Gongol.com Archives: 2024 Second-Quarter Archives
April 3, 2024
A metal seal once used to mark a Papal decree has been discovered in Poland, more than 650 years after it was lost in transit. It is a fair assumption that the matter contained under the seal was thought to be important in its time; after all, it had been issued by the Pope, who was then (as now) a tremendously influential individual. ■ The decree itself is lost to history, and the artifact so recently discovered is partially missing. It's not even clear who was Pope when it was issued, sometime between 1303 and 1352. On the early end of that window, it could have been Benedict XI -- a full five Popes Benedict before the present day. ■ That should probably give us a lesson in the present, when people obsess over trending news and "going viral". Everyone gets only a limited time on Earth, and even the entire lives of some of the most notable people on the planet are often little more than a historical footnote. It's not nihilism to acknowledge that; it's merely historical literacy. Putting some perspective on the scurrying and attention-seeking of the present is just an application of reasonable humility. ■ And yet, even if much of what appears to be vitally important now is likely to be forgotten some centuries hence, perhaps that makes the thrust of our behavior even more important. What's written in a papal bull may be of no enduring consequence. But whether an individual chooses to treat a child with nurturing patience, a stranger with grace, a friend with timely concern, or a parent with honor really does push the world in the right direction. ■ Those encounters are often remembered -- usually only within one generation, but their consequences multiply as they become the lessons taught to the next generation and the virtues held up as models for emulation. Countless biographies (and eulogies) have pivoted on significant turning points in life brought about by a single person's good works. And many others have hinged on avoidable pain imposed by others as well. Those acts may rarely leave artifacts behind for people to uncover with metal detectors, but in the grand scheme of things, they probably matter a lot more than those that do.
April 5, 2024
A new book has entered circulation with an aggressive take on an old assumption: That country folk are a grave threat to city folk. Some have already undertaken methodical rebuttals of the details, but the premise itself needs to be challenged. ■ Rural and urban interests have sometimes diverged by a great deal; look no further than the history of the Federal Reserve to see a tangible example still around today. The Secretary of Agriculture was one of three members on the committee who set up the districts, because farmers need access to lots of bank credit. The Secretary of Commerce was not on the committee, and there was no HUD Secretary to enlist. ■ But America's geography is considerably more homogenized, socially and economically, than it was a century ago. Every state and every community comes with its own unique features, but the differences in material experience are pretty flat. 75% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Target store, and 90% are within 10 miles of a Walmart. Amazon packages go everywhere, satellite broadband access penetrates where fiber and cable lines do not, and there is no urban/rural divide in Netflix access. ■ But whereas rural and urban places really aren't as presumptively different as they once were, there is a sharp divide among those parts of America that are ascending, those that are stagnant, and those in decline. In those areas that are stagnant or in decline, the resulting feelings of resentment are a real problem -- whether those places are urban, suburban, exurban, or rural. ■ The symptoms are easy to identify, but the root causes can be excruciating to fix. Are houses in decay because of external circumstances or because of household laziness? Are students performing badly in school because the teachers are subpar or because the students lack motivation? Are Main Street storefronts empty because the shopowners ran into a tough economy or because the owners didn't try to keep up with the times? The uncertainties can make it distinctly hard to find responsive policies. But making prejudicial assumptions doesn't get us any closer.
April 7, 2024
For the entire history of mass media up until now, the default order has always been to report men's sports first and women's sports second (if at all). With the exceptional popularity of the University of Iowa's women's basketball team, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of that order. ■ Iowa's tournament games have beaten the ratings for almost all professional sports in the past year -- including the World Series and the NBA Finals. That's an exceptional turn of events. ■ It speaks to the indisputably transformative talent on display, of course. Yet it also points to the fact that when we want to see changes in the world, it's not enough to assume that money is the only element that matters. ■ Funding will always matter, but people's willingness to apply and refine their own skills do, too. But there is also the wholly unquantifiable element of human energy: Call it drive, will, momentum, spark, or something else, there's a characteristic that breaks the inertia of inaction and pushes people to do better. ■ Women athletes have been demonstrating terrific skill for decades. But the requisite energy is showing up in unprecedented ways. The world's most dominant individual athlete is the incredible Simone Biles. Women's wrestling is the fastest-growing sport in high schools. And the most-recognized player in college basketball is Iowa's Caitlin Clark (and there are two other women among the top five). The energy is on the side of reshuffling the old order.
Smaller families and tougher care choices
Japan is finding itself in a demographic trouble spot, with a labor market that is almost entirely employed, but a shrinking population of working-age people. The country's overall population is shrinking at a -0.41% annual rate, and the country has roughly one retiree for every two people of working age. ■ The United States is more youthful in many ways (with a ratio of about half as many retirees to working-age people, for example), but we're at risk of some similar hazards. Our birth rate isn't very high, and without our comparatively high rate of incoming migration, we could be facing a pretty alarming set of figures, too. ■ What's worth noting is that while much of the attention to birth and immigration rates tends to focus on the labor market, the consequences are no less important for the basic aspects of old-age care. Large families have traditionally been a source of social security (in the generic sense), and considerably smaller families will have to deal with their elders in different ways than in the past. ■ This could, paradoxically, make extended-family relations more important than when families tended to be much larger. We cannot just assume that there will be enough workers to adequately staff retirement homes, or that the funding will be readily available to outsource that care. ■ One in five families with children are raising lone offspring. That's bound to have consequences down the line, when care decisions (and other choices) have to be made on behalf of elderly relatives. It's not unlikely that nieces and nephews will end up caring for aunts and uncles, or that cousins will need to step in as de-facto brothers and sisters for one another, far more often than was the case when US households used to average nearly 6 people. ■ These are the factors that don't get captured in reports on workforce alone, and they're masked as well when immigration matters so heavily to net population growth. Japan may be well ahead of the United States in the changing tide of big-country population figures, but it's important to note some of the vital ways in which we're already likely to experience parallel trends. There are only so many ways in which robots will be able to "care" for us in the future.
April 8, 2024
In response to an unbelievable wind forecast, Xcel Energy deliberately shut off the power to 55,000 customers in Colorado (especially in the Denver and Boulder areas). At least another 100,000 lost power due to wind damage. ■ The windstorm itself was exceptional: The peak recorded gust was 97 mph, with lots of other gusts recorded well in excess of 70 mph. Nature served up its worst, to be sure. ■ But the decision to actively shut down the power grid is a reflection of the reasonable concern over the fire threat posed by the winds. It was just a little over two years ago that a devastating fire ripped through the Boulder area. That fire was almost certainly caused by a broken power line. ■ The power grid as we know it relies upon a huge amount of above-ground transmission. Burial would self-evidently reduce the risk of damage from wind events, but it's a tremendously expensive undertaking and may be entirely infeasible for high-voltage transmission. Air is a resistor, while the ground is a conductor. The job can be done, but it can't be done on the cheap. ■ Society is going to have to figure out whether it's worth expecting utility companies to bear the much higher cost of prevention: They won't bear those costs alone, and the implicit social contract between regulated utilities and the public requires that the public's demands not come at the expense of bankrupting the energy companies. Wildfires caused by power lines are a cost, too, and simply shutting down the electricity when winds are strong seems like an inelegant long-term solution to the problem.
April 10, 2024
Deduct your cash but not your services
Certain problems are vexing because they create plain and evident negative consequences -- but there is no clear evidence that any possible solution for those consequences won't be equally bad. A good example rears its head every tax season. ■ Economists will note that a market-clearing price can be found for most any good or service. It may be high, it may be low. It may come with externalities. But the price exists. And thus our society is prone to financializing most things. We tend to believe that charitable donations are a good thing, so we incentivize them by offering tax deductions. ■ In general, charity and welfare tend to be distributed most efficiently in the form of cash or cash-like transfers. While this isn't universally true (school lunch subsidies are a relatively clear counter-example), most of the time, it's better for recipients to get something they can allocate on their own. That's what makes the Earned Income Tax Credit broadly popular on both the left and the right. ■ But the opposite can be true on the other end: While cash payments are often better than goods for the receiver, it is sometimes (and perhaps even often) better for a donor to give in the form of services rather than cash. People with high-value skills can often do a lot more good by donating those skills "pro bono publico" than they might by earning income and then donating some of it as cash. ■ The tax code, however, rewards cash donations but does not reward the value of in-kind donations of services. This sets up a perverse set of incentives: The higher then value of the in-kind services one might donate, the lower the relative incentive to donate them pro-bono. Thus, an attorney who bills out at $300 an hour and takes home $100 of that $300 would have to work for three hours just to bring home the income to buy her own services on behalf of a charity. If that seems wholly inefficient, it's the fault of the tax code. ■ The lack of deductibility, of course, doesn't preclude accountants, attorneys, architects, engineers, doctors, nurses, dentists, graphic designers, computer programmers, and countless others from donating their high-value services. But the inconsistency of making their cash donations tax-deductible while offering no such incentive for their pro-bono services is counterproductive -- especially in an economy substantially dominated by the production of services. ■ The obvious case against permitting the value of in-kind service donations to be deducted is that it could open the door to considerable abuse. This is particularly vexatious because elite service providers are often well worth the price, and disincentivizing them from donating pro-bono services sets the entire charitable sector behind. Sometimes the sector gets access to those elite services anyway, but oftentimes it does not.
April 11, 2024
The Battle of Britain lasted four months, from July to October of 1940. It was this air battle that gave history the memorable words of Winston Churchill: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few". Britain's successful self-defense in the campaign was imperative to preventing Germany from carrying out an invasion, and it ensured that Britain could enlist the aid of the United States, first quietly, then with a roar after Pearl Harbor. ■ Ukraine has been under assault from Russia -- by both land and air -- for more than two years. The US Ambassador there reports that "Last night Russia launched more than 40 drones and 40 missiles into Ukraine. Kharkiv's critical infrastructure alone was struck by 10 missiles, and other cities including Lviv and Zaporizhzhia were impacted. The situation in Ukraine is dire; there is not a moment to lose." ■ It is a different conflict from the propeller-driven dogfights of World War II, yet it's much the same. Terrorism from the skies and unprovoked destruction of essential civilian infrastructure (like the missile attack that just destroyed Kyiv's largest power plant) are barbarous and uncivilized. ■ America's conscience was ultimately stirred by the suffering of the British people, but it still took too much pleading before our allies got the help they needed. Barbarians don't stop fighting out of goodwill; they keep going until it becomes evident that the costs are too high to go on. Ukraine has shown extraordinary willingness to stand for itself -- the missiles have been falling for six times as long as the Battle of Britain, and yet it still fights. ■ The United States could supply vital ammunition and air defense aid, but that requires Congressional action soon. Nothing will get easier or cheaper just by waiting, nor will the barbarians let up until they are repelled. The only way to be confident that the rest of Europe won't come under similar assault is for Ukraine to have a decisive and just defense.
April 12, 2024
It's only protest if it's peaceful
After threatening members of the Bakersfield City Council with murder in their own homes, a woman was arrested and tossed into jail. She has entered a plea of "not guilty" in response to 18 felony charges. ■ In polite news coverage, she is being called a "protester". That is a disservice to the language. Protest has a long and honorable history; threats of personal violence do not. ■ There is a strain of behavior in public life that chooses to catastrophize issues at every turn. A little piece of it can be found in every use of warnings like, "This is the most important election of our lifetime." And it routinely escalates from there. ■ The problem with this pattern is twofold: First, the chronic catastrophization of all things political turns some people into antisocial lunatics who think all ends must justify any means. (If it's always the "most important", then compromise, persuasion, and incrementalism have no real hope.) ■ Second, it blurs the line between words and actions. We have to be able to exchange words freely with people so that we can contain even our strongest feelings within civilized boundaries. ■ People who threaten to bring physical harm to city councilmembers, governors, and even Vice Presidents, actively surrender their right to remain in society until they can cool down and find their behavior corrected. Threats of violence aren't protest, they are terrorism.
In 1781, Alexander Hamilton gave us a beautiful line that seems to have perfectly anticipated our technology-saturated world: "Nothing is more common than for men to pass from the abuse of a good thing, to the disuse of it." We find it easy to believe the worst about new technologies because it is easy to imagine how we might abuse them in our own self-interest. But those cases are often oversold. ■ Nobody has much difficulty in imagining how generative artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to make it easier to cheat in high school and college classrooms. A technology made for the purpose of imitating human language has pretty obvious utility for doing things like writing essays. ■ The good news is that artificial intelligence doesn't appear to be increasing rates of cheating. (The bad news is that cheating was already widely self-reported long before AI came into the picture.) ■ But there are prospective dangers ahead that will undoubtedly lurk in the shadows of AI use, which is why the issue of AI alignment is so important. Requiring technology to serve human interests requires developing a lot of rules and definitions around hard questions like the classic, "What does it mean to be human?" ■ It would be a cruel irony if, while we are in the phase of "abuse of a good thing", we were to err on the side of ignorance in our approach to AI alignment, simply because too many people proved too impatient for their own good and failed to study enough of the humanities to become good technologists down the road.
April 13, 2024
Faulty glasses wreck eclipse viewing
An Ohio village bought 1,500 sets of eclipse-viewing glasses for the community, but they were defective and nobody knew until the big moment arrived. And it's not like, for instance, a snafu at the Fourth of July parade when everyone involved can just say, "We'll make up for it next year". It's going to be a long wait for the next eclipse. ■ The intriguing question is whether the supplier of the faulty glasses had an honest mistake (albeit one which should have been caught during some kind of quality-control process), or whether it was a scam from the start (based on the assumption that the buyers would have no real recourse). ■ This is one of the reasons brand names and reputations are still important, even when it's possible to buy just about anything online from low-cost suppliers. Who are manufacturers like "NoCry" and "Melasa" and "Medical King"? The answer is: Who knows? But they're selling "eclipse glasses" online. ■ The other side of the brand-name coin is that trustworthy brands ought to be able to command a reasonable premium for their products -- but not expect an extortionary one. 20% to 30% seems like a fair premium that most people would be willing to pay, much of the time, for the assurance of a reliable brand name when two products appear to be equivalents. Search costs are real, after all. ■ Sometimes a brand is preserved not in the avoidance of failure, but in how they demonstrate a commitment to repairing the damage. Johnson & Johnson's decisive response to the 1982 Tylenol poisonings in Chicagoland is the gold standard in this area. With infrequently-bought products (like eclipse glasses), it's much harder to search for quality in the absence of strong brand reputations. Regrettably for the people of Orange, Ohio, it's going to be a long time before they get to try again.
April 17, 2024
We don't have the luxury of insignificance
America periodically goes through fits of isolationistic fervor. The present one has made for a strange alignment of interests as the Speaker of the House tries to weather a challenge to his office while pressing for a package to supply military aid to friendly countries under fire. ■ Assuming the best (that is, assuming that opponents of the aid packages are genuine in their disagreement and not willing accomplices of hostile governments), this moment echoes previous instances during which the thought of providing material support to other countries was challenged on the grounds that their problems aren't ours. ■ Yet, time and time again, the United States has been forced to reconcile our innate preference to be left alone (and to stick to matters like our domestic economy) with the reality that we do, in fact, share a place on this planet with a much larger global population -- and that our influence is magnified by our wealth and power. Just 1 out of every 24 Earthlings is an American, but our economy accounts for 1/4th of the entire planet's economic activity. We are similarly over-represented in practically every other metric of influence, from the size of our military to the reach of our cultural outputs. ■ Almost 125 years ago, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the State of the Union to Congress for the first time. In that report, he remarked, "Owing to the rapid growth of our power and our interests on the Pacific, whatever happens in China must be of the keenest national concern to us." ■ At the time, America's "power" and "interests" were still merely a fraction of their size today. And yet Roosevelt, who was addressing China's Boxer Rebellion, still regarded American engagement with the world abroad as a matter worthy of the highest levels of public attention. It may have been self-serving, and it likely reflected undertones of lamentable racial prejudices. But it was also a realistic assessment that even a nascent global power couldn't just look away when matters took place overseas and far away. Our power and interests are vastly greater today. ■ Problems that start abroad often fail to stay there. We have the capacity to make matters better or to make them worse -- only judicious consideration and strategic thinking can decide where we end up. But nobody, especially not those in high public office, should get away with thinking that our inaction or disengagement counts as inert. America doesn't have the luxury of being unimportant, and that means every choice has consequences -- even the choice to take no action.
April 18, 2024
Juror identities and secret ballots
While Americans are fairly well-versed in the importance of the secret ballot, it's worth reiterating why individuals have an interest in keeping their own ballots secret, even when they're proud to support a candidate or a party. Ballot secrecy is important, even for the proud, because we cannot distinguish the ballot photo shared out of pride from the ballot photo shared out of coercion. ■ An abusive spouse, a bad boss, or a crooked union steward might compel another person to wear a lapel pin, apply a bumper sticker, or show up at a rally. Those are bad circumstances, to be sure, but if the ballot is always kept completely secret, then the individual's conscience should always be secure to prevail where it ultimately matters the most. Laws can only go so far -- social norms have to play a part, too. ■ Likewise, the anonymity of the jury is a vital public interest, and one that can only be maintained through a combination of laws and habits. Just as it's understandable that individual voters might be excited to show off their ballots, it's understandable that intrepid reporters might be eager to report on the makeup of a "jury of one's peers". ■ But it's just as important for a jury to maintain secrecy as for a ballot to be kept under wraps, and for similar reasons. If a crooked prosecutor, an unhinged defendant, or a compromised witness wanted to influence the outcome of a trial, they could cause trouble in all sorts of ways. But anonymity provides at least some defensive moat against that kind of compulsion. ■ A handful of journalists have already said far too much about the jury pool in the New York trial of a former President. They have revealed information sufficient enough to narrow down individual juror identities to small numbers -- with descriptions that might only apply to a dozen individuals. Those reporters should stop -- not because the law compels them, but because norms should.
April 20, 2024
Apple's iPhone exclusivity isn't the place for the Senate
(Video) Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released a video whose tone might be earnest, but also possibly tongue-in-cheek, decrying Apple's handling of text messages from non-iPhone users to those using iMessage. It is true that Apple uses cues (like a jarring color) to single out those off-brand users. And it's true that some iPhone users are inclined to keep their Android-using friends out of certain chats. ■ But is it the kind of overreach that justifies a United States Senator vowing to "break up Apple's 'monopoly'" over a "stranglehold on the smartphone market", when Apple has a sub-60% market share? That's not a literal monopoly. Its practices may be anti-competitive, but are they really illegally so? ■ It's not as though iMessage has an exclusive hold over the messaging market more generally -- there's Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Snapchat, Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp, and Google Chat, just to name a few. Several of them have more than 25% penetration in the US market. ■ People are free to migrate wherever their preferences take them. And those providers are free to offer exclusive features to attract users. Similar complaints could have been lodged against AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ a couple of decades ago, and look where they are now. ■ For those who truly feel left out of iPhone chats, but who don't want to surrender Androids as their primary phones, a prepaid phone plan for $15 a month and an unlocked, refurbished iPhone can be had for $150 or less. That's not free, but it's also not very much to pay to avoid the fear of missing out. ■ The mystique of government intervention as the way to alleviate even low-grade social conflicts really ought to be avoided. Excessive interference with ordinary market evolution tends to be wasteful and inefficient, slows the work of natural market reactions to consumer demands, and turns society weak and flabby.
Stopping the fire before it spreads
Members of Congress have been dropping hints that they've been told unspeakably bad things about what the Kremlin wants to do in Europe. Considering the incomprehensible barbarity of what his army has already done, unprovoked, to Ukraine, it must have been at once both highly persuasive and deeply astonishing in its depravity. When the Speaker of the House says he'd rather be taken down by rebellious party members than see Putin "continue to march through Europe if he were allowed", that's saying something.
April 21, 2024
Can Congress really banish TikTok?
It's a question with two different thorny answers. One is legal: The prospect of banishing a particular company by name through legislation isn't exactly an obvious slam-dunk. It's obviously going to be an issue for the courts to decide after much tempest. ■ The other is technical: The whole point of the Internet is that it evades easy control. The lessons of the Napster era, the dark web, and the mass-marketing of virtual private networks (VPNs) demonstrate that evasion of authority is a defining characteristic rather than a niche concern of the digital world. ■ That doesn't mean the application or its owner are benign, nor that they should be trusted or even used. If the parent company isn't demonstrably and actively collecting user information for nefarious purposes, it still most certainly could be. ■ The main problem isn't the content, though there are very good reasons to be concerned about what decentralized mass-scale disinformation campaigns could achieve in adversarial hands. The central problem is the collection and ownership of user data. Chinese agencies have been after American data on the biggest scale possible. We don't have to know why they're collecting the data, how they're storing it, or how they might put it to use. The collection itself is cause enough for suspicion. ■ American authorities would be daffy to ignore the possibility of massive surveillance facilitated by tech companies based in China. That doesn't excuse xenophobic questioning or unconstitutional overreach. But it does demand exceptional scrutiny. ■ Ideally, Americans would heed the warnings voluntarily and cease using the app out of enlightened self-interest. But if that's not to be the case, then perhaps it's inevitable that the imperfect remedy of legislation will be tested. The legal and technical challenges, though, should make it evident that the work is far from over.
April 22, 2024
NASA shares the good news that they have managed to re-establish a data link with Voyager 1. A computer chip on the probe went bad in November, and it's taken until now to implement a solution. ■ Voyager is a fascinating project, having been launched in 1977 and now officially in interstellar space. That the equipment is working at all after more than 40 years of motion and cosmic radiation is pretty amazing. ■ But it should really command some admiration that people on the Voyager team at NASA committed the effort to figure out a way around the hardware problem and re-program the chip from 15 billion miles away. It says something about the natural curiosity of our species that we want to know what's out there, so far away, and that we're willing to try some pretty challenging things to figure it out. Someday those signals will probably be lost for good, but for now, Voyager lives to transmit for another day (whatever that means once you're beyond the reach of your home star).
If we could speak to the animals, nobody would tell the whales to stop singing. Whale song is one of the fascinating aspects of biology that tells us that many of our human instincts are shared by other intelligent animals, which doesn't diminish them as aspects of humanity but rather elevates the other members of the animal kingdom. ■ But back to the whales: If it were possible to communicate with them, Dr. Dolittle-like, surely no human would tell the whales to shut up and wait for an individual to wander off and come back later with a new song to sing. Yet that is approximately how we treat human music. ■ Implicit in the very title of "The Tortured Poets Department" is the widely-accepted myth that creative people must suffer for their art (even if it becomes a smashing commercial success). But what if that is utter balderdash? ■ What if the forces that build anticipation around the debut of an album, a show, a novel, or a painting are in fact entrenching a deeply unhealthy relationship between humans and our artistic instincts? ■ There's no doubt that some creators are at their best when using art to work through difficult times -- it's hard to imagine Fiona Apple minus raw existentialism -- but maybe we unintentionally burden artists with the expectation that they should only release the work that tortured them, and simultaneously deny ordinary people an outlet so natural that whales experience it for free. ■ Perhaps they would tell us that we are ridiculous to expect art to go hand-in-hand with suffering or to confine the creation of art to sporadic releases from a few individuals, rather than engaging in it as a routine rhythm of living. That doesn't mean it can't play a role in struggle (or give rise to it), but maybe we should heed what musicians and writers and cartoonists are able to do when they surrender to speed rather than self-torture.
April 24, 2024
"Forethought, shrewdness, self-restraint"
In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a Presidential speech in his home state of New York, in which he pleaded with his fellow Americans to remain worthy of the republic they had so fortunately inherited. "Many qualities are needed by a people which would preserve the power of self-government in fact as well as in name," he encouraged. "Among these qualities are forethought, shrewdness, self-restraint, the courage which refuses to abandon one's own rights, and the disinterested and kindly good sense which enables one to do justice to the rights of others." ■ American history would be worth studying on its own merely for the fascinating story it tells. But it's enormously practical to study, as well. For as much as the country is the product of an idea -- an abstraction about people and self-government that takes shape around a couple of documents from the 1700s -- it's also the product of events that are as much a part of the experiment in self-government as the hypothesis that people can govern themselves. ■ One of the major concerns of Roosevelt's time was the threat of anarchist violence; an anarchist had assassinated William McKinley in 1901. And yet, that anarchist movement instigated Roosevelt to argue that "A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section, it departs from the old American ideal." ■ Those words hardly seem out of place today, particularly not at a moment when mass protests centered on group identities have made some universities tense and even threatening places to be. We're no less subject to those same pressures identified by Roosevelt some twelve decades ago than Americans were at his time. That the country endured through its trouble then is a good sign that we can weather difficulty today. But it doesn't happen without individuals choosing to be better than some of our lesser impulses would try to make us.
April 26, 2024
Few reactions are more reliable about flying right in the face of the evidence than the assumption that technological progress will lead to widespread and chronic unemployment for human beings. Technology will always bring about employment changes at the margins, but it also invariably scratches new itches and reveals brand-new preferences. ■ When tractors displaced horses, some losses were felt among oat farmers and farriers, but a great deal of work was created in factories, service and repair shops, implement dealerships, and countless other directly related industries, not to mention vast numbers of second-order industries. ■ Despite its many intriguing promises, artificial intelligence has no hope of permanently displacing as many jobs as it will ultimately create. Take, for instance, the case of "Justin", the "virtual Catholic apologist". ■ As an experiment in artificial intelligence, it's an interesting one: A chatbot programmed to answer questions about religious faith. After some initial missteps in how it was rolled out, the "Justin" persona has been changed from that of a priest to a lay theologian. ■ Aside from the many questions that might be asked about theology delivered by artificial intelligence, it should be noted that the technology itself probably reveals or even generates more questions than it could begin to answer. Can an artificial intelligence engine have a soul? Is it permissible to represent the thoughts of a real person using an artificial technology? If a novel claim is pronounced by an artificial intelligence, what would signal whether it was divinely inspired? Is there a literal deus ex machina? ■ The questions are certain to become vastly more numerous than they were before the technology existed: In effect, a make-work program for theologians. No matter how technology reconfigures human work, there will always be new puzzles to solve -- many of them generated by the new technologies being used, ostensibly, to save labor. From those puzzles alone, we can be assured that humans will never be made obsolete.
April 27, 2024
China's efforts to demolish the structure of individual rights in Hong Kong is a naked display of power being used to stifle dissent. But it may not just be a reaction to contemporary conditions on the ground: It turns out that nearly a century ago, the Communist partisans trying to subvert the existing republic in China used Hong Kong as a key point for getting resources to their forces inside the mainland. ■ The strategic choice to try to muzzle Hong Kong entirely seems from the outside like a colossal waste. As a special territory whose embrace of a liberal regime of laws had made it exceptionally wealthy by comparison with the rest of the country (and the world), it seemed like Hong Kong was a jewel worthy of preservation. ■ But perhaps those intergenerational memories were enough to convince China's regime that they didn't want anyone trying to get away with the things their predecessors had already done as revolutionaries themselves. That wouldn't reveal strategic foresight so much as an age-old instinct to pull up the ladder behind yourself. Regrettably, 7 million people are forced to live with the consequences.
April 29, 2024
The American Enterprise Institute has published a paper which estimates that China is spending much more on its military than the country publicly reports, and even more than the intelligence community serving the United States has openly estimated. The estimated amount is very similar to what the US itself devotes to military spending, and far more than Russia, which has the world's third-largest defense budget. ■ Spending alone doesn't amount to a guarantee of results; the Soviet Union spent prodigiously on its military and all it got in the end was bankruptcy and collapse. But seeing a country run by a regime with hostile habits and intentions raise the stakes like that should be enough to alert the United States that now is an essential time to build and keep good alliances. ■ In so many ways, the US is capable of unilateral action. That's what having a quarter of the entire planet's GDP will buy. But capability isn't the same as strategy. ■ Strategically, we need mutual commitments. Not deals that merely reward us for having the upper hand or that hold a sword of Damocles over our counterparties, like China's government has been so fond of implementing. Contrary to the empty-headed hostility to cooperative action expressed by some isolationists, our best hopes lie in engaging with friendly countries on win-win terms. ■ And where we can advance the rule of law, individual liberty, and a decent respect for human rights by making new or deeper diplomatic friendships, we should. The deeper the global reservoirs of goodwill and commitment to liberal values, the higher the costs to adversaries who would try to harm the order which those values sustain.
April 30, 2024
Proportions beat categorical imperatives
If you return home one day to find that a bird has built a nest in the way of your front door, you face a choice. You could get rid of the nest or move it to a less inconvenient spot. Or you might decide to use a different door until the eggs in the nest hatch and the baby birds fly away. That choice isn't an obligation, but it might be considered the act of a mensch -- a person of honor worth emulating in the world. ■ To wait for the natural cycle of hatchlings from one nest might be good. But ten nests would be too many. And abandoning the front door forever just to permit an endless cycle of birds to nest there would likewise be going too far. Besides the inconvenience of surrendering your own door, you might come to create dependency for the birds and a nuisance for the neighbors. ■ Nearly every good thing is a matter of proportions. Patience and forbearance are good; becoming a doormat is not. Generosity is good; giving to the point of self-impoverishment is not. Vitamin supplements can be good for health; but even vitamins can become toxic in excessive doses. ■ Too many people subscribe to an assumption that all things are subject to categorical imperatives. This leads to a troubling habit of escalation, as people try to apply their absolute certainty over rights and wrongs, using whatever means they find necessary. ■ Fundamentalism or absolutism of almost any stripe is incompatible with an understanding that goodness is virtually always a matter of proportions. There are boundaries around both our understanding of the facts and our capacity to make unconditional rules. ■ Political fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, ethical or moral fundamentalism -- any approach that requires an abandonment of scale and the adoption of fixed, immutable rules -- collides with the reality that conditions matter, even if they make our human choices messier. "It depends" tends to be a much less implicitly satisfying answer than a categorical imperative, but in the overwhelming preponderance of circumstances, "It depends" is right.
May 3, 2024
Giving vegetables the peanut treatment
History acknowledges George Washington Carver as one of the greatest innovators in the history of food and agriculture. We still benefit from many of his creations, not least from the humble jar of peanut butter, which remains one of the easiest, cheapest, and most easily stored sources of protein available in the world today. ■ When aid reaches people in the midst of famine, one of the key means of bringing relief is a special peanut-butter paste. And in millions of homes facing no such dire distress, the lunch of choice for many children (and more than a few adults) is a peanut butter sandwich accompanied by anything from jelly to pickles. Peanut butter is easy to master and it dependably resolves hunger pangs in a jiffy. ■ Perhaps most of the low-hanging fruit in food science has already been plucked, but it's hard to imagine that we've truly exhausted all of the good ideas for providing ample nutrition at low cost to the world. The current fight over synthetically-grown meat points to the fact that new technological progress is still being made. ■ Just as it isn't intuitively obvious that crushing a ground nut and mashing it into a paste is a great way to deliver high-density protein, there are undoubtedly unexplored ways to make valuable progress with other foodstuffs. A world of good could be done for public health in America if someone could do for selected vegetables what Carver did for peanuts -- so much of our cuisine depends on transforming them in unhealthy ways (converting potatoes into french fries, for instance) or treating them merely as vectors for dips and dressings. ■ Fruits have gotten at least some of this treatment, which is why we have strawberry preserves to spread on the other half of a sandwich and applesauce in single-serving packets. But aside from notable exceptions like tomato sauce and pickles, there just aren't many foods found in American diets that put vegetables to use as good things in their own right -- centerpiece foods that are just as easy to indulge as a scoop of peanut butter straight from the jar. Riches may not await their innovators, but the thanks of an over-fed but under-nutrified world might.
May 4, 2024
When Charlie Munger made his final appearance at a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in 2023, he and Warren Buffett took an audience question asking them to identify some of their own biggest mistakes. Without responding directly to the question, Munger offered a succinct formula for avoiding regret in life. ■ His advice: Spend less than you earn. Invest frugally. Avoid toxic people. Avoid toxic behaviors. Learn continuously. ■ That final point stands out. At the time he delivered it, Munger was 99 years old. Yet he remained a fanatical learner, notoriously devouring far more books than most people and learning from as many practical directions as he could. ■ At age 99, one could be forgiven for choosing to take the easy route at just about anything. A rational analyst might note that a 99-year-old man has two years of actuarial life expectancy remaining. Any time spent learning anything new is surely subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns. ■ But there's another way to look at it, and Munger embodied this alternative viewpoint: Someone who has spent the better part of 99 years accumulating wisdom like a squirrel gathering nuts for a hard winter has put him- or herself in a position whereby any incremental unit of knowledge is unusually likely to yield a truly extraordinary result. ■ This is to say that after many years of accumulating raw information, the truly worldly scholar is positioned unusually well to synthesize new observations or conclusions that are likely to escape the less-experienced. ■ Society often shakes its collective head at the follies of senior citizens who are stuck in their ways or who find themselves unable to adapt to new and changing conditions. But that mockery would be better channeled into an active eppreciation for those who really do try to remain vibrant learners, considering how much some of them still have remaining to contribute. ■ Not every 99-year-old (or even 69-year-old) will have as many thoughts remaining to synthesize as a Charlie Munger. But what a world if we expected more of them to do so, and if many of them rose to the occasion.
May 5, 2024
One benefit of the Internet age is that philosophies and perspectives that might have escaped widespread attention before can get a fair chance at exposure. The person who wants to explore ancient philosophies more deeply than the page or two of treatment they might have received in a school textbook can find active (and often passionate) advocates for a variety of worldviews: Twitter streams for Epicureanism, podcasts about Stoicism, and YouTube channels dedicated to Platonism. ■ The existence of modern tools to breathe life into ancient philosophies (and not just the Greek ones) is a net good for society, and quite a large one. But just as is the case with living religions, there are hazards: Hucksters who use the quest for meaning as a vehicle for self-enrichment, and fundamentalists who come to believe that only one way will do. ■ Everyone has to come to their own conclusions about what is meaningful, important, and worth pursuing in life. Even if they make the choice to follow a path charted by others, there is still an element of choice involved in every adult's system of values. ■ A person's formative process -- through both schooling and guidance from their elders -- ought to include a heavy dose of encouragement not to adhere only to one way of thinking, whether it's old or new. We've recorded enough human history to know with high confidence that no one way has a monopoly on answers to how to live the best possible life. An eclectic approach really is the only way. ■ That's where the good fortune of the Internet age comes in. A person doesn't have to spend months exhausting the shelves of a public library to find answers. The choices now come as easily as subscription to a Substack newsletter. The only problem is that nobody really has an incentive to tell people to sample broadly. Hard-line philosophies sell desk calendars. Heterodoxy does not.
Video games are now about fifty years old, which means that people now nearing age 60 can plausibly claim to have "grown up with them". Surely anyone whose youth coincided with the 1977 introduction of the Atari 2600 and the 1980-81 launch of Pac-Man may be credibly considered a video-gaming native. ■ Those people are mostly still in the workforce -- but some of the elders of the generation are closing in on retirement. This makes it reasonable to forecast that we are no more than a few years away from the first arcade-themed retirement living communities. ■ Think about it: One of the main complaints lodged against retirement communities today is a shortage of engaging programming and a perception that they are places to slow down. Yet a census of just about any casino floor will reveal an almost limitless supply of retired adults playing video slot machines -- which are nothing more than low-skill video games. ■ Casinos actually furnish a model well worth studying for those who will someday soon try to recruit Generation X retirees: They've developed games, sound effects, lighting, and even fragrances to keep people voluntarily captive for as long as possible. It's a wonder that retirement communities and assisted-living facilities, which often coordinate casino outings, haven't really sprouted any facilities that model themselves on a casino theme. If they take away the winning and losing of actual money, what harm would really be done? ■ Arcade-themed retirement environments are basically an inevitability, even if that hasn't really dawned on anyone yet. Appeals to nostalgia basically ensure that will be the case. But more to the point, it's a great environment in which to put good practices into effect. ■ Arcade gaming is an individual activity, but it takes place in a community environment. It can be done in ways that encourage memory and test reflexes. And all it really has to do is follow a casino-resort model in all but the winning and losing of money. It's an idea whose time has not quite come yet -- but which will be here before you know it.
May 7, 2024
Persuasion in the face of danger
In an interview with The Economist, French president Emmanuel Macron has warned that Europe faces security risks, economic risks, and social risks to its traditions of liberal democracy. "Things can fall apart very quickly," he warns. ■ Macron is right to be alarmed. As a general rule in life, things are rarely as bad as they seem but they can get much worse much faster than we realize. We tend to over-estimate present pain while discounting too heavily the possible rate of deterioration. It's a rule just as applicable to human affairs as it is to the maintenance of working equipment. ■ Reasonable people can hope that Macron is wrong about Europe's condition, but level-headedness requires taking him seriously. Macron can be provocative from time to time (after all, he once called NATO "brain-dead"), but he also sensed the mood of his own country well enough to revolutionize the entire party order when he was first elected. Macron may be labeled many things, but "smart" needs to be near the top. ■ That intelligence makes two other interview comments stand out. The first is his blunt assessment of Europe's challenge in confronting Russian lawlessness on its eastern borders. Macron doesn't hesitate to use language like "war crimes" and "war of aggression" -- blunt language that confronts the reality. ■ Nor does he mince words when he says "Deterrence is at the heart of sovereignty." It's why Finland embraces the "porcupine" strategy of national defense, and why it's so important for defense commitments to be credible. ■ Macron's other noteworthy comments are enduring in nature: "Politics isn't about reading polls, it's a fight, it's about ideas, it's about convictions". The populist moment has punched hard against ideas, seeking to replace them with personalities -- so it's reassuring that someone with power sees the matter otherwise.
May 8, 2024
A variety of organizations, most of which have enormous reach but very little share of the public mind, celebrate Drinking Water Week each year. Public proclamations from governors and mayors are often issued, and the broad-based value of public drinking water is cited in approving terms. ■ Lest the acknowledgment become too squishy and sanguine, we should do more to note that 90% of Americans are served by public drinking water systems regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which turns 50 this year. That's roughly 300 million people out of a population of some 335 million, all of whom can be satisfied with high confidence that whatever comes out of the tap is safe -- and that the people providing it are required to keep it safe under penalty of law. ■ You might quibble about differences in taste. You might find bottled water more convenient than tap water when you're on the road. You might even make the reasonable case that there's even more we as a society could do to continue advancing drinking water safety and quality (and of course there is -- just like there's more that medical science can do to keep us healthy, or that computer science can do to prevent malicious hacking). ■ But the fact is that a person can go literally almost anywhere in this gigantic country (third-largest in the world by land area) and know that what comes out of the tap won't make them sick. It's been tested and monitored, and someone is accountable for keeping it safe without you, the ordinary person, having to give it a second thought. ■ And it's not just what you drink -- it's the water washing the dishes where you go out to eat, what your surgeon uses to wash his or her hands, and what's ready to pour out of the sprinkler system over your head in a high-rise building. Almost everywhere you go, it's been tested, treated (where necessary), and delivered to a very high level of quality, typically at a cost so negligible that customers are billed in increments of hundreds or thousands of gallons per month. ■ If you've ever traveled to a country -- or even a campsite -- where the purity of your drinking water wasn't quite so assured, pause for a moment and consider just how much time you save simply by knowing that tap water is safe. Consider how much water reliability undergirds everything that happens in the economy. Consider how much better is your quality of life because you never give a second thought to waterborne diseases like cholera or typhoid fever. ■ Living without reliable sources of safe drinking water literally leaves people sick and tired. Drinking Water Week, as mundane as it may seem, celebrates the one thing that certifiably holds all the rest of civilization upright.
May 9, 2024
With legal proceedings occupying so much of the news, it's a fair time to consider how well we distinguish between two very different tracks followed by the justice system. There is a significant difference between them, though the difference is far too often overlooked. ■ The first track is the instinctive one: The use of punishment to penalize those whose deviance causes trouble for society. Sometimes the punishment is aimed at deterring the offender at hand, as when a criminal defendant is held in contempt of court. Other times, the punishment of one criminal is intended as a deterrent to others, as when conspirators are threatened with decades of prison time. ■ The other track is taken when society would rather reform the individual's behavior and return a "corrected" whole person back to society. Some 640,000 people each year return to American society after a period of incarceration -- more than the entire population of Wyoming. The needs of society are only really met when these people are truly engaged in a process of reform. Getting probation, work release, and inmate rehabilitation right are important tasks, just on the sheer numbers alone. ■ Parents often need to consider the difference between the tracks even within household affairs: Not every punishment corrects, and not every correction should be punishment. In fact, the vast majority of the time, parents should seek to correct in ways that are expressly different from punishment: Kids do "wrong" things quite often because they simply haven't learned enough yet about what's right. ■ Drawing the distinction is important because those who are chronic, willful, or contemptuous offenders of social orders and abusers of public trust impose real costs on their fellow citizens. For that set, correction is unlikely and punishment as deterrence may be the only sound approach. ■ The costs don't always show up immediately, but Theodore Roosevelt framed the costs of cumulative public malfeasance well: "Nothing so pleases the dishonest man in public life as to have an honest man falsely accused, for the result of innumerable accusations finally is to produce a habit of mind in the public which accepts each accusation as having something true in it and none as being all true; so that, finally, they believe that the honest man is a little crooked and that the crooked man is not much more dishonest than the rest."
May 10, 2024
As of February 2025, the Boy Scouts of America will be known as Scouting America. The name change has elicited no small number of reactionary responses from those who see the change as part of some broadly nefarious plot. ■ The reality is that the programs formerly reserved only to boys are now open at both the elementary school ages and middle/high school ranges to both boys and girls, and they have been for a few years. ■ The change reflected a response to some unpleasant institutional realities about membership trends. But opening up to girls' participation also reflected a long-overdue social change: The recognition that the same experiences and expectations that are good for young boys are almost always equally good for young girls. ■ Changing the name of the organization to remove the obsolete gendering doesn't diminish the organization; what matters is the "Scouting" part, not the "Boy" part. It's not an organization in which girls aspire to be like boys, but one in which boys and girls aspire to be the best versions of themselves. What about virtues like trustworthiness, helpfulness, courtesy, or bravery belong to one gender more than another?
May 11, 2024
An extraordinary solar storm has pushed the reach of the Northern Lights far beyond normal borders -- giving people even in Alabama and Florida a potentially once-in-a-lifetime view of what's typically reserved for people living much closer to the poles. ■ It's nearly unheard-of for an event to be visible to so many people around the world at the same time merely by looking out their own windows: No matter how large a weather system might be, it's not simultaneously-visible-in-North-America-and-Europe-and-Oceania large. We can share common experiences through our technologies, of course, but almost never can so many people share the same experience just by looking skyward. And it's a phenomenal sight. ■ The people who watch "space weather" note that the geomagnetic storm responsbile for the aurora is the product of a "complex sunspot cluster that is 17 times the diameter of Earth." Our very planet is dwarfed by the conditions causing the special event. ■ The "Serenity Prayer" widely popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous (but celebrated far beyond it) pleads, "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." ■ Nothing we know how to accomplish on a human scale lights even a candle by comparison with the scale of the natural show going on now. A coronal mass ejection can take up a quarter of the space between the Earth and the Sun. That's too big to comprehend on a human scale, much less to influence. ■ So an extraordinary aurora is a good trigger for some epistemic modesty: We can only know so much and we can act on even less. There are many things we can do, but sometimes nature imposes forces on us far beyond our capacities. That shouldn't be cause for despair, only for humility.
May 12, 2024
An octogenarian pair has made an embarrassment of themselves by attempting to smash a copy of the Magna Carta in a purported effort to put attention on climate-change issues. ■ The document is fine and the perpetrators will likely pay some kind of penalty for their crimes. But this style of activity isn't a meaningful act of protest; it's a tantrum, just as it is when people throw food at the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh's "Sunflowers". ■ Throwing and breaking things to seek attention is immature tantrum behavior, no matter how old the subjects committing the vandalism. It neither makes a meaningful symbolic claim (the Magna Carta well predates anything resembling the Industrial Revolution, for instance), nor gives any sound-minded onlooker any reasonable cause to think differently about a controversy. ■ Moreover, it is an act of profound narcissism to think that your pet issue is more important than a work widely considered a civilizational treasure. The Magna Carta dates to 1215. To attempt to damage it for the sake of a political issue -- even assuming the issue was a valid one -- is to implicitly declare that you think your troubles exceed those of anyone who has lived for the past 800 years. ■ Whether it's a tangible object (like a painting, a sculpture, or a document) or an abstraction (like an institution or a norm), there is rarely a justification for setting out to destroy it wholesale. There are indeed times when blowing up a symbol is a prudent act. But causing damage to cultural artifacts in pursuit of "making a point" or "drawing attention" is generally no more than mere petulance.
May 14, 2024
Writer and surgeon Atul Gawande offers a thought-provoking perspective on the value of writing in his book, "Better": "An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community and also of a willingness to contribute something meaningful to it. So choose your audience. Write something." ■ Gawande is right on more than just the merits he noted. Committing a thought to writing (when that writing is intended for reading by others) also implicitly requires the author to spend time refining the thoughts and words -- almost nobody generates a perfectly grammatical stream of consciousness. Thus, the act of writing inherently demands that the honest writer attempt to save the audience's time by finding the right words to make the right point. ■ Our species has been around for some 300,000 years, but writing has only been around for some 5,200 of them. That means 98% of the entire history of human life up until the present went entirely without the written word. ■ And the best available data suggests that up until the 1960s, the majority of the world's population was illiterate. The written word existed, but was of little direct use to a majority of humanity until only about six decades ago. ■ It's nearly inconceivable that our species, with our giant, energy-hungry, problem-solving brains, had no real way to reliably store hard knowledge or complex thoughts outside of our fragile memories up until practically yesterday in evolutionary terms, or that a majority of people on Earth weren't able to read or write until about the time astronauts first landed on the Moon. ■ Gawande's admonition seems almost old-fashioned in a time of fast-paced social media, but it's incumbent on us to realize that the gift of shared written language is basically new in historical terms. We've likely uncovered only a scarce amount of the unrealized potential of not just near-universal human literacy but of near-universal ability to instantly transmit our own writing anywhere else on the planet (and even to effortlessly translate what has been written in languages other than our own). It shouldn't go without appreciation.
Too many children's stories still rely on antiquated stereotypes. If you're writing something that includes narrative filler about princesses changing costumes, perhaps it's time to reconsider priorities.
If you don't contribute to their healthy development early on, they may grow up to espouse complete nonsense about human values with boundless unjustified self-confidence. A truly flabbergasting number of "influencer" types are engaged in little more than thinly-veiled and desperate bids to gain male approval and affection.
May 16, 2024
Words go in and out of fashion for a variety of social reasons. But one word that's overdue for a revival is "tasteful". ■ Taylor Swift's song "Down Bad", which peaked at #2 in the Billboard Hot 100, manages to make use of the oft-forbidden "F" word 17 times in just over four minutes of airplay. Pornography and brain worms are at the center of the political universe. The world's third-richest person is reveling in the joys of stirring up trouble. ■ Tasteful behavior may be hard to define precisely, but it generally consists of doing things that won't seem regrettable later on. How much later? How regrettable? That may vary. In general, though, tastefulness is really just voluntary restraint from the maximalist approach in all things. ■ But it's silly to reject the idea that we can think far enough ahead to demonstrate tasteful restraint. People make long-term decisions all the time. Suppose we were to apply seven years as a standard: Could people reasonably hold themselves to a standard of behavior that would reflect well on them after seven years of time passes? ■ Seven years seems like a lot until it is compared to other guideposts. A seven-year-old child is generally in first grade. The average passenger vehicle has been on the road for 12 years. The median stay in an owner-occupied home is 13 years. ■ Thus it really isn't that great a stretch to ask people to think ahead, particularly if they're in the practice of doing so. And that comes back to the question of whether there is a social expectation to behave in tasteful ways. If tastefulness is a standard matter of habit, then it becomes self-perpetuating. If it falls away, then perhaps its only ticket back is for people to grow tired of the regrets and push the expectation back into place.
May 17, 2024
After a transformational season culminating in a record-setting championship game, the University of Iowa's head women's basketball coach, Lisa Bluder, has announced her retirement. Having helped to expand the profile of the sport behind a phenomenal player, Bluder exits into a smooth transition: Seeing her long-time assistant elevated to head coach. ■ Lots of organizations -- businesses, universities, non-profits, school districts, teams, and others -- are enamored with conducting big, splashy recruitment searches. Even police departments do it. Performing a baton pass to an obvious successor is often viewed as being too dull a step to make the kind of splash that stakeholders may want. ■ But grooming a logical successor is exactly the mark of a good leader -- one who is confident enough to say that the institution will survive their departure. It's what Warren Buffett has conspicuously done in business, and what Johnny Carson erroneously thought he was doing with the "Tonight Show". ■ To groom a successor is to acknowledge one's own limitations (including, but not limited to, mortality) and to implicitly promise that their work will focus not just on what brings credit and praise to the person in the spotlight, but on what perpetuates the good of the institution. That takes a convergence of humility and self-confidence, as well as a sincere belief in the process. ■ Outside of a monarchy, it often isn't splashy to cultivate and elevate an heir apparent. But if institutions matter (and they do), then continuity ought to be the goal far more often than not.
May 18, 2024
There are plenty of honest jobs that already come under the umbrella of "You couldn't pay me enough to do that", even with the benefit of proper person protective equipment, safety regulations, and training systems. But some efforts to make a dollar don't respect the law and are even more dangerous as a result: Like the person who probably electrocuted themselves in Omaha while apparently trying to cut into live power lines to salvage the copper inside. Sometimes we under-appreciate just how dangerous normal life used to be -- but habits, norms, and practices all make a difference. Seeing what happens when people disregard all of the rules because they think no one is watching.
Fly-through view of new Des Moines airport terminal
(Video) Everything always looks better in the computer renderings than in reality, but the planned design looks like it heavily emphasizes high ceilings and ample natural light
Wildfire smoke damages air quality in Iowa
Even though the wildfires involved are in Canada
A funeral home in the Des Moines area has coordinated an event to provide a dignified memorial and interment service for three dozen babies who were miscarried or stillborn -- in some cases, 70 or 80 years ago. Their cremains have been stored at a number of local facilities for all that time without having been claimed. ■ The origins of the story are sad, but the decision to do something honorable for the deceased reflects well on our humanity. Treating death with dignity is a way to honor life. Mourners deserve an opportunity to gather and grieve; where mourners cannot be found, the dead still deserve to be treated with respect for their humanity. ■ That is no less the case for the unclaimed baby than it is for the unclaimed veteran. One doesn't have to subscribe to the formally ritualized aspects of religious funeral practice to recognize the importance of dignity and consistency in these practices. Rectifying the shame-ridden practices of the past to afford dignity in the future is a sign that we (as a species) are becoming better than we were in the past.
One-paragraph book review: "In Praise of Public Life"
An inoffensive but not especially memorable tribute to service in public office
May 23, 2024
Many Americans are familiar with George H.W. Bush's infamous line, "Read my lips: No new taxes", but it's far from the most significant clause he uttered while in high office. Bush 41 often struggled to communicate with the effectiveness of his predecessor, but he was an exceptionally well-qualified public servant, and an individual well-equipped to see with some clarity the truly epic changes taking place around him. ■ In his 1988 nomination acceptance speech, the same address that gave us "Read my lips", Bush articulated a recognition of the facts that have an eerie resonance 35 years later. ■ Said the nominee: "The tremors in the Soviet world continue. The hard earth there has not yet settled. Perhaps what is happening will change our world forever. Perhaps not. A prudent skepticism is in order. And so is hope. Either way, we're in an unprecedented position to change the nature of our relationship. Not by preemptive concession -- but by keeping our strength. Not by yielding up defense systems with nothing won in return -- but by hard, cool engagement in the tug and pull of diplomacy." ■ Those "tremors" ultimately came to a crescendo when the Soviet Union fell forever at the end of 1991. The "war" part of the Cold War may have been won, but it is evident now that the peace wasn't, neither permanently nor completely. ■ If we had truly secured the peace, Russia's government today wouldn't invade some of its neighbors, menace others, or conduct unconventional warfare against the United States. In our eagerness to cash in the "peace dividend", America ignored Bush's call to "prudent skepticism" -- and not just in the afterglow of Cold War victory. Long after it should have been obvious that "keeping our strength" needed to mean more than just having weapons, a sitting President glibly mocked the very idea of recognizing that the peace was incomplete. ■ In his own way, Bush was telling the American voter that we couldn't anticipate having dessert without eating our vegetables, too. It's rarely a popular message to tell people that temperance, sacrifice, and skepticism will be required of them. Even great leaders have a hard time cultivating what isn't already in the makeup of their people (even if those character traits are dormant and need re-awakening). But if we don't habituate ourselves to those characteristics, history has a way of forcing us to reckon with their absence sooner or later.
May 24, 2024
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Finland, and Norway have agreed to cooperate on the creation of a "drone wall" to keep track of "unfriendly countries", in the words of Lithuania's interior minister. ■ Diplomatic circumspection aside, there's only one country with which all six of the cooperating countries share borders, and it's the one that's still conducting an invasion against Ukraine, Poland's neighbor to the southeast. It's the same country that's instigating trouble along Estonia's border waters and jamming GPS signals for airplanes in the region. ■ Technology, broadly speaking, has always been attractive in defense and warfare for its usefulness as a force multiplier. Unfortunately, it does not replace the considerable investment that must be made in uninspiring stuff like border fortification upgrades. ■ Dwight Eisenhower once lamented, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." ■ It is good that those countries are cooperating, because their cooperation compounds the deterrent effect of any one country's defenses. It is very bad, though, that they (quite rationally) recognize the need to commit their precious resources to such defensive activity. We shouldn't even for a minute forget that tensions have risen due to the actions of only a single government, and that all the costs the world bears are consequences of those actions.
May 26, 2024
A warning from the Lithuanian interior minister: "The entire region is facing similar threats coordinated by Russia and Belarus -- instrumentalization of migration, cyberattacks, disinformation, sabotage of critical infrastructure and other hybrid threats." In many ways, the United States still enjoys the protection of two very large oceans. But we should be alert not to let complacency creep in. What the Lithuanian minister adds is really quite heart-stopping: "First of all, we have to think about the evacuation of the population on a regional scale". ■ That concept is hard to comprehend, but it could easily be true: Lithuania is only about 25,000 square miles in all, or about the size of West Virginia. That's not very large, and that fact certainly animates concerns about the need for a population-scale evacuation (for a country of 2.6 million people). ■ Russia has already occupied about that amount of territory in Ukraine, and has lately shown willingness to bomb civilians shopping at hardware stores. The alarm in the Baltics is entirely warranted. ■ Contingency planning for a possible invasion is a lamentable thing to have to make a budgetary and policy priority, though it's a good thing the threat is being taken seriously. Demonstrations that America's allies are taking the threat to their own sovereignty seriously ought to have an impact on American leaders and voters alike. Our intrinsic geographic security shouldn't keep us from recognizing that others are far less removed from peril.
May 27, 2024
In a considerable increase over the times a decade or more ago, 29% of American workers are working from home at least once a week. Some states have substantially higher rates even than the national average -- Maryland's workforce is 40% remote, Colorado's is 39%, and Masschusetts is at 38%. Minnesota has the high in the Midwest at 34%. ■ Nationwide, 14% of the workforce is fully remote. While that number is the real sea change in terms of perceptions, more net good almost certainly comes from the substantial share of workers who can operate from home part of the time. Some work has always required an on-site presence -- a plumber can't replace your kitchen faucet via Microsoft Teams. ■
May 28, 2024
The National Weather Service initially identified the tornado that struck Greenfield, Iowa, as "at least" an EF-3. Subsequent investigation found evidence sufficient to escalate that rating to EF-4. No small number of online commenters saw fit to second-guess the preliminary rating, and many more have vocally criticized and mindlessly second-guessed the upgraded rating, as well -- enough that they came right out and addressed the early critics. ■ The problem we face is that the intensity ratings are based upon evidence and are bounded by specific criteria. Those don't fit well within a public space that craves conflict and extremity. ■ Things are made even more complicated by the modern storm-chasing environment. We are blessed to live at a time when portable Doppler radar systems operated by scientists are capturing valuable data that will undoubtedly have scientific merit down the road. And we will likely find considerable benefit from the emerging field of drone-based tornado surveillance. Radar can pinpoint only so well; live video tracking may be available sooner than we think. ■ But there are also some live-streamers who are best characterized along a spectrum ranging from "adrenaline junkies" to "disaster pornographers". They profit from hype, by turning audiences into cheering sections. Cheering for what, though? Bigger disasters? ■ The human toll from a tornado isn't neatly contained within a number. Meteorologists need to classify what they see in a scientific way so they can make better models in the future; after all, the value of a model is measured by the quality of its predictions. ■ The rest of us don't have to observe scientific classifications to have natural, empathetic responses to events. While the EF Scale attempts to estimate peak wind speeds, it does so on the basis of observable damage. And that damage, even lower on the scale, can be hard to grasp even if it doesn't quite qualify as "incredible". Perhaps instead of clamoring for higher ratings, we should level-up our realization of how bad even lower-scale tornadoes can be for the individuals affected.
May 29, 2024
The most important words spoken by John F. Kennedy as President had nothing to do with what you can do for your country or being a Berliner. What were probably his most important words came when, asking the country to embrace the Apollo missions and related tasks, he urged, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." ■ From a basic material standpoint, things generally have never been easier for the vast majority of Americans. Real per-capita GDP has never been higher. Inflation arrests much of the attention, but unemployment is low, basic quality-of-life goods have never been more prevalent, and new technological tools are being introduced at a breakneck pace. ■ Why, then, is so much of public opinion so sour (Gallup says that 74% of us think America's on the wrong track)? Why are so many people quick to express listlessness, dissatisfaction, or ennui? Grown adults insist on presenting themselves to all the world like angsty teenagers. ■ Perhaps we have stewed too long in a cultural broth that improbably blends the prosperity Gospel, a toxic "YOLO" fixation on perpetual self-care, and a generalized sort of impatience. And in committing so much energy to making things easier (or at least in making them feel that way) that we've gotten away from equipping people with the tools to grapple with what's hard. ■ We need more voices, respected ones, willing to challenge us to do hard things because the process of doing hard things is good for us, as individuals and as a country. It does us no good to be both soft and agitated, simultaneously restless and unfocused, looking always for the escape rather than the path through the difficulty. ■ It doesn't need to be the work of a President, necessarily, but someone needs to revive a sense of intrinsic appreciation for challenge. There's no shortage of tasks to be undertaken.
May 30, 2024
In 2023, about one out of every five watts of electricity generated in the United States came from nuclear power generation. On the whole, that's a good thing: Nuclear fission power is, for now at least, the only tool we have for baseline electric generation that doesn't burn a fossil fuel. Natural gas makes up 43% of the generation mix, and coal continues its decline, down now to about 16%. ■ Renewables are on the ascent, of course, accelerated by developments like the rather stunning decline in the cost of photovoltaic power. But they, like nature, remain inconsistent and until we get the problem of truly massive storage figured out, some kind of weather-independent generation is necessary to achieve a blend that meets demand. Meeting 100% of net demand with renewable generation is possible (it's already been done in Iowa), but on-demand generation remains a necessity. ■ This is why plans to support nuclear-plant development are worthy of attention. New nuclear plants are a colossal rarity in America: New reactors recently brought online in Georgia took years of construction time and billions of dollars more than anticipated, and those were the first new ones in almost a decade. ■ We aren't about to turn into the Springfield of "Simpsons" myth, with its unflattering nuclear plant. But getting closer to a reliable, modular, budget-friendly, and perhaps even community-scale nuclear generators would be a big win for society as we continue to steer aggressively towards a de-carbonized future.
May 31, 2024
If a recent survey is truly representative of the broader population, then more than half of America's high school math teachers are making up their own worksheets and other supporting materials, rather than using content furnished by their districts. This is an important problem to cite for a number of reasons. ■ First and foremost, it most likely reflects a chronic problem with math education in the United States: There seems to be very little consensus about how to approach it most effectively, particularly when students don't see how content really applies to then and many of their parents still suffer from lingering resentment over how they themselves were taught. It's no surprise that nobody is proud of American students' math performance on the world stage. ■ The heavy use of non-standard content supplements also represents a non-trivial waste of time and effort. Many, if not most, other subjects have at least some context dependency -- there are local topics to explore in government class, foreign languages may reflect the accents and dialects that the instructors themselves learned, and a deep dive into biology may explore things differently in Alaska than in Florida. But math, for the most part, is the same everywhere: Trigonometry doesn't have a dialect. ■ While efforts to nationalize virtually any school curricula are bound to run up against justifiable criticism, it seems clear that we are chronic offenders when it comes to math education. Not only ought there to be some considerable economies of scale to exploit (really, can't we all learn Cartesian planes and conditional probabilities from the same worksheets?), we should also be able to leverage more from the gap between those who are really gifted math teachers and those who are not. ■ It may seem dismissive to single out the high-performers, but it's really not a matter of dispute: A good teacher doesn't just have content knowledge, they also have to master pedagogy -- the process of conveying information to the students. It may be plainly more effective to identify the very best math lecturers in a school and have them focus on lesson planning to be delivered to all of the math students together, while the other teachers attend to one-on-one interventions with students as they need them.
June 1, 2024
An arrest is not a conviction. The recent case of golfer Scottie Scheffler is a fair reminder that an arrest is an action undertaken, in the moment, by a law-enforcement officer. And sometimes, arresting police officers make mistakes, get carried away, or simply lie about what they witness. ■ Prosecutorial standards can be inconsistent. The movement to pardon or commute sentences over non-violent drug-related offenses is a reflection of growing acknowledgment that some communities have faced harsher penalties than others for the same offenses. ■ People can go on to be law-abiding, constructive citizens after spending time in the correctional system. Martha Stewart did hard time after a felony conviction, but she seems not to have pickpocketed or otherwise bilked close friends like Snoop Dogg in the nearly two decades since. ■ We are equal under the law. Besides a deadly Civil War to resolve the question, America has enshrined that standard of equal protection in the 14th Amendment and in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Equality means plainly that no citizen is without the protection of the law, nor is anyone above it. ■ The right to a trial by jury is a fundamental one. Americans can request the decision of a jury, screen the jurors for objectionable outlooks, and tailor arguments to try to appeal to their individual biases and predispositions. ■ Juries can be wrong. They can be unsophisticated. They can be imperfect in any of the ways that any collection of a dozen people might be. But juries selected at random from voter registration lists are structurally about as consistent with the principle of self-government as anything else we do in practical civic life. If the ordinary juror can understand the facts, the law, and the testimony presented, and emerge convinced of a defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, then that conviction is just about the most honest assessment a community can possibly give to the behavior of the accused.
June 3, 2024
Maximize housing production now
The concept of home has a powerful hold on the American mind. The objective of our national pastime is to arrive at home plate. A majority of the states have some version of the castle doctrine enshrined in state law. Americans spend upwards of $11 billion a year on motorhomes. ■ Perhaps this effect is especially pronounced in America because so many people are either actively or vestigially aware that they descend from refugees or other immigrants driven from their homes somewhere else. Half a dozen generations removed from the Great Famine, some Irish Americans can still be found invoke holy protection of their homes with St. Brigid's crosses. Many other cultures behave similarly. ■ With rising mortgage interest rates appearing to have real consequences for homeownership rates, we should reckon with the range of factors that tend to drive up the cost of homeownership. We don't do very well at laying out high-density transportation options near high-density living options. Our predominant zoning patterns discourage innovations in the "missing middle" of housing. Financing conventions have long penalized economical options like manufactured housing. ■ Many of the problems come down to local choices and regulations, which in turn are often driven by inertia, fear of policy innovation, and a general lack of imagination. But maximizing the supply of safe, dignified, and affordable housing isn't just consistent with a sort of atmospheric Americanism; it's also well-established that stable housing contributes meaningfully to a number of important health measures. ■ Stories like profiles of the homeless high school valedictorian should urge us to a greater awareness of the need to press hard for the policies that would maximize the supply of housing options that provide security, safety, and stability -- even if they start from a modest base. If the sod house can have a place in American myth, surely we can find ways to open up wider paths to suitable options for the modern world.
June 4, 2024
This used to be a much more dangerous country
There exists a class of viral videos best described as "People in lesser-developed countries doing eye-wateringly dangerous work". Thanks to the social-media algorithms that reward intensity of reaction rather than intrinsic quality, videos like "Excavator operator on completely unstable slope tries to free giant boulder at enormous personal risk" are rewarded with millions of views and priority placement in the news feeds of ordinary users. ■ Above all, we should not reward the creators of these videos. Just because an activity is recorded doesn't mean it needs to be shared. And just because the subject of a video manages not to get killed or gravely injured while, for instance, building a path along a sheer mountain cliff, doesn't mean that it should get clicks, likes, or views. Those only encourage the production of more such videos. ■ Just about the only good that can come of circulating those videos among people in countries with more advanced economies (and better protections for worker health and safety) is, perhaps, an appreciation for just how dangerous life was even for the people of our own countries -- and families -- just a couple of generations ago. It is not OSHA, per se, that make American workplaces safer than they were in the past, but rather the conditions of measurement, reporting, public pressure, and viable workplace alternatives, among others. ■ In 1931 (less than a century ago), 17,000 American workers died on the job. In 2022, that number was 5,486 -- less than a third of the earlier figure, despite a near-tripling of the total population. Today's number is still too high, but prosperity, technological advancements, and public pressure on legislators and regulators have served to reduce the rate by a great deal. ■ Similar changes are essentially inevitable elsewhere, as economic standards rise, choices expand, and, critically, public demands are taken more seriously by government leaders. America used to be a vastly more dangerous place in ordinary life, but highly meritorious improvements have changed that. We should avoid danger voyeurism, no matter how often the algorithms try to serve it up.
June 5, 2024
History isn't just for the victors
The aphorism goes, "History is written by the victors". That's adjacent to the truth, but it's not quite right. History is, in fact, written by those who endure. ■ In the case of D-Day, history really has been written by the victors -- and for good cause. 80 years ago on June 6th, the Allies ignited the beginning of the end for the Axis powers. Once rightly vanquished, the Nazis had nothing to contribute to the writing of that history. But modern Germany takes a part in continuing to write and acknowledge the history of that day. ■ There are plenty of other historical victors, though, from whom we hear little or nothing. Genghis Khan exists mainly in hazy myth today, and his Mongol Empire left behind little of its own impression on the literary history of the world. ■ In times closer to our own, the Communist Party won the struggle for control of China. But what happened 35 years ago, at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, can't be expunged from history. The protests were real, the Tank Man was real, and the instinct to believe that individual human beings matter and that their liberties are inherent isn't erasable. ■ Even if the regime (the side of the apparent victors) seeks to purge its own history even from AI chatbots, the attempts to write history-minus-the-truth only end up highlighting the gaps. Human resistance to oppression will endure -- and those who endure will ultimately have the say in what history records.
June 7, 2024
A woman is in a dispute with the city of Chariton, Iowa, over her intention to keep a goose as an "emotional-support animal". At other times, from other places, we've heard of emotional-support boa constrictors, emotional-support pigs, and emotional-support alligators. ■ The idea of emotional bonding with certain familiar species of animals -- dogs, cats, horses, perhaps the occasional parakeet -- is nothing new. Dogs have been our pets for tens of thousands of years. And it's entirely possible that some people achieve satisfying attachments to animals of far-flung breeds. ■ But the claims to "emotional support" from far-flung members of the animal kingdom, known neither for their intelligence nor their warmth, strains credulity. There is, for instance, an entire Facebook group devoted to the titular claim that Canada Geese Are Jerks. ■ Modern life is indeed more complex than lift at any time in the past. We have to navigate many questions and challenges daily just in order to survive, and that can tax people whose mental composition isn't optimal for that complexity. ■ Perhaps, though, that should indicate to us something about the need to equip ourselves, both as individuals and as a society, with the tools to adapt and endure the struggles and hard times that come our way, rather than retreating into the imagined "emotional support" of species for which indifference to humans would be an improvement over their natural instincts. ■ Everyone needs mental tools to persist through especially troubling times, and sometimes just to get through ordinary days. But those tools are ultimately internal in nature, not things we can project onto other creatures and then relay back to ourselves, certainly not upon pains of losing access to housing.
June 8, 2024
An employee at an airport shop in Fort Lauderdale is charged with grand theft after a passenger tracked her luggage to his house after it went missing from the baggage carousel. This incident would be an excellent one out of which to make a very big example: Throw the book at the thief, and make sure that airport employees nationwide hear about it. ■ In particular, the victim's method of tracking down the luggage needs to be part of the story. She tracked an Apple Watch that was inside the suitcase. ■ Deterrence needs to be credible in order to be effective. Appropriate deterrence in this case requires that airport employees know and believe that there is both (a) a significant chance that anything they steal can and will be tracked, and (b) a high probability that they will face extremely unpleasant penalties if caught stealing. ■ The odds that the accused thief was working alone seem slim. Travelers are stripped of many of their normal defense mechanisms when they enter airports -- having to trust any number of unseen baggage handlers, security screeners, and other individuals along the way, all while themselves having to jump through many hoops to accommodate what oftentimes feels like little more than security theater. A single stolen suitcase may not seem like much, but if the authorities don't drop the hammer on all of the culprits involved, they risk undermining the essential trust that travelers must have in their handlers.
June 9, 2024
When the president of a nuclear power goes about smugly saying of Europe, "They are more or less defenseless" against such weapons (as Vladimir Putin has just done), then it is high time to be sure of two things. ■ The first is to be entirely clear in mind -- and in resolve -- to put to use every prudent tool of deterrence or detection available against such weapons. From the moment that a second country in the world had developed nuclear weapons, the deployment of those weapons has been a gamble. And in the context of any gamble, the actions of counterparties affects the overall calculation of risk. For the now-mostly allied nations of Europe, there is no real substitute for unapologetically finding ways to decrease the offensive value of a potential adversary's nuclear weapons. ■ The second is to be sure that it becomes uncomfortable to be voluntarily in the aggressor's orbit -- and welcoming in ours. Putin's thinly-veiled threats were made at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an event at which a BBC reporter "saw delegations from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America". ■ Russia is actively engaged in a plainly unprovoked war of aggression and invasion against Ukraine, and now its president is pleased to threaten the remainder of Europe. No country should find itself comfortable sending a delegation to an economic conference there. It should be clear that until it withdraws from Ukraine and ceases to menace its neighbors, it is a pariah state, and its poor standing should be considered contagious. ■ That requires, though, a carrot to balance out the stick: Just as the US and the USSR raced each other to align other countries with themselves during the Cold War, we should be eager to use trade, engagement, and diplomacy to make it much more comfortable to be in our orbit than to be showing up to make deals in St. Petersburg. Until they can throw a conference and have nobody show up, there's a lot of strategic work to be done.
June 10, 2024
Elon Musk is threatening to ban iPhones from his companies if Apple goes through with plans to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT into the best-known Apple devices. It is one of many prominent artificial-intelligence-related headlines capturing a disproportionate share of public and news media attention right now. ■ Musk points at privacy concerns as the root of his reaction, and his ventures do indeed depend heavily upon proprietary information and processes. Apple says that almost everything new that it intends to enable in its devices will be computed on the device itself, essentially answering those privacy concerns from the very start. If little or nothing is submitted to or processed by cloud computing, then the device might arguably be seen as little more than a private extension of the user's own mind. ■ But what the controversy cannot really address is a more fundamental question: What is the ultimate calling for these technologies? We call the whole basket of them "artificial intelligence tools", but to a considerable degree, the large-language models aren't really generating new ideas. In many cases, they are being used to draw useful connections -- to some extent, even to synthesize the questions that human users ought to be asking. ■ Ultimately, though, as with human creators, the lasting merit will be found in generating thoroughly novel ideas. We will know something new and different is happening when artificial intelligence can come up with an eighth basic narrative plot that hasn't been previously explored. Until that time, it will mostly function to reassemble the information that humans have already cast into the world -- which will be of little comfort to those who, like Musk, believe their information is too valuable to let leak.
June 11, 2024
When is a frankfurter not a hot dog?
Joey Chestnut, the world's most renowned competitive eater of hot dogs, has been told he is not welcome to attend the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest this year unless he repents of his endorsement deal with Impossible Foods. ■ Chestnut, who is in a position as a perennial favorite and double-digit-year champion of the event to throw his weight around a bit, says his absence "will deprive the great fans of the holiday's usual joy and entertainment". It will still be Independence Day, after all, but the contest would certainly look different without him. ■ Not that it's anything but an entirely commercial endeavor, anyway. The holiday is rightly celebrated by re-reading at least a few lines of the Declaration of Independence; the hot dogs are just garnish on the day. But other than opening the door wide for Impossible Foods to get some free publicity for their plant-based frankfurters, the decision as reported may unintentionally elevate the meatless hot dogs. ■ If you're a sports-car company and a popular driver wants to endorse a motorcycle brand, you can openly say, "Motorcycles are totally different from sports cars, and there's lots of room for both!" But if you consider motorcycles peers or even rivals for a category like "The experience of driving fast", then you might actually be giving yourself a harder time in the long run by saying that there's a conflict between competing in one and being a spokesperson for the other. ■ The entire thing may be a self-serving fabricated controversy anyway -- that much remains to be seen. But it seems like the most prudent move for the incumbent makers of beef-based dogs is to "otherize" the vegan alternative as much as possible, rather than implying that they are competitors in the same class.
June 13, 2024
The shareholders of Tesla have ratified an unfathomably large compensation package for Elon Musk -- one, in the words of the company's proxy statement, "equivalent to 12% of the total number of shares of our common stock". In dollar terms, NBC News calls it a $56 billion reward. ■ Warren Buffett has thought about executive compensation probably more thoroughly than anyone alive today. And for at least two decades, he has argued (as did his partner, Charlie Munger) that stock options should be expensed when used as tools of executive compensation (as shareholders have consented to doing for Musk). And there is no escaping the knowledge that $56 billion is an inconceivably large sum for an individual. ■ Musk has been one of the most dynamic figures on the world business scene in at least a lifetime, if not in a century or longer. But if one adopts the Buffett view of compensation -- that it should all be counted as expense, no matter what form it takes -- then the plain question that must be asked by the rational owner is this: By comparison with compensating one person $56 billion, how much would the company have benefited from hiring 56,000 engineers at $1 million each over the same period of time? Or 5,600 elite professionals at $10 million each? 560 at a still-eye-watering $100 million apiece? ■ If options are properly viewed as a real expense (as they should be), then one of the very first rules of economics applies: The real cost of something is what you give up in order to get it. And a titanic compensation package granted to an individual must always be weighed against the value of using the same total sum to compensate a larger number of people with smaller increments. Not small, but simply smaller. ■ Shareholders are free to consent to whatever compensation packages they see as necessary to achieve their desired results as company owners. But as a matter of intellectual rigor, they shouldn't unwittingly assume that they've gotten a better deal by rewarding one rather than 5,600 or 56,000.
June 15, 2024
A number of "major London hospitals", as the BBC called them, were targeted in a significant cyberattack thought to be the work of a Russian criminal group. It went beyond a case of ransomware, where data was held hostage, and escalated instead to a case where the actual operation of the hospitals' computer systems themselves were held hostage. ■ Hundreds of appointments and even operations were cancelled. The attackers took aim at a pathology services group, which brings vital services like blood tests to a screeching halt. ■ Cyberattacks exist in a domain that is uncomfortable for the existing frameworks of law: The same attack can be a crime (they're after money), it can be terroristic (what else would you call it if armed gangs took over the blood labs at a hospital?), and under some circumstances it can be viewed as warfare. In this case, the attackers are thought to be in Russia -- where cyberattacks are not just performed for criminal gain, but also to advance malignant state interests. ■ The need for informed policy-making -- with increased awareness and comprehension among elected officials, civil servants, and voters, too -- is extremely high, and growing higher by the day. There is no use in standing by and hoping that the problem resolves itself or goes away.
June 16, 2024
Dissolving a small school district
The board of a small Iowa school district has voted to initiate a process to dissolve the district next year, subject to voter approval at a public referendum. The Orient-Macksburg school board acknowledged that it was a "difficult and emotional decision to make", but the vote was unanimous. ■ It's not uncommon for educational policy to be discussed in dull, over-broad terms. The public hears endlessly about "small class sizes" and the need to "pay teachers more", but the broad terms are rarely enough to address what's really optimal for students and their well-being. Sometimes, for instance, scale becomes a limiting factor. Rural Iowa school districts have been consolidating for decades because the smallest ones found themselves economically unsustainable -- no matter how much their local communities wanted to keep them around, whether for travel convenience, sentimental reasons, or local identity. ■ In 2020, America was abruptly forced to reassess what goes into schools and what we expect out of them. And to some extent, we've begun to reckon with certain important truths. Among them: Most kids very much need to be in social environments with their peers, most learning can be individuated to some degree (especially with the aid of thoughtfully-applied technology), and in some cases, class size doesn't matter one iota (see, for instance, the infinitely scalable coursework delivered by MIT OpenCourseware or the Khan Academy. Sometimes a great recorded lecture is vastly preferable to a poorly-prepared small-group lesson. ■ Consolidation isn't going away for rural places: America was on an urbanization trend even from the beginning, and it's still taking place today. The changes won't always be comfortable, but that doesn't make them any less important to address thoughtfully. Catchy slogans aren't often going to do much to help.
June 17, 2024
Having long ago made antagonistic and legally indefensible territorial claims to nearly the entire South China Sea, the ruling regime in China uses provocative claims against its neighbors to test those potential adversaries. This most lately includes a claim of a collision between a Philippine vessel and one of their own, a claim which the Philippines rejects as "deceptive and misleading". ■ Though it is not part of NATO, the Philippines is an ally of the United States under the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. The United States has behaved imperfectly towards the Philippines in the past, but the treaty alliance looks stable -- particularly because both countries share strong self-interests. ■ Other countries, even distant ones like Sweden, recognize the situation too. China has newly declared intentions to detain foreigners who "trespass" into their claims. Given the size of the claims and the obvious interference with rivalrous legal claims by other countries -- including freedom of navigation, in which the United States is profoundly interested -- it's setting up a potentially explosive environment. ■ Nobody who possesses any sense wants to see an escalation of hostilities in the South China Sea, nor anywhere else in the broader Pacific. It's not the kind of situation that ends well for anyone. But how we best prevent that escalation depends on the reactions of our counterparts. ■ In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt told Congress in his State of the Union, "The strong arm of the Government in enforcing respect for its just rights in international matters is the Navy of the United States. I most earnestly recommend that there be no halt in the work of upbuilding the American Navy. There is no more patriotic duty before us a people than to keep the Navy adequate to the needs of this country's position." ■ No small number of experts on the matter are concerned that we are, 120 years later, falling short of Roosevelt's call to duty. It's the kind of matter to which attention should have been given in earnest 20 years ago. But the next-best time to "yesterday" is "right now".
June 18, 2024
Fake working caught up with more than a dozen employees of Wells Fargo, who were fired for "simulating" activity on their computers in order to look like they were working when they were not. It's the kind of situation that isn't exactly new in its own right, but is much more widespread now that working from home -- at least in a hybrid format -- is now a post-pandemic normal in many companies, both large and small. ■ "Many foxes grow grey, but few grow good", wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1749. That was a long time before anyone worked from a laptop at home, but deception and laziness were nothing new even then. ■ It's possible to have substantial unease about an employer using panopticon-like tricks to watch their employees, while also having contempt for those who would take a paycheck in exchange for the mere illusion of activity. Two things can be bad at the same time. Bossware is creepy and cheating is wrong; both/and, not either/or. ■ There is a good chance, though, that the problem had even more to do with the particular tools being used to simulate activity -- Amazon is happy to sell the would-be un-worker a mouse jiggler for as little as $5.09. ■ But what else is that USB-enabled device capable of carrying? The very same kind of company that would openly sell a device for someone who would cheat for a paycheck is most certainly also the kind of company that might well be open to delivering a malicious payload onto the customer's (work) computer. ■ This is how black-hat hacking happens: Get people to insert dodgy USB devices in their computers without considering the consequences of the hidden payloads that might be on board. If a device is capable of standing in for your keyboard or your mouse, it's certainly also capable of being turned into a keystroke logger, in the perfect spot to record passwords, proprietary information, and other things that insiders shouldn't be giving away. ■ It's easy to make the story about lazy workers or Big Brother at the office. But it's an opening to much more than that: Everyone has a role to play in cybersecurity, and the Wells Fargo incident makes for a very good time to shine a light on that fact.
June 19, 2024
It's nothing more than a meme, but the advice it delivers is solid: "Stop chasing your dreams! Humans are persistence predators. Follow your dreams at a sustainable pace until they get tired and lie down." There's humor inside the advice, but it's wrapped in a shell of truth. ■ Perhaps it's because so much of our country's founding story is tired up in the word "revolution", but America has a chronic under-appreciation for the value of persistence. Not the big, sparkling reveal, but the long-term maintenance of what was unveiled. Not the launch of a new app or a splashy IPO, but the quiet and often nearly invisible incremental growth that keeps things going. ■ We need to tell our kids -- and ourselves -- that it's important to find the right path, but also to endure long hikes on it. There need to be waypoints along the trail, but looking forward to something distant is a vital skill. It really is a biologically human thing to keep hunting after a reward for a long, long time. ■ The Summer Olympics will shine a spotlight on many tales of long pursuits. The ones most suitable to television coverage will include hardships and emotional trials. Viewers will be invited again and again to "Meet the Athletes". ■ But we need to see beyond sports and beyond tragic and heroic tales. We have to see beyond them in order to value the long climbs everywhere in life, with uncertain rewards and feats of endurance. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "Think of three things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account." ■ Revolution and overnight success are both overrated. Be sure you're on the right course, then be relentless.
June 20, 2024
June 21, 2024
Commerce Department says drop Kaspersky immediately
The Commerce Department is shutting down Kaspersky's antivirus and cybersecurity software and service sales in the US. The government says the company is too closely tied to the Russian military and Russian government to be trusted -- even the US-based wing of the company. It all goes into effect within a hundred days. ■ It's an extreme move. The Commerce Department even acknowledges that, noting that its investigation "found that the company's continued operations in the United States presented a national security risk -- due to the Russian Government's offensive cyber capabilities and capacity to influence or direct Kaspersky's operations". ■ The company, unsurprisingly, denies that it's a threat, but what else would they be expected to do? ■ It's a disappointment, strictly from a technical perspective: Kaspersky used to be the best antivirus maker around. For a long time, its software was the fastest and most effective on the market. ■ But by its nature, cybersecurity software has to be trustworthy above and beyond any technological merits. The more access software or a service has to the inner workings of a computer system, the more important trust becomes. A total ban may seem ham-fisted (and it may even be an overreach of legal authority; the whole act is groundbreaking), but the threat is very real and the consequences of leaving our soft underbelly exposed could be grave.
Half of US auto dealers affected by cyberattack
The attack went after a company that provides backend services to half of the country's auto dealerships
The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been ordered to leave the area, a cargo ship has been sunk by an explosive floating drone, and the crisis imposed by the Houthis is costing the whole world real money.
An alternative to posting the Ten Commandments
"America" editor Rev. James Martin poses a challenge: If religious rules are going to be posted in public, why not the Beatitudes?
Flash flooding in northern Iowa
Forecast anticipates up to 7" of rainfall across big portions of northern Iowa, southern Minnesota, and reaches of Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
June 22, 2024
Unbending, unflinching purpose
Theodore Roosevelt only got to deliver one inaugural address as President. In that sole inaugural, Roosevelt urged on his fellow Americans: "There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright." ■ Political apocalypticism is cheap and easy. It's the common root of "Burn it all down" and "This is the most important election in our lifetime", not to mention any number of other unhinged and unrestrained views. But it's neither new nor novel, nor are the conditions that some people believe offer justification for their extreme views. ■ Uncertainty is nothing new. Roosevelt served two terms, but had only one inaugural -- because his predecessor was assassinated. In fact, though he was only 42 when he became President, Roosevelt had lived through the assassinations of three Presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. ■ Rapid technological change is nothing new. We think that smartphones, electric cars, and reusable rockets are examples of dramatic change (and they are), but young President Roosevelt lived through the invention of the telephone (patented in 1876), the automobile (built in 1885), and the airplane (proven in 1903). Whatever the breakneck pace of change we experience today, it doesn't actually exceed what was happening then. Roosevelt even witnessed the introduction of municipal electricity (in 1882). ■ Economic change is nothing new. We've seen global financial panics and stock-market bubbles, but Roosevelt lived through a five-year great depression starting in 1873, long before the one we treat as the singular Great Depression today. And he'd lived through three other economic depressions, in 1884, 1890, and 1893. And all of those were worsened by a weak social safety net and the complete absence of a Federal Reserve System (founded in 1913). ■ Nor is dramatic cultural change anything new, either. We may have Spotify and Netflix at our disposal, but Roosevelt had lived to see the first recording devices for music and speech (1877) and the very first movies (1894). And that is to say nothing of the enormous social consequences of the long-overdue end of slavery in the South. ■ And yet, within 40 years of his inaugural address, the America over which Roosevelt presided would go on to victory in two world wars, unfathomable economic growth, and head-spinning technological change. That's what happens when you refuse to fear the future and face problems seriously, with an "unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright". There was no room for despair then, and there's no room for it now: Only a serious sense of resolve will do.
June 23, 2024
Stopping HIV transmission with a drug
When Magic Johnson revealed his HIV diagnosis to the world in 1991, even he thought it was a death sentence. For many people, it already had been, and there was no certainty at all about the future treatment of the virus. It had been headline-grabbing news just two years prior for Princess Diana to have hugged a young AIDS patient. ■ Pharmaceuticals have done amazing things in the years since -- Magic Johnson is still alive and tweeting to this day. Television commercials even advertise to a market for people living with HIV, which suggests that it's a demographic with at least some degree of critical mass. ■ But even with all that progress in mind, it is stunning to encounter the news that a drug trial was prematurely cut short because the drug had proven so overwhelmingly effective that it became unethical to keep anyone in the placebo group. A randomized trial of more than 5,000 women and girls in South Africa and Uganda came back with zero cases of HIV infection among more than 2,100 women receiving the drug. ■ The doses only need to be taken semiannually, so it's basically in vaccine territory. It's not exactly a vaccine in the normal sense, but since it's a shot that prevents the transmission of the virus, it has effectively the same result. The old wisdom about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure is as true today as ever, so this news is profoundly good.
June 25, 2024
No small number of students still apply for college admissions or for scholarships via written essays. As with any sorting test, the written essay has its imperfections and its drawbacks. Yet it also offers a reasonably fair set of conditions under which the applicant can demonstrate their clarity of thought. ■ Writing isn't the only skill that matters, but it is almost universally demanded of people in the professional class. In part, we expect writing because we expect to have our time respected: Most people read much faster than anyone can naturally speak (or listen). ■ Whereas even a gifted speaker can stumble, meander, or misquote when called upon for an extemporaneous reply to a question, writing offers the respondent an opportunity to think through a persuasive case and otherwise organize their thoughts before subjecting them to scrutiny. ■ While it will be a welcome development to have a Presidential debate without a noisy audience to tip the scales of public perception, it remains the case that the best alternative to televised Presidential debates would be to demand live-written responses to important questions (maybe even the same ones as get asked aloud during debates). ■ We typically conduct televised debates with the gravitas of a game show, when instead they ought to be treated as the most consequential job interviews on Earth. From time to time, maybe we need the comic relief of a "youth and inexperience" moment to serve as a cultural bond. ■ But if we really wanted to plumb the minds of our candidates, we'd do better to hand them some blue composition books and a set of sharpened No. 2 pencils. No aides, no ghostwriters, no pollsters. Just the candidates and their own ideas.
June 27, 2024
In the scheme of human development, the First Amendment is a triumph. It wasn't obvious to the world then that humans possessed an intrinsic right to air their thoughts in the forms of speech, print, or protest. Nor is it sufficiently obvious to the world now; some reputable indicators have shown the balance of freedom in retreat for two decades worldwide. ■ Yet even James Madison, contributing author of and advocate for the Constitution, recognized that good things could often be imperfect: "[T]he purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the greater, not the perfect, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused." ■ One "alloy" of the First Amendment is that it artificially subsidizes a surplus of speech: Particularly, it encourages the over-production of speech about politics. Not about ideas, per se, but about contests and figures -- the "horse race", above all. ■ Other subjects are often even more important. Science and technology, economics, international relations, and many others can be far more important. But they are complex and require expertise. They rarely lend themselves to the kinds of "team" alignments without which it can be hard to get audiences interested. ■ Meanwhile, there are often small but intensely interested parties who have strong incentives to constrain the boundaries of discussion. Experts, gatekeepers, public relations representatives, activists, and others are ready to pounce in the name of accuracy, fairness, or simple self-interest. Some even get litigious. ■ With horse-race politics, though, we recognize and respect a nearly unassailable right to speculate, criticize, and even fabricate. Everyone can have an opinion, nearly any opinion is legally safe to declare, and no special knowledge is required to either start the discussion or to join it. Public figures make for easy caricatures and the aspect of team rivalry is easy to spur. ■ That second-order consequence of over-supplying mostly meaningless content is not an argument for diminishing the First Amendment, of course. But it's vital to notice the consequences. A tendency towards maximum freedom for political speech can leave the public square overstuffed with the discoursive equivalent of empty calories -- and a bit light on the "vegetables" of issues away from politics.
June 28, 2024
The European Union is on the verge of selecting Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas as its new High Representative for Foreign Affairs, a role whose closest American counterpart is the Secretary of State. It's a major office even in ordinary times, and these times are not ordinary. ■ Lots of news coverage defaults to calling Prime Minister Kallas a "hard-liner", but that phrase ought to come under further scrutiny. First and foremost, compared to what? ■ She leads a small country with a transformative modern history, with a large and obviously belligerent neighbor literally across the fence. What alternative is there? Estonia has about 1.2 million people (fewer people than Maine), and a little less land area than West Virginia. Russia is bigger by orders of magnitude. ■ Instead of "hard-liner", it seems like "steadfast and serious" is a better description. She lived under Soviet occupation, so clarity about standing with strength against her troublesome neighbor is a virtue, not a vice. ■ Based on her record and rhetorical history, this looks like one of the best moves the EU has made in recent memory. It has begun looking at absorbing Ukraine into its membership, and only a firm stance in defense of every frontier will suffice. Pejoratives like "hard-liner" may be easy to grasp, but they run the risk of implying that a softer alternative is available or even preferable.
June 30, 2024
The last two hundred years or so have seen a radical improvement in the economic conditions of most of the human race. It was only around 1830 when the first steam locomotives began to displace horses as the power hauling trains on tracks. Everything else we would consider "modern" in the world has arrived since that time, from telecommunications to electricity to potable water to penicillin. It's all been part of a two-century explosion in economic growth, attributable to technology, trade, ingenuity, and human will. ■ Two hundred years really isn't that long in the scale of human history. John Quincy Adams was elected in 1824 and lived until 1848 (when he was still in government, serving in the House of Representatives). That meant his life overlapped with that of Grover Cleveland (born in 1837), whose own life lasted until 1908 -- the same year Lyndon Johnson was born. And every President alive today possesses memories of Johnson's Presidential era. ■ Whether we measure political "generations" or simply the genealogical ones, we only need single digits to reach back to a conclusively pre-modern time. Yet the truly radical improvement in humanity's ability to satisfy material needs almost unfathomably well (compared with those pre-modern times) hasn't been matched by a concomitant improvement in our ability to satisfy other vital dimensions of human life, and that creates an unmistakable but often-overlooked tension in life experience. ■ We and our relatively recent forebears have, for instance, effectively decimated the rate of child mortality -- a spectacular human achievement by any standard. Yet while there have been considerable improvements in child-rearing since that time, it would be hard to argue that we've made comparable progress in knowing how to raise children to be well-rounded, self-confident, and prepared to live fulfilling lives. Much progress has been made, of course, but lots of parents still hit their kids, the Surgeon General has campaigned against a "loneliness epidemic", and extremely alarming indicators of fragile mental wellness among adolescents and teenagers must not be overlooked. ■ While those are only a few examples, many other such gaps can be found between the spectacular improvement in material circumstances and less-impressive improvement in sociological and psychological measures of wellness. We should acknowledge that the gaps are often disorienting. ■ Yet we also have to recognize that improvements in both material and non-material conditions are mostly iterative; they build on what came before, and have to be maintained with intentionality and discipline if they are to be passed along. We shouldn't so much despair that our progress on matters other than material conditions has lagged as we should take confidence from the astonishing economic and technological progress of the last two centuries that enormous improvements in other human affairs are possible -- and aspire to achieve them.