 companies. Neither of those statistics has yet balanced out quite like the Olympic medal count, but indisputable progress has been made. ■ The genuine surge in popular enthusiasm for women's sports may prove to be a sort of vanguard for helping to knock down the resistance that remains in the way of recognizing women's eligibility for other high-performance activities. For now, that's only an effect we can really detect in equality-committed countries like the United States. The ultimate goal, though, would be to see those effects carried over elsewhere around a world that often remains unequal and explicitly sexist.