Gongol.com Archives: October 2024
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October 2, 2024
History to guard the present and future
In a time of big events -- a catastrophic hurricane in the southeast, a significant Presidential election just weeks away, wars underway involving both allies and foes -- it's easy to find commentary that leans heavily upon the notion that everything in view is unprecedented. This temperament is egged on by a media environment (both social and mass media) that rewards nothing more than it rewards engagement, whether it is of quality or not. ■ This leads some people to make outlandish claims in pursuit of that engagement. Some even do it in the public square, like the union boss who wants to inflict pain on everyone so that he can hold his industry in stasis rather than seeing it conform with the times. Dreams of past glories (like a certain hazy fondness for an industrialized past) are easy to romanticize. ■ Historical literacy is an indispensable guardian of future welfare. It's vital to recognize the fullness of history -- where we and our predecessors went wrong and where they went right. What mistakes were made and what was hidden from scrutiny. What developments were fruitful and which ones set us back. ■ That historical literacy takes work. It takes educators who know their stuff and have ideas for making the past relevant to students who might not be ready to care of their own volition. It takes public figures who can incorporate historical references honorably into what they say about the present. It takes a public willing to check the facts once in a while. It takes resources like Our World In Data that can serve as clearinghouses for what we need to see in perspective. ■ None of this is necessarily easy, and it's certainly not free. But the costs of historical illiteracy are huge. Human nature changes very little over time, and in many aspects it never changes at all. Thus, while the particular details may change, history truly does often rhyme. But unless we know how it went the first time around, we leave ourselves dreadfully vulnerable to the hazards of making bad judgments over and over again.
October 3, 2024
A columnist for the University of Iowa's student newspaper laments that his campus remains peppered with buildings in the Brutalist architectural style. Cole Walker pleads, "Brutalist-style buildings should be torn down or renovated to enhance campus facilities and engage students in nontraditional ways, ensuring that curiosity and creativity flourish through a focus on design and culture." ■ He's entirely not wrong; some of the concrete monoliths of Iowa City are drab and uninspiring -- though others have modestly more curb appeal than they might be given credit for having. But it's a stretch to imagine that a public university will simply tear down big, heavy buildings just for the purpose of replacing them with structures that "engage students in nontraditional ways". That would require a whole lot of money for a terribly ambiguous purpose. ■ But what the student's plea does underscore is a lesson that ought to ring in every architect's ears: Buildings should be designed for the people inside them. ■ Most buildings are scarcely "designed" at all; nobody's really putting much thought into a strip mall. But those buildings that are favored enough to get true architectural treatment should generally obey Louis Sullivan's maxim that form follows function. The modern spin on that maxim ought to be that "Form first follows the function of serving the people inside". ■ How many buildings are constructed with little or no regard for even the basic features of permitting sunlight when it is wanted or filtering it naturally when it is not? Or of encouraging generous natural airflow to enhance mechanical HVAC? Or of creating interior spaces that thoughtfully center on the human experience? ■ Much can be done to add ornamentation or change a facade later on in the design phase -- or even be conducted during a long-overdue renovation. But surface features that matter only to people on the outside should come far behind the priority to make the building the best it can be for the needs of the people performing the functions inside of it -- not for the sake of the functions, but for the sake of the occupants. If that's done right, everything else should follow.
October 5, 2024
Liberate the language of money
Within a free-market economy, one tier of secular sainthood is reserved for those who liberate the language of money away from the financial and economic priesthood. Money itself isn't divine, but what it measures and the activity it facilitates makes all the difference between living in a modern, safe, and productive world -- or living in caves, feeling hungry, cold, and sick. ■ The problem we often face is that discussions of money -- even when it's a central point of public policy and decision-making -- are cloaked in the two things almost guaranteed to make ordinary people allergic: Jargon and math. ■ It doesn't really have to be this way; economic activity is as natural to any of us as rewarding a dog with a treat for performing a trick (a simple illustration of incentives) or watering a seedling and watching it grow (a fair metaphor for compounding interest). Most of what really matters could be conveyed to children in the form of bedtime stories -- and it probably should. ■ Waiting for adulthood doesn't help. People don't like learning anything that feels like a chore, and the money priesthood (that is, anyone who understands it well enough to obfuscate it for others and get paid to "figure it out") counts on that reluctance for its survival. ■ But the incentives create a feedback loop: The more the priesthood can complicate matters, the more intimidating it looks, and nobody has much incentive to de-complicate matters. What money is to be made in that? ■ Nor is this only the case for market economies. It applies to mixed and command economies, too -- perhaps even more so. The people of North Korea starve on average incomes of less than $2,000 a year, but the people who "command" their economy ride in limousines and look well-fed while their compatriots go hungry. ■ Ignorance concentrates power into the hands of those who know more than others. Sometimes they know better because they've learned more, and other times, they benefit from secrets. Dismantling mass-market ignorance of money would help to wrest power away from an undeserving priesthood.
October 6, 2024
There is no obvious way to make it profitable to a private-sector firm, but among the most valuable investments society could make in light of the artificial intelligence boom (and the perils, both known and unknown, that go with it) is to commit to a Manhattan Project-like effort to advance the science of psychology. Much of AI is purportedly built on the concepts of neural networks patterned on the human brain, yet we hardly know enough about the function of the brain to know how even to describe how neural networking even works. ■ Most arts and sciences seem to go through a similar series of development phases. It starts with the initial establishment of the discipline, usually under a founding theoretician or school (think Florence Nightingale and the modern practice of nursing). Then comes a juvenile stage, defined by the prominence of individual authors, often endorsing competitive theories (see, for instance, the economic rivalry between the schools of Hayek and Keynes). Then comes an adolescence, in which the second or third generation of experts starts to harmonize or unify the proven aspects of those early theories as new supplementary ideas blossom. Ultimately, most sciences arrive at a stage of maturity in which a fairly broad consensus prevails on the fundamentals and disagreements persist over the frontiers of the science. ■ Meteorology? A mature science. Economics? Probably somewhere in adolescence. AI? Still just a baby -- in which not only are most of the founders still alive, some (like Elon Musk and Sam Altman) are still actively feuding with each other. ■ Psychology still seems like it's in that juvenile phase -- there are still Jungians and Freudians and logotherapists and many other fragmented schools of thought. That fragmentation is on display in fields like business and education, which depend heavily on psychology, but still don't often confidently know what to do with it. ■ The real hazard for us could well become evident if AI science (which is well-funded and full of ambitious researchers with loads of incentives) matures faster than psychology. We have magnificent brains that are the products of millions of years of evolution, but computer processing is such that every human second is like years or even decades to a neural network. If we don't really know ourselves, how will we know where we stand in contrast with computers? ■ There's lots of talk about an AI "kill switch", as well there ought to be. But the ultimate kill switch is for us to know ourselves better than our tools know us. There's less monetary incentive driving toward that goal, and certainly less energy. It would do us well to rectify that gap.
October 10, 2024
When a candidate promises "Whatever tariffs are required: 100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent" on imported vehicles, it should be evident that the word "tariff" has taken on a purely tokenistic meaning. The effect is no longer about the actual effect of the taxes being imposed, but about the effort to use large-sounding numbers as an otherwise meaningless signal. ■ The European Union has slapped tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, and both the United States and Canada have already imposed 100% tariffs on those imports just this fall. ■ All parties involved seem intent on spinning the tariffs as moves to "protect" or "level the playing field for" their own domestic auto workers. But that's where tariffs run out of gas: We should always pivot to calling them "import taxes", because that's what they are. And as with any tax, the burden falls in some portion on both the buyer and the seller. ■ "Tariff" sounds like something that someone else pays, but the reality is that regardless of where the tax is actually collected, cutting the check isn't the same as paying the price. Honesty would require describing this motivation clearly: The countries imposing import taxes want their own domestic consumers to pay higher prices in the nominal interest of subsidizing work for their fellow citizens...assuming that the intended effect actually plays out. ■ That's a big assumption, of course. "Protection" from competition often does little more than leave a domestic industry soft and sluggish. See, for example, the weakness of the US auto industry in the 1970s, when names like Honda and Toyota started to come on the scene. Both of those Japanese companies are now enormous US domestic automakers, because they kept on improving and Americans kept demanding more. ■ There may be a very serious case to be made for blocking the importation of vehicles from China over security concerns; it has been widely noted that electric vehicle manufacturing is now as much about computers as it is about wheels. ■ But if Chinese-made electric vehicles are riddled with security risks (as well they might be), then import taxes are unlikely to be the solution -- especially if they're only meant to "protect" domestic industry. Trade policies motivated by security concerns should have clear security effects. Otherwise, it just looks like a reward for a small segment of workers getting preferential treatment at their fellow citizens' expense.
October 11, 2024
Awful people keep attacking the Internet Archive
Change your passwords; the bad guys are doing bad things
The people behind product development should always have some exposure to how their work actually performs in the real world. It is extremely hard, and perhaps impossible altogether, to build a great end product without first-hand exposure to how it is used in the field. ■ This observation can, of course, be taken too far: Plenty of firms have only ever put engineers and product developers on the fast track to management. That's not always the right decision; a well-integrated firm can make use of talent from many different departments. And management itself is a discipline, so even those who cross over from other disciplines need to learn how to be good managers if they want to thrive. ■ But it's also a huge mistake to divorce production from the customer experience. Google has filled a virtual graveyard with abandoned products, and the ruthlessness of its killing undoubtedly has some effect on whether customers trust them with future products. Salt water apparently can turn Teslas into fire-starters and Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions were kneecapped because people found Mark Zuckerberg's virtual avatar unsettling. ■ It's not for nothing that "We eat our own cooking" is a phrase intended to cultivate customer trust. Those who experience their own consequences may not be better-equipped to imagine great new possibilities than those for whom a product is more of an abstraction, but they are much better-positioned to experience the pain of their own errors and oversights and to be motivated to fix them.
The National Weather Service office in Des Moines uses high-resolution, real-time satellite imagery to pick out wildfires in their warning area. It's a stellar use of satellite imaging technology, and a great example of what can happen when science and technology open new doors to let curious human beings exercise their problem-solving instincts. ■ Obviously, nobody developed the GOES-16 satellite (or its siblings) for the direct purpose of looking for wildfires. It's first and foremost for looking at clouds. ■ But along the way, someone deduced that looking for fires was a possibility, and now we have a tool that can potentially help detect un-reported fires at least a little sooner. That, in turn, increases the odds that firefighters can be mobilized in time to keep field fires from growing out of control. ■ Fire detection from space is the kind of incremental technological improvement that is all too easy to take for granted. It doesn't affect most people, most of the time. But it's vastly improved over the grainy, low-resolution imagery that passed for weather satellite coverage in living memory. And when it's able to perform at its best, it can make a big difference for people on the ground.
In a real sign of the times, a media outlet tested the use of artificial intelligence to apply for jobs and found that modern job searching is conducive to that sort of automation. ■ One of the celebrated tools customizes cover letters to go along with the applications and resumes. It says something pretty dreadful if an applicant chooses to automate their cover letter, which is precisely the aspect of a job application that is supposed to put some personality and color into an otherwise highly routinized process. Automating the task of cover-letter writing achieves precisely the most perverse result. ■ Job applicants can be forgiven for trying to level the playing field against a job market that's already known to use AI technology to screen job applicants and even to conduct preliminary interviews. ■ But everyone involved must admit that there's something wrong with this picture. Human capital remains human above all, and although people are prone to many forms of lamentable bias, anything created by people -- whether intentionally programmed or "learned" artificially -- is likewise going to contain artifacts of that same bias. We're only kidding ourselves if we think we'll achieve better results for human beings by stripping all remaining elements of humanity from the process.
Good advice for re-framing problems
Dr. Mark Lewis, an oncologist from Utah with a sizeable social-media following, offers some tips for re-framing problems that have been helpful for him -- like disconnecting outcomes from self-worth and staying true to an internal yardstick of success rather than comparisons with others. They are well worth considering, particularly in the spirit of World Mental Health Day. They might well be the devices someone needs to hear today. ■ Different strategies work for different people. We are far from knowing the working of the mind well enough, categorically, to be able to treat people's mental wellness with the precision of, say, a prescription for eyeglasses. Improving on that frontier ought to be a high priority for society. ■ For many people, it would be a fair start to discern where they reside on a spectrum from "internal processor" to "external processor". It's often confused with introversion versus extroversion, but the two are not the same. An introvert may need to talk through problems, and an extrovert might feel compelled to think quietly in a space full of people. ■ Knowing which processing style prevails can help individuals work through those methods for framing problems with the best chance of success. An external processor, for example, might benefit from periodically writing out a list of stressors in order to take those problems out of the abstract mind and put them in a concrete, external place where they can be manipulated and contended with. ■ It may be easier for external processors to discern which problems call for a plan and which can be simply "let go", simply by putting them on a physical page. That technique might be utterly useless for an internal processor, who might find such a list jarring or aggravating as it intrudes on their interior thinking. ■ Contrasts like these tend to make a lot of pop psychology look ridiculous to at least half the audience at any given time. The "Plus-Minus-Interesting chart" may seem like a godsend to some and a total boat anchor to others, which is why anyone's list of hot tips has to come with either an implicit or (preferably) explicit list of contingent factors. Otherwise, a fair number of people may encounter that advice and come away either disappointed or frustrated. ■ There is no single path -- and certainly no shortcut -- to mental wellness and balance. But the path for each person needs to be constructed with some guidance towards self-awareness from the outset. Until we can diagnose a person's psychological makeup as reliably as we can test their cholesterol, there will remain a great deal of important work to do.
October 14, 2024
Big Ten football teams -- of which there are now considerably more than ten -- are having a rough time with the sheer expanse of the conference. They are now 3-10 when traveling across at least two time zones away for games. ■ In aviation, it's called crew resource management (CRM): The study of how human factors affect conditions within and among the team flying the airplane. CRM was originally just an innovation within the cockpit, opening up a pathway for junior officers to question their superiors. It has since evolved to include the full crew, which means flight attendants have a say in safety as well. ■ Human factors surely apply outside of aviation, too. It's not just about permitting subordinates to challenge the senior members of a team, it's also about recognizing that not everything can be boiled down to equipment or practice. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of whether the people involved are physically, emotionally, and psychologically up to a task. ■ On paper, a conference stretching from sea to shining sea may look impressive. It certainly has a monster of a reach on TV. But if the student-athletes are so wiped out by marathon travel schedules that away games start to look like give-away games, then maybe it will be time to take a cue from the teams flying the planes.
(Video) A flaming fuel tank rolls right past as a witness films an explosion at a Russian fuel depot
October 15, 2024
It has long been easy to pay lip service to the notion of non-violent resistance to injustice; nobody gets into trouble for praising figures like Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet it seems easy to overlook that the moral force of nonviolence depends upon an upstream condition: A sense of honor. ■ The honor of the resisters isn't what matters, but the honor of the audience -- the public at large. Gandhi and King both depended upon the expectation that the public would respond with revulsion to the sight of their protesters being punished, physically and brutally, for behaving blamelessly. ■ They assumed that even people who might have subscribed to a sense of racial superiority of their own would have subscribed even more to seeing themselves as being more decent than the brutality put on display by the authorities -- ostensibly in their name. For its political ends, the entire concept depends upon a common sense of respectability. ■ Respectability starts small. It doesn't emerge out of the ether in adulthood; it has to be inculcated in children in little ways (share, play fair, treat others how you want to be treated) and then reinforced all throughout a person's lifetime. Something is fundamentally broken among those who reject the importance of respectability. Every member of the public who recognizes what good came from the nonviolent resistance movements needs to recognize that an essential way to honor its past victories is to reject disreputable behavior by those who wish to be leaders in the present.
October 16, 2024
The Department of Justice is considering a breakup of Google, or so it appears from a filing related to antitrust action being pursued against the company. There's no escaping notice of Google's considerable influence within some Internet-related markets, like search engines, video delivery, and smartphone applications. And intervention may be called for, depending upon what uses the company may have made of its market power to inhibit the growth of competitors. ■ Corporate disassembly, though, should be very much a last resort. It is one thing to prevent the bolting-together of a monopolist; if all of Google's components were independent and equally powerful without combination, then putting them together after the fact would certainly deserve to raise scrutiny. ■ But if organic growth is largely the cause of Google's success, then breakup may actually prolong the behaviors that the Justice Department finds undesirable. For one thing, obvious rival buyers with pockets deep enough to buy the spun-off companies may be unwilling to risk facing antitrust suits of their own, rendering them artificially less willing to promote competition. ■ For another, the risk of breakup could entice Google/Alphabet as it exists now to maximize its profitability before time runs out. After all, so doing might be in the best short-term and mid-term interests of its shareholders, regardless of what the long term might bring. ■ Moreover, if the constituent companies within today's Google/Alphabet are broken apart, they may be incentivized to engage in increased risk-taking as standalone entities -- which could in turn lead to even more aggressive sales practices than any in which they might be engaged now. ■ Categorical changes often overtake monopolistic behaviors anyway. AI could supersede search. Google could already be breaking its own search quality by contaminating the results with AI input, and the mass production of junk content could poison search engines altogether. Even better ad services could deplete the market for Internet advertising, just as Internet advertising mortally disrupted newspaper classified advertising. ■ Modesty should be the guiding principle for would-be regulators and trust-busters. Many if not most of yesterday's behemoth names in business are shadows of their former selves -- General Motors, General Electric, AT&T, and Sears are all vastly different than what they once were. Google is almost certain to experience the same, and market and technological changes will do more for the cause than anything that the government is likely to achieve.
October 19, 2024
There was a time when a car that reached 100,000 miles was a thing to be celebrated. But at least for some manufacturers, 400,000 miles might be the new 100,000. And that's something pretty remarkable. ■ The average American driver averages about 13,500 miles a year. So 100,000 miles represents seven and a half years of average driving, but 400,000 miles equates to more than a quarter-century. And while it's doubtful that most people who have high-mileage cars are also low-mileage individual drivers, the point remains: Getting a lot of service out of the same car means a lot of time driving the same model. ■ Cars and trucks on American roads are now almost teenaged, on average. While we're likely to be turning over many of our consumer goods much more frequently than that -- smartphones and televisions, especially -- we're sticking with our cars longer than we're sticking with our homes. ■ Automakers would like more consumer churn, because sales volume is what drives revenues and, ultimately, earnings. But considering the enormous resource demands that go with automaking, long-lasting, reliable vehicles represent an under-appreciated victory for green thinking.
October 20, 2024
Every civilization defines itself at least somewhat through the customs and rules by which the people abide. Early on in the formation of the American culture as a unique identity, Benjamin Franklin offered this advice: "It is ill-manners to silence a fool, and cruelty to let him go on." ■ The tension between freedom of expression and the need to control for quality isn't an easy one. Internet culture in particular dictates that we often have no choice but to let any given fool go on. ■ A friend might pull the fool aside and tell them to shut up; on social media it is all too often the angry reply that keeps some people going. "Poasters", "reply guys", and common loudmouths who used to just spout off from the corner of a bar take advantage of the deeply addictive nature of our interactive tools to stoke reactions from the wise and foolish alike. ■ That all would be bad enough on its own, but it is worse when we are under relentless attack by agitation propagandists: People using the unmediated attention people pay to the zeitgeist in order to get them angry about all the wrong things in service of sinister ends. ■ It's become a cornerstone of malignant foreign influence campaigns targeting the United States, and there are plenty of domestic voices who behave badly for their own self-interest. Contrary to what Elon Musk thinks, silence is sometimes golden. ■ We might be inclined to think that the most American thing to do is to consider all free speech equally good -- not as a matter of law, but as a matter of culture. But if Ben Franklin is right, it's even more American to use the non-coercive tools at our disposal (influence, attention, and the "mute" buttons, for starters) to silence fools before they go on.
Twitter users are being made to train AI by default
Anyone who's ever had to submit to an institutional review for performing any test involving human subjects has got to look at this kind of behavior in some measure of disbelief.
Tropical weather is all about energy transfer
Three cheers for analysis that frames tropical cyclones in terms of "energy", since that's the root of what really matters. 2024 had a very mild peak-season Atlantic hurricane season, but a very energetic off-peak season.
A colorful conclusion to the growing season
Purple aster, goldenrod, and other plants native to Iowa can supply some color into the end of fall
October 22, 2024
Never before has more time been afforded for the contemplation of a rich inner life than what is available now to the mainstream American. ■ Compared with previous generations, we spend less time sick, less time doing oppressive chores, more time at leisure, more time educated and informed, and simply more time alive than at any time in history. It isn't even a close contest. ■ All of this should leave the average individual better-poised to appreciate the majesty and wonder of existence itself, better than anyone at least since the philosophers of ancient Greece. ■ Of course, that the time is available does not mean that all are interested in the pursuit. That is a part of freedom. Nobody is forced to examine life like Socrates. ■ But there is certain danger in ceding power, whether in the form of time or money or political influence, to anyone who declines to engage in that sort of contemplation. And there are many, who either wield power or who want to get it, for whom there is nothing important except that power in the here and now. ■ Just as the person conducting a meeting owes it to the other attendees to spend time and effort optimizing the quality of the time spent in the meeting, so too does anyone with power owe it to their subordinates to put real energy and consideration into questions of meaning and purpose. ■ This applies in the workplace, the clubhouse, the church, and the halls of elected power. If you aspire to make decisions for others, then you owe it to them to at least have some due consideration for what makes those decisions right or wrong. ■ A person without a well-considered inner life is still a person, of course, and entitled to all of the dignity that entails. But if it's obvious that a person never invests any time or effort into really struggling with big questions, then that person is unsuited to telling others where to go and what to do.
The high temperature in Iowa for the week of October 14th through 20th was 85°. The low was 17°.
(Video) KABC-TV in Los Angeles takes viewers on a walk from Dodger Stadium to the nearest subway station. It's a nearly half-hour hike, and the first-person camera view makes it perfectly clear that long stretches of the walk would violate a basic toddler test -- a reasonable person wouldn't feel safe walking side-by-side while holding hands with a well-behaved toddler. In many places, it can't even be physically done. That's a design choice, and it's a very bad one.
October 25, 2024
What made "The Americans" such compelling television (aside, of course, from strong writing and skilled acting) was the premise that, even during the height of the Cold War, you could have been living next door to a Soviet secret agent without even knowing it. Even the FBI counter-intelligence officer living across the street could be fooled. ■ It's a premise locked in time. The Cold War was a unique era in history, and the technological limitations of the day played a noteworthy supporting role in the show. The Soviet Union couldn't exactly take over one of the big three television networks, so the reach of their propaganda was limited and much of the spy technology was dedicated instead to sneaking intelligence across the border. ■ Today, everyone is potentially "next door" to Russian influence and disinformation operations every time we venture online. In a non-trivial joint statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and CISA, the American public has been warned that "Russian actors manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania [...] part of Moscow's broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans". ■ The problem now, when compared with the Cold War of the Reagan era, is that Russia's government today can devote its resources to doubling down on confirmation bias -- it doesn't have to convince anyone to become a Communist anymore. It serves the Kremlin's interests merely to have Americans fighting stupidly among ourselves, assuming the worst about our perceived opponents. And they can do it without even leaving home. ■ It matters quite a lot indeed whether we can disagree without being disagreeable, open ourselves to persuasion in light of new facts without falling for disinformation, and adhere strictly to the sanctity of the political process even if we dislike the ultimate outcomes. If all that matters to our geopolitical foes is that we remain contentious and in disarray, then it's far easier for them to stir trouble now than when they had to dispatch highly-trained spies from Moscow. ■ What matters now is how many real Americans are willing to believe the worst of their fellow Americans when impersonated by people hostile to America. Any number greater than zero is probably too many.
October 26, 2024
TSMC, the enormous Taiwanese manufacturer of computer chips, has cut off its shipments to a Chinese company that appears to have been funneling chips to Huawei. Huawei is the Chinese electronics manufacturer of dubious ownership: It claims to be employee-owned, but the State Department and other observers say it's controlled by the Communist Party. ■ TSMC operates in a fascinating domain: It might well be Taiwan's most important asset. But it's also expanding in Europe and the United States in a huge way. Their new plant in Arizona is reportedly even more productive than the mature plants in Taiwan.
The administrator of NASA wants someone to investigate Elon Musk and why he has been in personal contact with Vladimir Putin. Musk owns at least a plurality of shares in SpaceX and is thought to have overwhelming voting control of the company. ■ NASA has an obvious interest in the conduct and management of the company. If the controlling partner in the operation is having secret gab-fests with the president of a very large and frequently hostile country, that's something quite different from a pipefitter in Brooklyn calling his grandma in Irkutsk. And the Wall Street Journal reports that it's a matter of "regular contact" between the two since 2022. ■ Starlink, for instance, is a SpaceX subsidiary, and the availability of (and access to) Starlink is playing an important role in Ukraine's war to repel Russian invasion. ■ Americans have broad rights to engage in international business and to hold opinions on global matters. But US Code imposes serious penalties on those who insert themselves into foreign policy to the detriment of the country. Musk occupies such an extraordinary place in economic and technological life that it would be dereliction not to probe more fully what's going on.
Apple is about to update its software to permit certain versions of AirPods to act as over-the-counter hearing aids. The FDA started allowing over-the-counter sales of hearing aids two years ago, and this is the first time they've approved a non-dedicated device to act as a hearing aid using software. ■ We shouldn't underestimate just how useful steps like this can turn out to be. For example, the history of education for children who are deaf or hard of hearing is chock-full of very big struggles to obtain seemingly small accommodations. But today nothing would seem out of place about a teenager wearing AirPods -- and if this development makes the difference to some high-school freshman who might otherwise not be able to afford prescription hearing aids, or who might be self-conscious about wearing them, then it all accrues to the good. ■ All too often, the public perceives accommodations as things we do "for the handicapped". But the reality is that almost all accommodations end up helping some "normal" people all of the time, and almost all of the public some of the time. The same ramp that makes it easier for a paraplegic to get in and out of a building also helps the former marathoner with worn-out knees, as well as the kid who twisted her ankle playing soccer. ■ Likewise, closed captioning, which wasn't even introduced for live programming until 1982, was originally "for the hearing-impaired". But now it would seem out of place to see a TV without captioning activated in a crowded bar or another public place -- locations where even people with abnormally good hearing benefit from the accommodation. And captioning can help many children learn to read. ■ The arrival of hybrid earbuds and hearing aids may not seem like much, but it's exactly the sort of modest, incremental progress that ends up looking much more significant in the rear-view mirror than it looks in advance.
The US Navy is currently operating with two "strategic ends" on the books: "1) Readiness for the possibility of war with the People's Republic of China by 2027, and 2) Enhancing long-term advantage". It's not a secret plan: That's the published policy. And they've chosen 2027 as a target because that's what the Communist Party of China says is its target for surpassing us in war. ■ Here, though, is the deeply unsettling takeaway from the Navy's "Navigation Plan": "The PRC's defense industrial base is on a wartime footing, including the world's largest shipbuilding capacity now at the hands of the PLAN" [People's Liberation Army Navy]. ■ The United States, by contrast, has almost negligible active shipbuilding capacity and has turned away from shipbuilding as a strategic priority. We can change course, but that will require considerable investments in workforce development and production processes. ■ It would also require budgetary commitments from Congress. Big ones. For many years to come. At a time when preparatory investments aren't especially popular and huge deficits are already the norm ($1.8 trillion this fiscal year!). ■ This is a problem that some observers have seen coming for quite a while. And unless we take it seriously now, the amount of future catching-up to be required will only compound. ■ The world is very big and the oceans cover most of it. Spin the globe on Google Earth sometime and see how much of it can only be criss-crossed by long-distance aircraft or patrolled by a blue-water navy. In the absence of guaranteed world peace, stability, and liberalization for a century to come, America needs to maintain, preserve, and enhance the world's biggest navy. Circumstances don't offer us a viable alternative choice.
Would Greek food sell better in America if we knew how to pronounce "gyro"?
It's hard to say it without sounding like either a moron or a pretentious jerk. It might also matter that it's more fun to say "pizza" than "souvlaki".
October 27, 2024
Scientists document an invasive Burmese python in Florida eating a 77-lb. deer.
October 28, 2024
Expect less from your government
Epistemological modesty needs voters, too. Don't expect, ask, or want a government that does too much. Demand one that can't cause too much damage when it gets things wrong, because it will get things wrong. Humans are imperfect, and imperfect humans wielding great power can do a lot of harm.
Lightning: It's not just a bolt from the blue
A lovely illustration from NOAA illustrating the many different forms of lightning and related "transient luminous events"
October 29, 2024
The three models of news editorials
USA Today has joined the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post in announcing it will not publish an editorial endorsement for President in 2024. This has caused controversy, but what does the decision not to endorse actually mean? It depends on what the audience expects a newspaper editorial to represent. ■ In one model, the editorial reflects the reasoned opinion of a publication's editors on current newsworthy events, enlightened by the facts (presumably) reported in the same publication. In this model, the editorial is shaped by some basic underlying values of the publication, but the conclusion is rarely ever foregone -- if it were, an explanation of the editors' judgment would not be necessary and the editorial writing would only be a waste of space. ■ In a different model, the publication itself is institutionally committed to advancing a cause, and the form and shape of both the news content and the opinion content serve the cause. The conclusion of any piece of editorial writing can be reliably predicted in advance, because the nature of the cause is preordained. ■ Contemporary audiences seem to be increasingly fond of the latter model, preferring the comforts of their own confirmation bias to the frequent discomforts of being presented with novel arguments and subjects that require some new effort to understand. ■ There is a third model, though, emerging prominently in the 2024 general election. It is one that says "We will take no position on newsworthy events, either out of fear or aversion to accusations of bias. Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, has signed his name to an opinion piece saying just that: "What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it's the right one." ■ Bezos, in effect, says that he fears that publications have become institutionally unwell by subscribing to the second model. There is probably some truth to that diagnosis. But the cure is not to run into the arms of the third model, avoiding claims to an opinion altogether. ■ News coverage is always affected by constraints, and thus it always reflects some kind of editorial judgment: What news to cover, how to report it, what priority to give the coverage, when to break the news, even which journalists to assign the story. Ideally, an editor should want to optimize the quality and quantity of information available to make an informed judgment. ■ After all, news is anything that materially changes our understanding of the status quo. If the status quo has been disrupted, then good self-governing citizens need to think about the consequences, and news publications ought to be informing them well enough to make some kind of informed judgment. ■ A good test of whether they are doing so is to go back to the first model -- the one under which the conclusion isn't foregone -- and ask the editors to produce a reasoned opinion on the subject. If they cannot, either they haven't covered the news thoroughly enough, or they may lack the integrity to admit their motivations.
An almost perfect entry from "Art But Make It Sports"
There's no experience truly comparable to the launch of a large space rocket. The noise, the heat, and the rumble of thunder in the chest combine for an overwhelming sensation -- one that almost inescapably causes the witness to react reflexively.
October 30, 2024
While other newspapers have abstained from offering endorsements in the Presidential election, one local newspaper has gone on record with a fiery editorial: El Nuevo Dia, widely regarded as the newspaper of record in Puerto Rico. ■ Puerto Rico occupies a complicated place in American consciousness: Its residents are citizens, but the territory has no vote in Congress, and consequently, no vote in the Electoral College. As a territory, claimed along with Guam at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, it is held awkwardly at arm's length: Spanish-speaking but legally American, taxed but unable to leave or upgrade to statehood without the blessing of Congress, well-represented in the US Armed Forces but entitled to its own Olympic team. ■ Citizenship means that Puerto Ricans are just as free to move about the country as Kansans, Californians, or Kentuckians. That, in turn, means that El Nuevo Dia's fury at a repugnant joke at a political rally echoes and amplifies a sentiment that is likely being felt in other places. New York City, for instance, is home to 574,000 Puerto Ricans -- effectively the same as the entire population of Wyoming. ■ With a non-binding referendum on Puerto Rico's status on the ballot there, the territory could make more news than usual for the rest of the country on Election Night. Considering the lingering consequences of Hurricane Maria on the island and the evident ways in which its legal status appears to hold the island back, it should come as no surprise if the people there decide to assert their status and demand full respect as Americans in a vigorous way.
October 31, 2024
Few things are both awful enough and plausible enough that they should keep anyone up at night. But the non-trivial probability that someone will terrorize a large gathering of Americans using weaponized drone aircraft should be very, very high on that list.