Gongol.com Archives: December 2024
| December 2024 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 | ||||
December 1, 2024
Sentences that would have once been incomprehensible
The broadcasting journal TV Technology reports with no apparent surprise: "Twin Cities PBS (TPT) said it will premiere 'Broadcast Wars,' an original documentary about local broadcast news in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The program will be available on Nov. 26 at 7 p.m. as a two-hour film on TPT 2 and as a three-part streaming limited series available on the PBS App." ■ For one thing, the thought that the rivalries among different news operations within a major (but not top-ten) market would merit a documentary would almost certainly have shocked anyone living through the time period that is the focus of the project. Producing anything of a scale close to that of a feature film would have been a massively expensive project in the 1980s or times before. "60 Minutes" was a groundbreaking television show in part because only the major commercial networks had the resources to do big feature projects -- certainly not local Public Television affiliates. ■ Then there's the matter of distribution: To anyone living in the Reagan Era, it would seem incomprehensible for a media outlet to develop an ambitious production like a three-part, 120-minute documentary and then distribute it mainly via the Internet, with the thought of possibly broadcasting it later on a digital TV subchannel little more than an afterthought. ■ And then there is the matter of the unspoken subtext: That the era when local television news really, really mattered would someday be a matter more suited for historical documentary than hot topic of current conversation. And yet, that's how it is: Local TV news still matters and still brings in a lot of revenue, but streaming and other digital platforms are where to find the real growth. ■ Self-respecting communities still need journalists and documentarians. The Minneapolis-St. Paul television market is big and robust, and due to geography, it dominates most of the state of 5.7 million people. That would put it roughly between Denmark and Finland in population, both of which can easily claim to have distinctive cultures (including media) of their own. The same could and should be easy to say about Minnesota. ■ But there is also no doubt that the environment generally has become harder for "local" media of all types, as classified advertising has evaporated (massively undercutting the traditional workhorse of newspaper revenues) and conventional synchronous viewing and listening have been widely displaced for television and radio. How we work out what comes next -- which isn't just a business or media question, but a major social one as well -- will have no small impact on the shape of the future.
The massive death toll caused by Russia's continued assault against Ukraine really is hard to fathom. The Kremlin could stop the pointless dying in an instant.
December 2, 2024
While the news of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend placed considerable attention on the President's decision to pardon his long-troublemaking son, another prominent father passed judgment of a different sort on his offspring. Warren Buffett, who has a nearly $150 billion fortune to his name, announced a plan to entrust the charitable distribution of his wealth to his children when he passes away. ■ Buffett's announcement is unusually frank in its assessment of how his children came to this point: When his first wife died and left behind a $3 billion fortune, "they were not ready to handle the staggering wealth that Berkshire shares had generated". That was in 2004, when they were in their late 40s and early 50s. ■ "Not ready" says a lot, even if it's objectively true that taking over a $3 billion fortune would test the judgment of most people. Barack Obama became President of the United States at age 47. Dwight Eisenhower was 53 years old on D-Day. Plenty of big decisions have been made at middle age. ■ To his credit, though, Buffett has sought to be clear-eyed about his own offspring and their preparedness for big responsibility -- which now includes giving away his enormous fortune (about 50 times larger now than $3 billion) when he dies. "I've never wished to create a dynasty or pursue any plan that extended beyond the children", writes Buffett. "I know the three well and trust them completely. Future generations are another matter [...] And tomorrow's decisions are likely to be better made by three live and well-directed brains than by a dead hand." ■ It's a lesson worth considering in contrast with many other prominent parental choices, including the exercise of a Presidential pardon. Everyone must make their own choices in adulthood, but nobody should be held more responsible for forming a future adult than their parents. The eighteen years (or so) of childhood are both an eternity and an instant. But, actuarially speaking, most people will know their own offspring far longer as adults than as juveniles. Every bit of effort that goes into producing good people from the start matters to what character emerges when they come of age.
December 3, 2024
Feedback loops in political economy
An enlightening paper on political attitudes in the United States reveals that zero-sum thinking has a deeper effect on many people's preferences than any conventional partisan alignment. It's a conclusion based upon survey data collected from a sample of more than 20,000 Americans, and the results are convincing. ■ Even more eye-opening is the observation that zero-sum thinking, which is quite convincingly related to economic conditions in one's youth, is also demonstrably related to previous generations' experience within a family. If your parents or grandparents (and maybe even great-grandparents) experienced economic mobility, there's probably an effect that shows up, measurably, in your attitudes today. ■ The research certainly helps to build a case for seeing economic growth and progress as an important pillar for what we historically called a "liberal" world order: One based on liberties and freedoms for all. Setting up false rivalries between groups (an exercise in zero-sum thinking) is a long-standing weapon of those who want to use power in bad ways. ■ It's also a mild case for supporting those programs, initiatives, and institutions that help young people to appreciate constructive and non-competitive activities in their youth. If our political attitudes in adulthood are partially formed by whether we see the economic pie as a thing that can grow or not, surely we are also formed by whether our recreational and developmental activities convince us to see everything as matchups between teams, one of which must lose in order for the other to win. ■ It's all quite insightful, and probably unexpectedly helpful in illuminating why some of the conventional assumptions about the two-party political system in the US seem to be falling apart before our eyes. Feedback loops can be very real -- and have very long periods.
December 5, 2024
America's enormous prosperity is so vast and such a part of the background of ordinary life that we don't often have the ability to see how much it pervades even the smallest aspects of our national experience. This can ultimately be hazardous, especially if it causes us to become disengaged from the sources of that prosperity. ■ Take, for example, the incredible network of four-lane highways that connect so much of the country. Roads have been important to commerce for as long as humans have gathered in settlements, and four-lane divided highways are basically the pinnacle of what a road can be: Fast, useful, and comparatively safe. ■ America has so many of them that some go lightly traveled. In places, a motorist might have a whole lane to travel with no other vehicles around for a mile or two ahead or behind, even in broad daylight. But while those highways are so common as to be seemingly everywhere to an American, there are US counties with more four-lane highway miles than entire nations abroad. ■ Even the Trans-Canada Highway, which one might expect to be the biggest and widest in its country, still contains segments of only two lanes. (And Canada is one of the rich countries!) Meanwhile, there are multiple four-lane routes across mid-sized states like Iowa, built at typical costs of around $10 million per mile. ■ When prosperity seeps into every aspect of life experience like that, it can become hard to notice without intentional focus. That is in many ways a blessing, but it also means we have to be on guard against the blissful ignorance of the conditions that make prosperity possible: Trade (mostly free), standards (wisely set), and competition (lawfully maintained), among others. These goods don't appear merely by accident.
December 6, 2024
Bits and bytes of Woodward and Bernstein
One of the many unusual aspects of content generated by artificial intelligence is that it is not eligible for copyright protection under current interpretations of US law. This happens to coincide with another exception in copyright law, which holds that facts cannot be copyrighted. Due to this loophole-within-a-loophole, virtually every piece of factual news reporting is rather suddenly up for grabs via a backdoor route to the public domain. ■ That's because artificial intelligence is being used to generate (one hesitates to use the word "write") "news" stories, and the essence of generative AI is that it draws from the available written content in the world to create new material based upon the old. All it takes is for an AI tool to recognize factual content, and it is more or less at liberty to generate an offshoot or derivative piece of content -- which it can do in virtually unlimited volume, without sleep, until the end of time. ■ Facts, though, can be costly to obtain, and real judgment remains an exclusive advantage of thinking human beings. That hasn't stopped the companies backing AI technology from dabbling with experiments in the news business anyway. And it's only set to grow in intensity: One thing that human beings (who possess the eyeballs whose attention pays the bills for online services) are always likely to crave is new information about the world around them. ■ Lacking judgment is no small handicap: Computers might get pretty good at predicting what will generate clicks, but that doesn't mean they'll ever know when they've uncovered the next Watergate. ■ But if big computing companies, in the rush to try to generate any kind of profit off of AI experiments that they can, bluster their way into the news business with such force that they choke out the painfully dwindling number of journalists still on the job by "re-packaging" what the true shoe-leather reporters uncovered and wrote, then we're not only heading towards a future where everywhere is a news desert, we're also en route to a day when few human beings will have any practice (or resulting intuitive judgment) left to know when something advertised as "news" really is news.
Nevermind what the government has been saying and how it has been acting for many years now: Americans are being told to switch to encrypted messaging services rather than old-fashioned texts between friends and family. It's a significant reversal, instigated by the revelation that China's government and its affiliates have seriously compromised the security of America's telecommunications infrastructure. ■ So, all that stuff we used to hear about the importance of having backdoors for law enforcement? Forget it! Now it's all encryption, all the time! ■ It's all a matter of finding the lesser among evils -- or, perhaps, of making weighted-risk assessments of the available options. It may be bad if domestic law enforcement can't crack criminal cases because people were encrypting messages and rendering wiretaps useless. It's probably a whole lot worse if a hostile adversary can plug into the essential lines of communications that we've always used with almost no hesitation because what's domestic feels secure (even when it's not). ■ End-to-end communications encryption is rising to the surface as a matter of vital national interest, but it's also time to start considering what to do with data when it's "at rest" -- not traveling from place to place, but residing on the user's devices. We're going to regret not taking storage encryption more seriously than we do now; depending on what else our adversaries have already compromised, it may already be too late for much of what is stored.
December 10, 2024
Senator Bernie Sanders, who remains crankily "independent" while still trying to sway the Democratic Party by caucusing among them, has offered some unsolicited senatorial legitimacy to the efforts of the incoming Presidential administration. Sanders opines: "The defense budget is bloated. Defense contractors engage in fraud and waste. That's why we should cut military spending by 10%. I hope Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will support that effort." ■ It's a literally disingenuous claim. Sanders doesn't want to cut military spending because he thinks that 10% of the spending is fraudulent. He wants to cut that spending because he is broadly opposed to military power projections abroad. That is an opinion shared by others, even if it is troublingly wrong-headed at a time when the Communist Party that runs China is acting aggressively towards our friends and allies and Russia is engaged in a violent invasion of Ukraine. ■ To think that a world from which the United States withdraws or retreats is a safer one is to imagine that, somehow, the many things we ought to know about human nature do not exist. There will always be some balance of power in the world; the question is merely whether forces of good will control that balance. ■ If the problem were really one of fraud and abuse, then the solution wouldn't be a 10% across-the-board cut anyway: Fraud and abuse are controlled by spending more, not less, on auditing and enforcement. But that's an inconvenient fact of accounting. Undoubtedly, there is some wasteful spending to be found in the defense budget, just as there is waste to be found elsewhere. But the Constitution gives the power of the purse, in no uncertain terms, to Congress. ■ It is up to Congress to decide how much spending is the right amount, and by how much to oversee that spending. That isn't the province of any made-up departments of the Executive Branch. To pretend otherwise is deeply dishonest dealing.
December 11, 2024
Andrew Carnegie famously donated an enormous fortune to the construction of more than 2,500 free public libraries around the world, the majority of which were built in the United States. Carnegie's library campaign comprised one of the largest philanthropic gifts in history, when adjusted for dollar value, and it would be hard to imagine the consequential value of that gift. Free public libraries are treasured institutions that have the potential to create enormous welfare benefit for individuals and for society as a whole. ■ The philanthropic choices of wealthy people have always attracted great attention. And the inevitable question that must be weighed is: Can wealth do more good now, or should it be endowed for future use? ■ That's an especially challenging question, philosophically, because the kinds of people who accrue enormous wealth generally show a predisposition to delay gratification and a strong belief in the power of compounding. In the words of Warren Buffett, you want to build a snowball by finding a lot of snow and a really long hill. ■ But it's hard to ensure that a foundation designed to do philanthropic work (like giving away an enormous personal fortune) will remain true to its founders' intentions -- or that it will adapt appropriately as times change. What might have been a good charitable cause in 1924 might be entirely outdated in 2024. ■ Thus it is interesting to note the choice of the Kiewit Foundation, a philanthropy established on $150 million donated in 1980, to wind itself down by its 50-year mark, giving away $500 million in remaining assets in an enormous blitz. ■ The Kiewit Foundation has focused mainly on causes in and around Omaha, and some of its beneficiaries have relied a great deal on its support, so the transition could prove difficult for some. But on the larger scale, it's probably best for the wealth to be put to work sooner rather than later, since, like Carnegie's public libraries, the real benefit isn't in the first-order spending but rather in the second-order consequences of the spending that then leverage future possibilities. ■ In the Carnegie case, society benefits directly from having the books, but it benefits even more from the human potential that is unleashed or expanded by those books. In the Kiewit case, it's still to be determined which investments will take up the balance of what is to be distributed. But if they spread the investments around among a reasonable number of well-considered possibilities (say, perhaps, two dozen or so), and if good management is involved at the non-profits who get the funds, then even if a few of the initiatives turn out to be duds, at least a few of the remainder ought to be big enough victories to make the investment a permanent inflection point for the community overall.
December 12, 2024
A fire in Minneapolis started in a lot that was vacant of any permanent structures, but apparently crowded with tents and other temporary shelters. By the time it was extinguished, the fire had consumed the encampment and spread to a neighboring house -- one which had evidently been maintained with care. A second house nearby was also damaged. A similar event happened in the same neighborhood about two weeks ago. ■ Urban fires used to be grave and frequent threats in America. The Great Fires in Chicago (1871) and San Francisco (1906) are well-remembered, but lots of other American cities had huge and devastating fires, too, including Pittsburgh in 1845 and Atlanta in 1917. ■ Building codes have made a huge difference, as have professional firefighting crews. A huge difference is made by automatic fire sprinkler systems, which like modern fire departments, depend upon the public water systems that supply water faster than any tanker truck could deliver it. ■ But if people are living in informal or makeshift arrangements (like a tent encampment), then many of the protective advancements of modern living are lost. It's one of the reasons why people shouldn't have a knee-jerk response when asked to reconsider using the word "homeless". In a very real sense, the people in the Minneapolis encampment probably considered their tents "home", so they weren't really homeless -- but they were literally "unhoused". ■ The condition of going unhoused may have been voluntary or involuntary. There are plenty of social, economic, and health factors involved. But the consequences of living in conditions of heightened danger -- like using propane tanks to fuel their heat sources, which are at high risk of exploding in a fire, as happened in Minneapolis -- ended up harming people both inside and outside the encampment. ■ Nothing resolves these problems better than housing supply. A generous supply of housing that is safe and dignified is, in a very real sense, a matter of public safety, even if that isn't always obvious. Reasonable minds can differ on how to achieve that supply, but no one who wants to secure the benefits of modern safety practices should ignore the most important upstream factor. ■ Markets are very good at filling voids, even for goods like low-cost housing, but they often run into opposition from people who use zoning ordinances and other tools of political pressure to try to stifle that supply. The fires in Minneapolis show how the consequences can turn out to be dangerous for everyone.
December 13, 2024
One of the most information-dense graphics in all of weather, and it's one that ordinary people can gain a lot from learning to read
"All of north India has been pushed into a medical emergency"
Air pollution, long a chronic condition in places like Delhi, has become an acute problem this year, leading one high-ranking politician to declare that "all of north India has been pushed into a medical emergency". It's a problem culminating from combustion engines, construction activity, agricultural fires, and other sources. Even fireworks are part of the debate. ■ Anything significant that happens in India already tends to have consequences for a noteworthy share of the world's population, but in this case, India is simply experiencing an acute encounter with a problem that plagues almost all of us from time to time. Just this summer, wildfires in Canada's west caused spikes in doctors' visits in Baltimore, Maryland. ■ In a parallel with that other inescapable necessity, water, the best way to fix air pollution is to prevent its creation at the source. But failing that, it seems like there's still a lot of public-health ground to gain by figuring out how to economically clean large volumes of outdoor air and ultra-purify indoor air. ■ Neither consideration is anything new; people have talked about ideas as far-out as building giant fans to blow the smog out of Los Angeles. But if non-point-source pollution looks like a big problem for water quality (and it is), then it's an even bigger problem for air. By nature, gases tend to spread. Whatever pollutants start bumping around with air molecules become very hard to capture again. ■ But given that lots of what gets us sick is just floating around amid our indoor air, there ought to be more energy going into improving air quality even for places that don't have Delhi-level pollution. ■ It does go to show what a misstep it has been for America's public consciousness to think of problems like air and water pollution as "environmental" issues. Sure, there's a sense in which they are; but what really matters is that they are health issues that harm and even shorten human life. That should command a lot of energetic attention.
December 14, 2024
NATO's secretary-general wants a message to go to the leaders of European countries: "Tell them they need to spend more on defense so that we can continue to live in peace, tell them that security matters more than anything". In the words of Ulrike Franke, "No one wants to hear this. No one wants to say this. But it's crucial that this becomes part of the conversation." ■ It's true; nobody wants to be told to spend lots more money on tools they hope will go unused. But it's a paradoxical relationship: Build up a lot of weapons, and (at least in one dynamic) the odds of having to use them go down. Fail to armor up raises the odds that a vicious adversary will take advantage of the relative weakness. ■ "We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years. Danger is moving towards us at full speed," says Mark Rutte, the secretary-general. Some might dismiss his alarm because he has an incentive to encourage preparedness. But we shouldn't discount his warning any more than we might ignore the advice of a cardiologist worried about a patient whose cholesterol is on the rise. ■ What's it going to take to get the most sluggish partners to wake up to the threat, a thousand-day land war in Europe?
December 15, 2024
Don't leave talent on the sidelines
An approving profile of Pearl Young, the first woman to work in a technical role at the predecessor to today's NASA, notes that her gender made her a target for supervisors in the 1930s who complained of her attitude. "Attitude", of course, is the kind of complaint that is just plausible enough that it can't be dismissed out of hand, but it's vague enough that it can't really be proven either true or untrue. ■ It's generally worth noting who is so insecure in their status that they turn to non-falsifiable complaints about others in order to try to hold on to their own positions. Young's co-workers might have been aggrieved by a workplace attitude, but they also might have resented seeing a woman competing with them in the workplace. ■ Few things seem more likely to reflect the actual state of nature than to assume that raw talent is distributed widely throughout the human population. It would be close to madness to assume that any gender, ethnicity, or other inborn trait puts any individual closer to some kind of special claim to genius than any other. ■ This means that the bigger the net cast by a society to try to capture great talent, the more of it they should find. Arbitrarily and systemically excluding women from the scientific and technical fields, as was a widespread practice in the US until not all that long ago, was an incredibly stupid "own-goal". And yet it's still practiced by some of our rivals yet today. ■ For instance, China still doesn't have more than a handful of women in its space program, even in 2024. This doesn't mean they would be better off with a system of quotas to raise that number; the disparity is the evidence of some much deeper problems. ■ But if a group is selected from a large population that ought to have widely-distributed talent and the resulting picks look badly skewed to the notable exclusion of significant groups, then it's a strong symptom that the selectors are probably leaving much of the available natural talent on the sidelines.
December 17, 2024
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have published a joint statement telling the people of New Jersey to stop panicking over rumors of drones flying overhead. It's no small dismissal for them to say, "There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space." ■ Panics happen from time to time, and it's not especially surprising that people are looking into the sky at night and misinterpreting what they see. Lots of airplanes are flying overhead, almost all of the time. Especially along the Eastern Seaboard. ■ What we don't need is a nation full of Yosemite Sams firing off their guns (or even their high-powered lasers) at things they don't understand. ■ The United States certainly does need a sensible, well-calibrated approach to protecting civilians (especially at large gatherings) from the hazards of malicious uncrewed aerial vehicles. Ukraine has demonstrated just how useful drones can be in combat operations. ■ But vigilante behavior is virtually always in error, and the odds are much too great that Americans taking matters into their own hands (including members of Congress). Almost everything can be given a reasonable explanation to those who are reasonable enough to listen. We don't need the unreasonable among us taking amateur anti-aircraft potshots.
December 18, 2024
What democracy really looks like
The short-lived attempt to impose martial law on the Republic of Korea was a remarkable news event -- not least because it happened on a timeline with which even social media tools could scarcely keep pace. The president who attempted the stunt has been suspended and faces the first court hearing about whether to remove him permanently from office before the end of the month. He's also going to be investigated by a Corruption Investigation Office. ■ The incident was a lesson for the world about the elements of democracy, especially under stress. Since at least 1999, American protesters (usually on the left) have adhered to the idea that big gatherings are the best way to show, in their words, "What democracy looks like". And while there is nothing wrong with the exercise of the Constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of peaceable assembly, mass gatherings are only useful in certain circumstances. ■ The 1963 March on Washington, for instance, was a powerful symbol because it showed just how many people were ready to redeem, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., the "promissory note" written into the nation's founding but long denied in practice. It was also an event resulting from a very long crescendo of determined, persistent action against unjust laws prevailing in the South. ■ In South Korea's case, it's entirely possible that mass gatherings may have been effective, ultimately, in repelling the attempted autogolpe. But South Korea got something much better: Its legislature responded with steadiness and firmness to a fundamental appeal to civic duty. ■ They said no, in no uncertain terms. And they did it even though guns had been drawn. ■ That, even more than any gathering, is "what democracy looks like". It looks like officials putting the interests of their laws, their future, and their honor ahead of personal hazard. That isn't always a given: Some politicians are cowardly, craven, or selfish. ■ Korea's legislators have modeled for the world exactly what it means to serve as leaders -- to put their duty and honor in front of their fears. "Public service" can become a hollow cliche, but we have just witnessed what can happen when people authentically believe in putting others before themselves.
December 20, 2024
The chaotic race to hold off a government shutdown ought to serve as a spur for the public to demand something that might seem contrary: To demand an expansion of the House of Representatives. ■ The reflexive response goes something like, "Why should we pay for more politicians when we don't like the ones we already have?". But the problem we need to solve is that as House districts grow ever larger by population (remember, we've been fixed at 435 seats in the House for a century, despite enormous population growth since then), the costs of getting elected (and re-elected) have risen. Those costs are both direct (as in the cost of campaign ads) and implied (since any individual incumbent feels greater pressure not to endanger their own re-election by taking chances). ■ Is there room to do it? Yes, we could make space within the existing chamber to fit a lot more Representatives. (If airlines can squeeze passengers into ever-smaller seats, surely we can pack a few more elected officials into a room for debate.) And the additional support staff required could fit into some new buildings, if we were to be smart about it. ■ Among many arguments for making the House bigger -- among them, making the Electoral College more proportional without tweaking the Constitution -- one we shouldn't overlook is the value of getting a variety of new perspectives and sources of expertise into the room. We have a lot of lawyers (30% of Representatives have law degrees) but not a lot of people with more varied backgrounds, like auto-repair shop owners and psychologists. ■ In a world marked by increasing complexity, a dose of multidisciplinarity among the voting members would make Congress better. Change is unlikely, of course, unless and until the members see it in their own self-interest to expand the House. But it's worth pressing the issue from the outside, since our frustrations are often more systematic than not.