Gongol.com Archives: November 2024
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November 1, 2024
Whether it takes place on Halloween proper, on the Saturday before Halloween, or on Beggars' Night, the annual practice of children's trick-or-treating is one of our best secular rituals. Neighbors share treats with young people and children get to spread a little joy. It's all quite wholesome and a good reminder just before Election Day that we all have to live within our communities no matter who wins office. ■ Even though the ritual looks a little like a sugar-welfare program (except in special places like Des Moines, where children are expected to earn their candy with bad joke-telling), it can actually be a wonderful lesson in capitalism. ■ On the first round of trick-or-treating, kids don't have a lot of say in what they get: It's simply whatever the neighbors choose to give away. But the economics lesson comes when the bags and buckets are overturned and kids start to compare what they hauled home. Then the great bartering period begins, as one child trades whatever they can in exchange for more chocolate, while another trades to maximize fruity candies. One might be willing to give away their Almond Joy bars, while another might treat Reese's Peanut Butter Cups like gold. ■ Subtly, the Halloween candy exchange teaches kids that different people place different values on the same things. Not only that, they learn that trading with others (when there's no coercion involved) leaves everyone better off than when they started. They might even pick up the clues that things work even more smoothly when people start to put prices on things they want -- three miniature Snickers bars for one bag of Skittles, perhaps? ■ Nobody has to be hit over the head with a lesson in market economics while they're enjoying a momentary sugar rush. But the exchanges often linger for a few days after the treats have been collected, as kids go to school and soccer practice and Cub Scout meetings where they continue to trade loot with one another. And it can't hurt for parents to gently help their little ghosts and goblins recognize the virtue in a little bit of free trade, even if it's only spilled across the kitchen table.
November 2, 2024
In 1922, Ireland was in the midst of liberating itself from British colonial rule. The Irish Free State had established independence from the UK on paper, but a civil war was still to take a year and hundreds of lives before a true state could be recognized. ■ One of the harshest aspects to the civil war was that it pitted two groups who effectively wanted the same thing (a free Irish republic) against one another -- because some thought an incomplete freedom from the UK was the most that could be achieved at the time, while others opposed the treaty on the grounds of its incompleteness. The resulting violence didn't hasten Ireland's freedom, but it did scar the nation. ■ Of those instigating the violence, the youthful general and political leader Michael Collins wrote, "Worst of all, their action has been a crime against the nation in this -- that the anarchy and ruin they were bringing about was undermining the confidence of the nation in itself. So far as it succeeded it was proving that our enemies were right, that we were incapable of self-government. When left to ourselves in freedom we could show nothing of the native civilization we had claimed as our own." ■ Collins himself would be assassinated in the fighting, his life cut far short. Born in 1890, Collins easily should have lived to see the Republic of Ireland Act enter full force in 1949. ■ But that is what interior political violence does: It deprives some individuals from seeing the fruits of their struggles, while, in Collins's words, "undermining the confidence of the nation". A war for independence or to overthrow an autocrat is one matter; sometimes, the only thing an oppressive regime will recognize is violence. Among a people, though, differences have to be settled -- always imperfectly -- through votes, debates, lawmaking, and consent.
Imagine a common EU nuclear deterrent: Think of the academic papers! "Ambiguous Ambiguity: The Strategic Posture of an Unconstrained Monte Carlo Simulation"
November 3, 2024
Who's got the plan to shoot down evil drones?
One of the things that should land near the top of any list of problems that should keep thoughtful public leaders awake at night is the risk that someone is going to weaponize a remotely-piloted aircraft and use it to cause harm to a large gathering of people. Hampering efforts in this regard appears to be a dreadfully murky legal framework that doesn't appear to shed any of the much-needed light on who bears responsibility or authority to do anything about it. ■ The vast majority of drone applications are harmless or even helpful. But the lack of a framework for deciding how to do things like protecting large gatherings with some kind of anti-aerial defense is an unconscionable omission. A thing that is 99.999% good but that happens a million times still needs some kind of framework for addressing the bad. ■ This is one of the problems that emerges from letting our political debates be driven by individuals who are chronically dishonest, self-absorbed, and prone to fabulism. The more we let crazy talk set the agenda and crowd out real policy discussions, the more we hobble ourselves from preparing for the problems of the future. ■ Our problems don't get easier to solve just because we ignore them, nor because crazy talk gains more click traffic than sober debates. Making politics into a form of entertainment is an act of civic self-harm. ■ We have lunatics reviving long-debunked conspiracy theories about fluoride in drinking water instead of serious proposals to keep people safe from a threat like drone attack -- a threat that is obviously already serious (see how Russia has been using them to assault Ukraine) and utterly certain to become even more hazardous with time. There is a real cost to letting carelessness and unseriousness prevail in politics -- unfortunately, it's not always obvious what that cost is until it's too late.
China swaps crews at its space station
As part of its pursuit of a Moon base -- and probably quite a few other ambitions in space -- China has launched three astronauts into orbit to staff the country's space station. The launch was an impressive sight -- witness the reflexive grin on the face of the correspondent from The Australian in his video report from the launch. The noise, heat, and chest-rattling rumble of a large rocket launch are an incomparable sensation. But beyond any one launch, the direction of any national space program tells a lot about the country's ambitions.
Nigeria's death penalty threatens kids
CNN reports that 29 children, ages 14 to 17, could face the country's death penalty for participating in a protest over economic hardship. Nigeria should get more attention than it already does from America's news media, if for no other reason than that it is a country of 236 million people, making it the 6th largest in the world. When a country that large is experiencing a 30% inflation rate, it's a situation of increasing hardship on a very large scale. To put children in the potential peril of a death sentence over political protest is both newsworthy and morally unconscionable. AAnd while the treatment of those particular minors is a matter for serious legal protection, the conditions that lead to a per-capita GDP of $1,600 a year merit tough scrutiny from those who know anything about economics. That kind of poverty on that kind of scale is injurious to so much human welfare that fixing it ought to be both a national and an international priority.
A 550' tall building in Manhattan has no windows except for some glass panels at its entrance. This architectural curiosity began as an AT&T switching center, and has evolved into a role in other telecommunications-related duties since then. While it stands out for its height, the alert observer will note that there are windowless buildings in almost all cities of any size -- generally on the periphery of the downtown core. That's what the land-line phone system once required (and to some extent still does). In mid-major cities like Omaha, they're usually as close as possible to downtown without being close to any high-rent features like the local waterfront. In small towns like Stuart, they're usually a block or two away from the town square or Main Street. For those who travel to new places with some regularity, finding the old telephone building can be a fun puzzle to solve, since they're usually found near the most interesting parts of a town anyway.
November 4, 2024
The allegation that the Kremlin attempted to sabotage airplanes traveling between Europe and the United States is morally shocking. Yet it can scarcely be called "surprising", considering the barbaric way it has made war on Ukraine and the lengths to which it has gone to use asymmetrical means to achieve its ends, in part by threatening Ukraine's friends and allies. ■ By any rational assessment, Russia should have long ago become a productive and peaceful member of the fraternity of nations. It has enormous natural wealth and a historical reputation of scientific achievement, both of which ought to have positioned it well to benefit from trade and peaceful cooperation. ■ But instead, its government has acted not just with beligerence but with reckless, callous hostility to human welfare. And yet there are dupes, tools, and willing agents of that evil who applaud what they choose to see and defend what they should not. ■ There is nothing laudable or admirable about a government that relentlessly terrorizes its neighbors. There is nothing defensible about a regime that literally tries to set fire to global trade. There is nothing friendly or agreeable about a nation that tries to stoke violence to undermine democracy. It's evil. And anyone who seeks power by promising to give in to those tactics should be kept far away from authority in any country that wants to remain free.
Democracy's pump-up theme song
(Video) "Right Here, Right Now", by Jesus Jones. It's the right choice.
November 5, 2024
Vote like your great-great-grandma is watching
You don't have to vote like her -- she might have had some pretty bad opinions. But vote like she's watching over your shoulder, and in a way that ought to make her proud. A great-great-grandmother is sufficiently far removed from the present generation that most of us never knew our own. But it's also close enough that she probably loved someone who loved you. There are exceptions, of course, but few things are more generally true than that it is hard to exceed the love of a mother for her child. It's also true that a matrilineal chain is the one genetic bond that can't be faked: A mother knows with absolute certainty whether she gave birth to her own child. So your (matrilineal) great-great-grandmother almost assuredly cared at least a little bit about the world you would occupy, even if she never knew you.
November 8, 2024
The case of the female Iranian university student who defied both policy and policing by walking around in public in her underwear should draw the world's attention for at least two reasons. ■ The first is the case itself and what it says directly about the appalling condition of women's rights in Iran (though certainly elsewhere, too). That dress codes can lead to de facto death penalties anywhere should be an outrage. But in a country of nearly 90 million people, it represents malignant repression on a vast scale. "Woman, Life, Freedom" hasn't gotten its due hearing yet. ■ The second reason is how it serves as a vivid reminder that there is nothing magically truthful about "official" statements. Officially, the protester -- named in some reports as Ahoo Daryaei -- was taken to a "medical center" for treatment of "severe stress". Nobody should take that official statement at face value. ■ Taken too far, skepticism risks stumbling into cynicism or even nihilism. Those are dangers to be avoided. But failing to apply certain tests of reasonable doubt to the official pronouncements of any government leaves the audience open to manipulation. ■ No one should accept the claim at face value that Iran's government cares about the welfare of this individual student, neither in light of current law nor of the government's past behavior. Official channels can be abused, in governments both free and anti-free, especially because the ability to define truth is itself a valuable power. We should take care to witness what happens to the protester herself for her well-being, but we should also take care for our own sakes to remember that "official" and "true" should never be assumed to be synonyms.
The Ukrainian embassy to the United States asks for "Strengthened air defense, the ability to destroy Russian military aircraft & permission for Ukraine to carry out long-range strikes against legitimate military targets in Russia"
November 9, 2024
"Neutral" isn't synonymous with "good"
"Neutrality" is a word often loaded with positive connotations. It conjures up the image of Switzerland, whose deliberate policy of neutrality makes it appear to be above the lowly act of "choosing sides". ■ This is, of course, an incomplete view of things -- "neutrality" made Switzerland and its banks a hotbed of money laundering for evil during World War II. It may be to Switzerland's defensive advantage to take no sides in war, but it corrupts the soul to believe that neutrality in the face of evil is a moral good. ■ Vladimir Putin has adopted an even more sinister definition of neutrality which he wishes to apply to Ukraine, saying, "If there is no neutrality, it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good-neighborly relations between Russia and Ukraine". ■ The world shouldn't be even remotely fooled: In this context, he plainly means "neutrality" to mean "involuntary neutralization". Submission to the will of an aggressor. Incapacity to act defensively. Not just harmless, but helpless. ■ No one should expect Ukraine to submit to a policy like that. It is a throwback to the Soviet-era notion of spheres of influence, when big powers used their neighbors as buffers, as though the world were a giant board game of Risk. ■ Ukraine deserves to choose its own future, its own alliances, and its own way of life. The Ukrainian people will have no more peace if they have been involuntarily neutralized by a violent neighbor than if they were to remain openly at war. "Neutral" isn't a synonym for "good".
Despite what fatuous and gullible talking heads tell themselves, John Adams was never a party leader in the Senate. Actual history is almost invariably more interesting than the fairy tales and fever dreams people tell themselves, but it's really easy for the ignorant to convince themselves that fiction is fact.
November 10, 2024
People in at least six states received racist text messages following the election, suggesting that they were being taken to "plantations". The stunt is not funny, nor clever, nor even remotely tolerable. ■ But it's also probably not domestic, either. The language of the text messages sounds like the kind of thing a person with a 19th-Century understanding of the United States might write if they hadn't ever been to the country. Even the stupidest American knows there aren't any working plantations. ■ It also appears to have been conducted at scale, meaning that the messages had to have been sent at a cost of some resources. Bulk text messages aren't really that expensive, but they aren't free, either. ■ Moreover, it seems evident that the messages were racially targeted, which suggests that the perpetrators used a database that contained profiles containing names, telephone numbers, and racial identity information. This is the kind of information exposed during large-scale data breaches. ■ The messages have been traced to a VPN operation in Poland, which could make it difficult if not impossible to hunt down the original perpetrators. It fits a pattern of general mayhem and discord that is consistent with what a malicious foreign government might try to do. If that is the case, this incident is probably a pretty nasty harbinger of what more is to come.
Until January 19, 2025, Joe Biden still has the option to turn Kamala Harris into the first female President. Food for thought.
November 11, 2024
A misleading figure is often circulated on Veterans Day: The estimate that American military veterans take their own lives at a rate of 22 per day. While that figure has had a mobilizing effect on certain resources, it may also be misleading in its apparent precision. ■ Regardless of the actual number, society certainly has a common interest in reducing it to as few as possible. And the particular way in which we furnish health care for servicemembers and veterans alike presents an opportunity. ■ There is an obvious intersection between mental health care and suicide prevention. But even though we have population-level care for things like infectious-disease prevention, we have only made limited progress has ever been made in supplying population-level care for mental wellness. ■ That presents an opportunity, were we to grasp it: The Department of Veterans Affairs has a unique level of reach through which to address mental wellness care at a population-level scale. ■ To do that well, though, we need policy-makers to commit resources towards that kind of research not as an effort to "solve" a particular problem affecting veterans, but rather as a way to address mental wellness as part of a holistic approach to human health generally. The veteran population doesn't look exactly like the public at large, but it's coming closer in several significant ways. ■ As it does so, we have the opportunity to make progress on those population-level efforts not by treating veterans as an intrinsically "broken" population needing to be "fixed", but as an increasingly representative fraction of the general population needing (and deserving) mental-wellness care in much the same way as the population at large. Just as it improved society for the military to lead the vanguard of racial integration (imperfectly, but significantly), so too would it improve society for the same population to help lead a more holistic approach to treating the brain as an essential part of the body.
November 12, 2024
The demographic shadow looming over colleges
The good news for Iowa's three state universities is that enrollment has held mainly steady in the face of some meaningful headwinds. But the bad news for them is that total in-state enrollment is down from a decade ago, and the broader demographic trends indicate that high schools are going to graduate fewer prospective college freshmen for a while to come. ■ Iowa has three state schools: A land-grant university (Iowa State), a public research school (Iowa), and a comprehensive university (Northern Iowa). It's a compact arrangement by comparison with some states that have far more institutions. But it's still hard to keep the budgets balanced without attracting out-of-state tuition dollars. ■ What makes a university system worth subsidizing is the return on the public's investment -- though never strictly in terms of dollars. A university can (and should) generate real cultural, civic, and economic returns to the community that funds it. And even though those can be difficult to measure well (if even at all), there has to be a relentless pursuit of both incremental improvement and substantial innovation in everything the institution does. ■ That's a lot to ask, but it's also a fair expectation, considering that a majority of American adults do not hold four-year degrees, yet their taxes subsidize the effort. That investment has to come back in more than just some athletic rivalries. It's imperative that college leaders recognize those needs sooner rather than later; if the demographic drop-off turns out to be as real as expected (and as the population pyramid makes real in black and white), they won't want to be caught flat-footed trying to explain why they need continued support as enrollment drops.
Nebraska homeowner dies with 40 bombs in the basement
They were not live munitions any longer, but they were WWII-era bombs that required a state patrol bomb squad and the National Guard's explosive-ordnanace team to check out. Folks, if you're going to indulge in some kind of weird collecting obsession, maybe tell the people you love some of the details about it before you die, OK?
(Video) A public service announcement telling Irish voters how to make sure they're registered to vote comes across so friendly, it might as well be a tourism video
November 13, 2024
The naming of a new slate of Cabinet secretaries is one of the strangest of all league draft events: There's only one team on the field, and the players can be chosen for reasons ranging from proven past performance to growth potential to naked patronage. The team has precious little time to prepare before hitting the field of play, and each of those main players must immediately turn around and recruit their own team of assistants and deputies. ■ America has endured some pretty awful picks: Ulysses S Grant had a notoriously corrupt Cabinet, and Warren Harding's administration contained some downright filthy characters. At least one person rose to Vice President while flirting with outright Communist sympathies and Richard Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was forced to resign over tax and other charges. And let us not overlook the villainy of VP Aaron Burr. ■ All of which is to say that the biggest mistake when assessing an incoming Cabinet is to assume that the nation has never seen anything like them before. History begs to be our guide -- both for Presidents as they make their choices, Senators as they pass judgment on qualifications through advice and consent, and the loyal opposition as they seek to impose accountability. ■ Calvin Coolidge, who assumed the Presidency upon Harding's death and had to disentangle some of the mess behind, wrote in his autobiography, "When a man has invested his personal interest and reputation in the conduct of a public office, if he goes wrong it will not be because of former relations, but because he is a bad man [...] What we need in appointive positions is men of knowledge and experience who have sufficient character to resist temptations." Whoever finds their way into office, whether of good character or not, it only makes sense for us to bear Coolidge's advice in mind. Very few human behaviors are ever as new as we imagine them; the specific conditions may vary, but human nature is almost never new.
November 14, 2024
When in doubt, consult Silent Cal
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence ... The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." - Calvin Coolidge
November 15, 2024
A Chicago man, who long felt conflicted about the family in which he was raised, was able to uncover that he had been adopted as a child. And upon some genetic investigation, he discovered that his birth mother not only lived nearby -- she was the proprietor of a small bakery he frequented often enough that the owner (his birth mother) already knew him by name. Reunited with her now, the son is taking over the bakery's operations from his mother as she commences her retirement. ■ It's hard to imagine a story that could better distill the human urge to belong: Vamarr Hunter only went looking for his birth mother after succumbing to a feeling that he didn't rightly belong to the family he had known for his first 35 years. Then, upon discovering his genetic connection to someone with whom he already had a friendship, he changed his entire career path to fit in. ■ There's a reason that rituals like school homecomings and family reunions and retirement parties are so durable: They confirm that urge to belong and reinforce the binding ties among our different tribes. ■ With the exception of some extremely rare types who truly are confirmed loners, most people want to belong so instinctively and so strongly that we pick multiple identities -- around our schools, our workplaces, our faith traditions, our families, our citizenship, our interests, and even our entertainment choices. Swifties and Deadheads alike are not to be dismissed. ■ Smart people seeking to triumph over the challenges that confront humanity ought to take belonging into account, in many cases much more seriously than has often been the case in the past. It can rarely be forced artificially (see the common resentment of any number of "team-building" exercises in the workplace), but to be durable it has to grow out of something more than just a cult of personality. Personalities retire, fade away, and ultimately die. Belonging is an act that begins among people -- as few as just a mother and child. But there are few forces more powerful than the urge to be one of those who belong.
November 16, 2024
Trade policy commentator Simon Lester offers the observation, "As economic competition with China heats up, it's worth remembering that in the late 1980s/early 1990s, people were writing books with titles like 'Trading Places: How we are giving our future to Japan and how to reclaim it'". That seems like a text from an era long ago and far away, but the copyright date is only 1989 -- making the text younger than the median American. ■ Japan was on a hot streak in the 1980s, but it never overtook the United States. That doesn't mean it didn't still end up quite rich: Japan has the world's fifth-largest economy today and a wealthy per-capita GDP. But it also still feels the effects of an interventionist industrial policy based upon the government imposing a scarcity mentality on the private sector. ■ In other words, Japan was on the rise, but it wasn't on an inevitable path to overtaking the United States. And a major contributing factor was (and remains) that the United States benefits from being an unplanned economy. We don't win because brilliant people are in charge; we win because nobody is in charge. Despite the way people wildly overestimate the power of the President to "manage the economy", often at the encouragement of those very Presidents who want to take credit for work they didn't really do, the lack of any real centralized control is both the secret ingredient and the secret recipe. It is both the "what" and the "why". ■ The United States is clearly in an economic rivalry with China, as well as a rivalry for other forms of power and influence. Nothing is certain about the outcomes, but there is a very safe way to forecast the future: Always bet on the side in a competition that is most genuinely open to new ideas, new people, and new partnerships. The freedom to fail (or to simply be wrong without catastrophic consequences) pays huge dividends. ■ On that basis, the people of the United States need to know what's best for ourselves: The maximum possible freedom of movement for goods, people, money, and ideas. On that same account, China's government is actively choosing to hobble itself: Consider the stealth required merely for people to discuss academic ideas freely. ■ Ideas don't move freely across a Great Firewall. Nor are people free to move about when arbitrary and capricious punishment looms over anyone trying to do business inside their borders. Just moving goods isn't enough. ■ The only way for America to lose our place in such a competition is to surrender the advantages that ought to come most easily to us. Let people make choices, leave them free, welcome new arrivals, think liberally (like John Stuart Mill), and make lots of room for failure. That's how to win.
November 17, 2024
A change to the terms of service on the platform formerly known as Twitter has taken effect, granting the company permission (in its words) to "analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models", a permission not explicitly discussed in the previous edition of the terms. ■ That change is roughly coincidental with the results of a Presidential election in which X/Twitter's owner has played a prominent and possibly manipulative role, and the unpopularity of the recent activity has triggered a significant exodus from X/Twitter to competing platform Bluesky. It's unlikely that anyone will successfully tease out how much of the exodus is due to the behavior and how much is due to the policy change, but both are certainly contributory. ■ Content-scraping of any platform in order to train artificial intelligence is sketchy behavior at best. It's already been done by lots of rivals in the artificial intelligence marketplace -- X/Twitter is merely one among several. But it does have a captive data set, which makes the AI training seem particularly targeted at the incumbent users. ■ We've never grappled before with what happens when the whole world has equal access to the same publishing platforms. There was a time not long ago when everyone knew who had published copyright-protected content and who had not: If you didn't have a book on the shelf of a library or a published article in a newspaper or a magazine, then your thoughts hadn't really reached a domain that ever would have been accessible to use for training. ■ The instinct to object to having one's content used to train someone else's computer model is understandable. But there's an uncomfortable inversion to the problem: If all people of goodwill withdraw their ideas from the data sets, then what's left behind will only be a concentrated collection of the bad. What would a library be if John Stuart Mill was omitted while Karl Marx remained? ■ It's a terrible Catch-22. Opting in (to allowing one's content to be used for AI training) means implicitly rewarding bad behavior. Opting out means that what's left behind has a higher concentration of the bad. And it's become evident that artificial intelligence tools are here to stay. ■ Thus what we have is like an inverted tragedy of the commons: What matters to artificial intelligence is not how much of it is "consumed" (since the whole point is that it is an effectively inexhaustible source of output), but how much it can draw from raw inputs that are, on balance, good for society. That those inputs are intermediated by actors who may themselves be of dubious character makes the whole matter even more complicated. It is a complex dynamic without an easy solution.
November 18, 2024
Scholarly research points to a contagion effect that goes along with incivility in the workplace. While social virality seems to explain some things, and certain social conditions may be raising some tempers, it also seems increasingly evident that lots of people were raised with a bunch of negative rules against which they feel like rebelling as adults, rather than being raised with positive or aspirational rules that give them guides for growth. ■ Negative rules, like "Don't talk back", are quick and easy for an adult to dispense. See the undesirable behavior, then issue an edict against it. Not much thought required. ■ Affirmative rules, like "Speak to others like you want them to speak to you", are usually a little harder to concoct. Usually not much more than the time required to take a single deep breath, but often more than frazzled adults want to take. ■ While negative rules are sometimes necessary, especially in a pinch ("Don't touch that hot stove!"), they're harder to follow. They are literally more challenging to process cognitively. They set up constraints, and it's hard for even adult minds to know where all of those different boundaries lie: In the words of Warren Buffett, "If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you're going to get a ticket." ■ Aspirational or affirmative rules are harder for the rule-maker to concoct, but much easier to follow because they offer a pathway for the curious young mind. "Don't make a mess" puts the burden on the child to know what qualifies as a mess and what to do about it. The affirmative alternative is simply, "Clean up after yourself", which gives them a behavior to adopt rather than a punishment to avoid. Affirmative rule-making helps to structure a growth mindset in the developing young brain: One can strive towards greater compliance with a positive goal, while a negative boundary can only be violated. ■ Too many people act as though defiance is their dominant personality characteristic. As they get older and have more resources and power at their disposal, the damage their defiance can do increases as well. It's an anti-social feedback loop, the seeds of which were often sown decades before.
November 19, 2024
What was the point of taking Hong Kong?
The lead sentence from the BBC says in a flat tone, "A Hong Kong court has sentenced key pro-democracy leaders to years in jail for subversion". But the real story should be said something like this: "A Chinese court has used a 2019 law imposed by the central government to send 45 pro-democracy leaders from Hong Kong to prison for 4 to 10 years each". ■ The way the Communist Party treats Hong Kong, it is a wonder that it ever fought to take the territory in the first place. Promises of "One country, two systems" have been viciously jettisoned (in a way that ought to be particularly alarming to anyone who fears an involuntary annexation of Taiwan).
Threads drops a huge early lead
Despite starting with the backing of Facebook (and its enormous reach to potential members), Threads has been overtaken by Bluesky in the number of active daily users in the United States. And it's happened thanks to Bluesky basically tripling its active user base in three weeks. It's never enough just to have a head start.
Sabotaged cables in the Baltic Sea
Germany's defense minister says two telecommunications cables were cut in the Baltic Sea -- one between Germany and Finland, and one between Lithuania and Sweden. And he says it wasn't an accident. This is a story that tests how much attention the world is capable of paying to hybrid or gray-zone hostilities: Activity that doesn't quite meet the standard to be called warfare, but far more belligerent than not. ■ Finland, officially, is "not jumping to conclusions yet", but the reality is that two like incidents of such a scale happening in close succession hardly looks like the mere impact of chance. And it isn't hard to guess which country with a presence in the Baltic region might be interested in harassing the neighbors. ■ There's a fundamental asymmetry to this kind of behavior: It's almost always vastly cheaper to cause damage than to repair it. And for the malicious actor who manages to cause the problems while remaining just barely cloaked enough to avoid outright attribution, it can be an efficient way to introduce a little bit of mayhem to its rivals. Not enough to merit a full-blown counter-response, but enough to cause something between nuisance and real pain: Death by a thousand papercuts. ■ Fundamentally, that's how reasonable people can recognize which side is closer to right in any kind of rivalry: The side that behaves more constructively, working towards commonly-agreed rules and norms, aiding more than it tears down, is probably the one on the side of right. But that doesn't preclude showing firmness in addition to being right. Someone caused the damage in the Baltic Sea, and consequences ought to follow. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, "Pardoning the bad, is injuring the good."
Fraud comes hard for older Americans
The Federal Trade Commission has released a report estimating that older Americans may have been scammed for as much as $61 billion in 2023, including 4,600 who were taken for $100,00 or more.
November 20, 2024
Who manages the UK's national newspapers?
A gallery of the editors-in-chief at Britain's eighteen "national" newspapers highlights the huge difference between the apparent influence of Britain's papers and what remains of those in America. The US doesn't even have a half-dozen papers that even aspire to be considered "national" in nature: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Times, and (maybe) the Washington Post. ■ The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune both contracted their aspirations long ago, and further down the metro population rankings, they don't grow any more ambitious: The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, and Arizona Republic don't look much beyond their own turf for influence. By contrast with the UK's eighteen "national" publications, the #18 newspaper in the US circulates to fewer than 50,000 print subscribers. ■ Britain's much greater population density probably gave it a lot more of a natural market for a newspaper-heavy culture: Back when newspapers had to be delivered by hand, having nearly ten times as many people per square mile was certainly an advantage. But now that daily publications can be delivered digitally, it's remarkable that America's incumbent newspaper institutions haven't tried harder to stake out more significant influence beyond their physical turf. ■ Even the New York Times, which shamelessly appeals to its readers' high sense of self-regard, now reaches more people through its games than its news content. Why aren't there more efforts to appeal to psychographic identity, particularly now that so much news is already homogenized nationally? ■ We can look to a lot of reasons why it may be outdated to even constrain ourselves to an examination of "newspapers", per se, but the fact remains that newsgathering and editorial operations that have in many cases been around for more than 100 years offer at least some kind of institutional memory and ought to at least try to distinguish themselves in recognizable ways. Perhaps paradoxically, blanket criticisms of "the media" might find a little more resistance if individual outlets retained more distinctive personalities. ■ "Personality" in an editorial outlet doesn't have to mean "political identity" any more than it does for a human being; in fact, both individuals and newspapers are generally better off when politics are far down the list of identifying characteristics. A publication can stand out for its writing style, its heroes, its features, its special beats, its witty commentary, its peculiar hobby horses, its imagined audiences, its imaginary friends, or the unusual things that interest its writers. All of those things should easily make a market for at least two dozen recognizable "national" outlets in the United States, by virtue of our enormous size alone.
Justice Department wants a judge to break up Google
The department wants Google to be forced to spin off the Chrome browser and stop giving preference to its own search engine within the Android operating system
Boeing layoffs are a bad economic signal
The company is planning a 10% cut to its workforce -- a large number on its own, but also clearly worth wider attention: Aircraft sales make up a lot of the US export market.
November 23, 2024
It has been noted for some time and by different surveys that Americans who regularly attend religious services have the highest rate of good feelings about Sundays, and rate Sundays the best day of the week. Theologians might point to the specifics of theology as the source of those good feelings, and they might be right; by nature, their claims are difficult if not impossible to falsify. ■ But it's also fair to consider that it may be enough simply that Sundays represent, for many, a day of voluntary belonging. Bonding between people happens mainly through the sharing of experience -- especially constructive experiences, though those constructive bonds can help to form a social glue for living through painful experiences, too. ■ With regular religious attendance on the decline in the United States, perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities in our history is that Benjamin Franklin never got around to founding the quasi-religious movement he described in his autobiography as a "bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection". ■ Franklin effectively described a project to drive people towards moral improvement through self-examination and cooperation, but his "Society of the Free and Easy" never took permanent form. The name may have been clunky, but the idea probably had merit. ■ An enormous number of Americans have adopted "spiritual but not religious" as a substitute for established theology and the need for moral self-improvement has never dissipated. People will always seek those answers, and they will always gravitate towards places of belonging. Franklin was probably on to something well over 200 years ago when he wrote that there should be a distinctly American creed professing that "the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man." The question is where people gather to celebrate it, and if they're free to do it on Sunday mornings.
November 24, 2024
The City of Waterloo, Iowa, (metro population 168,000) has agreed to furnish millions of dollars to demolish and redevelop the Crossroads Mall. The whole project is budgeted at $87 million. It was once a significant retail center, but is down to a dozen or two employees in the entire facility. ■ Shopping malls once had their heyday because they delivered variety, availability, and proximity, all in a climate-controlled package. The model made sense until online shopping managed to provide more variety and nearly the same availability -- what the shopper sacrifices in having to wait for a next-day delivery, they gain in not having to look for a parking spot. And an online store is always at least as proximate as the nearest mall. ■ The malls that manage to survive much longer will do so because they offer something social or cultural that goes farther than a good layaway program. Some retail destinations are a little like Disney World and others are places to be seen consuming conspicuously. Many of them will go on. ■ But a lot of others will have to be replaced. Leaving them to die and turn into ghosts isn't much of a plan, especially for those places where a mall that once depended on anchor stores itself becomes a boat anchor dragging down the real estate around it. ■ America doesn't have much of a track record of developing high-quality centers for civic activity and social life; reimagining our many dead and dying malls as lively public spaces in the spirit of European opera houses with attractive community-building features may be a necessary way forward, at least for some.
November 27, 2024
A small town in Kentucky has voted to disband itself. By a slim margin, a tax revolt has overturned the status quo. ■ Then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a lot of hassle for saying, "Corporations are people" during a speech in 2011. If he'd only said, "Corporations are made up of people", then his point would have been clearer -- and irrefutable. Corporations are indeed very little without the people who form them. ■ It's no small matter that cities are corporations, and thus they are, in turn, largely made up of the people who live within them. Had Romney said something like, "Cities are people", then it's likely that many of his detractors would have charitably welcomed him making the point. ■ As corporations, cities exist mainly to offer economies of scale in delivering important services: Police, fire, rescue, water, streets, sewers, drainage, and parks. Some offer their own utility services, some manage the local schools, and some even run opera houses and run television stations. But the main purpose of the city as a legal entity is to take care of a lot of necessary chores in order to make it easier for settlements of people to live together in clean, safe, and economical ways. ■ Obliterating a city government doesn't obliterate the needs managed by the city. It just makes them harder to perform. Even in the case of little Bonnieville, the county will have to take over for some of the same administrative chores that had been the work of the city before. Others, like keeping the street lights on, will be abandoned. ■ The local power company has suggested that individual households could pick up the tab if they wanted to keep the streetlights on. And therein lies the heart of the matter: Residents might still be able to obtain most of the services they had before by paying for them a la carte. But it's pretty hard to get the same bundle of services one piece at a time for the same price as a municipal corporation can furnish by offering a one-stop shop. Taxes are never popular, but few people really give fair consideration to the deals they're getting close to home.
November 28, 2024
The rabbi and scholar Jonathan Sacks wrote, "How tragic it is that we so often keep our gratitude to ourselves, speaking it aloud only when the person to whom we feel indebted is no longer here, and we are comforting his or her mourners." It is a tragedy, indeed. ■ Naturally, some time often needs to pass between a good act and a display of gratitude -- you don't stop a person in the process of dropping off a casserole and have them wait in the doorway while you hand-write a thank-you note. And in some cases, a good deed long remembered can bring great joy when acknowledged long afterward -- consider the kindergarten teacher greeted with love by a graduating high-school senior. ■ But it generally betters us to do the work of recognizing others for their good works earlier rather than later. Yes, good behavior should generally be its own reward. But humans are social creatures, and we are formed by the norms and institutions around us. If we want to see more good choices being made in this life, then we need to praise (and be seen praising) those good works as early as can be sensibly justified. Reinforce good behavior and you might just get more of it.
November 30, 2024
There has been no shortage of notice paid to the astronomical growth in active users on the Bluesky social media platform. After a long and slow period of organic growth, the service has exploded with activity, surging right past services like Threads, which had a much more favorable starting position. Many of the new Bluesky users are adopting it as a substitute for X/Twitter, where erratic leadership at the very top has undermined years of goodwill. ■ In the process of moving, a noteworthy share of users have remarked on the uneasy sense that they are abandoning many years of remarks on the old platform. And while it is, of course, entirely possible to export the archives of one's X/Twitter activity, the process naturally causes some to reflect on whether there is any point to preserving such a record at all. ■ For most of the natural world, life is a struggle for survival. But for human beings, it is something different. We haven't conquered mortality altogether, but tools like vaccines and clean drinking water have smashed the old limits that used to keep many of us from growing old. For human beings, life is predominantly a struggle to be remembered. ■ We can't be sure that dolphins and bonobos aren't telling tales of their ancestors, but it's pretty unlikely. Yet we humans struggle constantly with the matter of memory: We visit gravesites, take DNA tests, watch historical documentaries, subscribe to Ancestry.com, fund archaeological research, and digitize the contents of the Library of Congress. Our nations fight one another, but even those that lose battles and wars -- even to the point of being completely conquered -- still have champions who insist upon being remembered. ■ It might not be obvious, but the same natural urges are behind the celebration of National Native American Heritage Month each year and the compulsion to save one's own social media archives. We may be far from knowing everything about big questions like the meaning of life, but our gift of self-awareness tells us that unless and until we find those bigger answers, the next closest thing is to make some kind of impression on the common memory of the species. Whether that takes the form of having a name chiseled in stone, registering for copyright protection on a literary work, or etching a signature into an heirloom craft, almost all of us are captive to the same instinct.