Gongol.com Archives: 2024 Fourth-Quarter Archives
October 2, 2024
History to guard the present and future
In a time of big events -- a catastrophic hurricane in the southeast, a significant Presidential election just weeks away, wars underway involving both allies and foes -- it's easy to find commentary that leans heavily upon the notion that everything in view is unprecedented. This temperament is egged on by a media environment (both social and mass media) that rewards nothing more than it rewards engagement, whether it is of quality or not. ■ This leads some people to make outlandish claims in pursuit of that engagement. Some even do it in the public square, like the union boss who wants to inflict pain on everyone so that he can hold his industry in stasis rather than seeing it conform with the times. Dreams of past glories (like a certain hazy fondness for an industrialized past) are easy to romanticize. ■ Historical literacy is an indispensable guardian of future welfare. It's vital to recognize the fullness of history -- where we and our predecessors went wrong and where they went right. What mistakes were made and what was hidden from scrutiny. What developments were fruitful and which ones set us back. ■ That historical literacy takes work. It takes educators who know their stuff and have ideas for making the past relevant to students who might not be ready to care of their own volition. It takes public figures who can incorporate historical references honorably into what they say about the present. It takes a public willing to check the facts once in a while. It takes resources like Our World In Data that can serve as clearinghouses for what we need to see in perspective. ■ None of this is necessarily easy, and it's certainly not free. But the costs of historical illiteracy are huge. Human nature changes very little over time, and in many aspects it never changes at all. Thus, while the particular details may change, history truly does often rhyme. But unless we know how it went the first time around, we leave ourselves dreadfully vulnerable to the hazards of making bad judgments over and over again.
October 3, 2024
A columnist for the University of Iowa's student newspaper laments that his campus remains peppered with buildings in the Brutalist architectural style. Cole Walker pleads, "Brutalist-style buildings should be torn down or renovated to enhance campus facilities and engage students in nontraditional ways, ensuring that curiosity and creativity flourish through a focus on design and culture." ■ He's entirely not wrong; some of the concrete monoliths of Iowa City are drab and uninspiring -- though others have modestly more curb appeal than they might be given credit for having. But it's a stretch to imagine that a public university will simply tear down big, heavy buildings just for the purpose of replacing them with structures that "engage students in nontraditional ways". That would require a whole lot of money for a terribly ambiguous purpose. ■ But what the student's plea does underscore is a lesson that ought to ring in every architect's ears: Buildings should be designed for the people inside them. ■ Most buildings are scarcely "designed" at all; nobody's really putting much thought into a strip mall. But those buildings that are favored enough to get true architectural treatment should generally obey Louis Sullivan's maxim that form follows function. The modern spin on that maxim ought to be that "Form first follows the function of serving the people inside". ■ How many buildings are constructed with little or no regard for even the basic features of permitting sunlight when it is wanted or filtering it naturally when it is not? Or of encouraging generous natural airflow to enhance mechanical HVAC? Or of creating interior spaces that thoughtfully center on the human experience? ■ Much can be done to add ornamentation or change a facade later on in the design phase -- or even be conducted during a long-overdue renovation. But surface features that matter only to people on the outside should come far behind the priority to make the building the best it can be for the needs of the people performing the functions inside of it -- not for the sake of the functions, but for the sake of the occupants. If that's done right, everything else should follow.
October 5, 2024
Liberate the language of money
Within a free-market economy, one tier of secular sainthood is reserved for those who liberate the language of money away from the financial and economic priesthood. Money itself isn't divine, but what it measures and the activity it facilitates makes all the difference between living in a modern, safe, and productive world -- or living in caves, feeling hungry, cold, and sick. ■ The problem we often face is that discussions of money -- even when it's a central point of public policy and decision-making -- are cloaked in the two things almost guaranteed to make ordinary people allergic: Jargon and math. ■ It doesn't really have to be this way; economic activity is as natural to any of us as rewarding a dog with a treat for performing a trick (a simple illustration of incentives) or watering a seedling and watching it grow (a fair metaphor for compounding interest). Most of what really matters could be conveyed to children in the form of bedtime stories -- and it probably should. ■ Waiting for adulthood doesn't help. People don't like learning anything that feels like a chore, and the money priesthood (that is, anyone who understands it well enough to obfuscate it for others and get paid to "figure it out") counts on that reluctance for its survival. ■ But the incentives create a feedback loop: The more the priesthood can complicate matters, the more intimidating it looks, and nobody has much incentive to de-complicate matters. What money is to be made in that? ■ Nor is this only the case for market economies. It applies to mixed and command economies, too -- perhaps even more so. The people of North Korea starve on average incomes of less than $2,000 a year, but the people who "command" their economy ride in limousines and look well-fed while their compatriots go hungry. ■ Ignorance concentrates power into the hands of those who know more than others. Sometimes they know better because they've learned more, and other times, they benefit from secrets. Dismantling mass-market ignorance of money would help to wrest power away from an undeserving priesthood.
October 6, 2024
There is no obvious way to make it profitable to a private-sector firm, but among the most valuable investments society could make in light of the artificial intelligence boom (and the perils, both known and unknown, that go with it) is to commit to a Manhattan Project-like effort to advance the science of psychology. Much of AI is purportedly built on the concepts of neural networks patterned on the human brain, yet we hardly know enough about the function of the brain to know how even to describe how neural networking even works. ■ Most arts and sciences seem to go through a similar series of development phases. It starts with the initial establishment of the discipline, usually under a founding theoretician or school (think Florence Nightingale and the modern practice of nursing). Then comes a juvenile stage, defined by the prominence of individual authors, often endorsing competitive theories (see, for instance, the economic rivalry between the schools of Hayek and Keynes). Then comes an adolescence, in which the second or third generation of experts starts to harmonize or unify the proven aspects of those early theories as new supplementary ideas blossom. Ultimately, most sciences arrive at a stage of maturity in which a fairly broad consensus prevails on the fundamentals and disagreements persist over the frontiers of the science. ■ Meteorology? A mature science. Economics? Probably somewhere in adolescence. AI? Still just a baby -- in which not only are most of the founders still alive, some (like Elon Musk and Sam Altman) are still actively feuding with each other. ■ Psychology still seems like it's in that juvenile phase -- there are still Jungians and Freudians and logotherapists and many other fragmented schools of thought. That fragmentation is on display in fields like business and education, which depend heavily on psychology, but still don't often confidently know what to do with it. ■ The real hazard for us could well become evident if AI science (which is well-funded and full of ambitious researchers with loads of incentives) matures faster than psychology. We have magnificent brains that are the products of millions of years of evolution, but computer processing is such that every human second is like years or even decades to a neural network. If we don't really know ourselves, how will we know where we stand in contrast with computers? ■ There's lots of talk about an AI "kill switch", as well there ought to be. But the ultimate kill switch is for us to know ourselves better than our tools know us. There's less monetary incentive driving toward that goal, and certainly less energy. It would do us well to rectify that gap.
October 10, 2024
When a candidate promises "Whatever tariffs are required: 100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent" on imported vehicles, it should be evident that the word "tariff" has taken on a purely tokenistic meaning. The effect is no longer about the actual effect of the taxes being imposed, but about the effort to use large-sounding numbers as an otherwise meaningless signal. ■ The European Union has slapped tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, and both the United States and Canada have already imposed 100% tariffs on those imports just this fall. ■ All parties involved seem intent on spinning the tariffs as moves to "protect" or "level the playing field for" their own domestic auto workers. But that's where tariffs run out of gas: We should always pivot to calling them "import taxes", because that's what they are. And as with any tax, the burden falls in some portion on both the buyer and the seller. ■ "Tariff" sounds like something that someone else pays, but the reality is that regardless of where the tax is actually collected, cutting the check isn't the same as paying the price. Honesty would require describing this motivation clearly: The countries imposing import taxes want their own domestic consumers to pay higher prices in the nominal interest of subsidizing work for their fellow citizens...assuming that the intended effect actually plays out. ■ That's a big assumption, of course. "Protection" from competition often does little more than leave a domestic industry soft and sluggish. See, for example, the weakness of the US auto industry in the 1970s, when names like Honda and Toyota started to come on the scene. Both of those Japanese companies are now enormous US domestic automakers, because they kept on improving and Americans kept demanding more. ■ There may be a very serious case to be made for blocking the importation of vehicles from China over security concerns; it has been widely noted that electric vehicle manufacturing is now as much about computers as it is about wheels. ■ But if Chinese-made electric vehicles are riddled with security risks (as well they might be), then import taxes are unlikely to be the solution -- especially if they're only meant to "protect" domestic industry. Trade policies motivated by security concerns should have clear security effects. Otherwise, it just looks like a reward for a small segment of workers getting preferential treatment at their fellow citizens' expense.
October 11, 2024
Awful people keep attacking the Internet Archive
Change your passwords; the bad guys are doing bad things
The people behind product development should always have some exposure to how their work actually performs in the real world. It is extremely hard, and perhaps impossible altogether, to build a great end product without first-hand exposure to how it is used in the field. ■ This observation can, of course, be taken too far: Plenty of firms have only ever put engineers and product developers on the fast track to management. That's not always the right decision; a well-integrated firm can make use of talent from many different departments. And management itself is a discipline, so even those who cross over from other disciplines need to learn how to be good managers if they want to thrive. ■ But it's also a huge mistake to divorce production from the customer experience. Google has filled a virtual graveyard with abandoned products, and the ruthlessness of its killing undoubtedly has some effect on whether customers trust them with future products. Salt water apparently can turn Teslas into fire-starters and Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions were kneecapped because people found Mark Zuckerberg's virtual avatar unsettling. ■ It's not for nothing that "We eat our own cooking" is a phrase intended to cultivate customer trust. Those who experience their own consequences may not be better-equipped to imagine great new possibilities than those for whom a product is more of an abstraction, but they are much better-positioned to experience the pain of their own errors and oversights and to be motivated to fix them.
The National Weather Service office in Des Moines uses high-resolution, real-time satellite imagery to pick out wildfires in their warning area. It's a stellar use of satellite imaging technology, and a great example of what can happen when science and technology open new doors to let curious human beings exercise their problem-solving instincts. ■ Obviously, nobody developed the GOES-16 satellite (or its siblings) for the direct purpose of looking for wildfires. It's first and foremost for looking at clouds. ■ But along the way, someone deduced that looking for fires was a possibility, and now we have a tool that can potentially help detect un-reported fires at least a little sooner. That, in turn, increases the odds that firefighters can be mobilized in time to keep field fires from growing out of control. ■ Fire detection from space is the kind of incremental technological improvement that is all too easy to take for granted. It doesn't affect most people, most of the time. But it's vastly improved over the grainy, low-resolution imagery that passed for weather satellite coverage in living memory. And when it's able to perform at its best, it can make a big difference for people on the ground.
In a real sign of the times, a media outlet tested the use of artificial intelligence to apply for jobs and found that modern job searching is conducive to that sort of automation. ■ One of the celebrated tools customizes cover letters to go along with the applications and resumes. It says something pretty dreadful if an applicant chooses to automate their cover letter, which is precisely the aspect of a job application that is supposed to put some personality and color into an otherwise highly routinized process. Automating the task of cover-letter writing achieves precisely the most perverse result. ■ Job applicants can be forgiven for trying to level the playing field against a job market that's already known to use AI technology to screen job applicants and even to conduct preliminary interviews. ■ But everyone involved must admit that there's something wrong with this picture. Human capital remains human above all, and although people are prone to many forms of lamentable bias, anything created by people -- whether intentionally programmed or "learned" artificially -- is likewise going to contain artifacts of that same bias. We're only kidding ourselves if we think we'll achieve better results for human beings by stripping all remaining elements of humanity from the process.
Good advice for re-framing problems
Dr. Mark Lewis, an oncologist from Utah with a sizeable social-media following, offers some tips for re-framing problems that have been helpful for him -- like disconnecting outcomes from self-worth and staying true to an internal yardstick of success rather than comparisons with others. They are well worth considering, particularly in the spirit of World Mental Health Day. They might well be the devices someone needs to hear today. ■ Different strategies work for different people. We are far from knowing the working of the mind well enough, categorically, to be able to treat people's mental wellness with the precision of, say, a prescription for eyeglasses. Improving on that frontier ought to be a high priority for society. ■ For many people, it would be a fair start to discern where they reside on a spectrum from "internal processor" to "external processor". It's often confused with introversion versus extroversion, but the two are not the same. An introvert may need to talk through problems, and an extrovert might feel compelled to think quietly in a space full of people. ■ Knowing which processing style prevails can help individuals work through those methods for framing problems with the best chance of success. An external processor, for example, might benefit from periodically writing out a list of stressors in order to take those problems out of the abstract mind and put them in a concrete, external place where they can be manipulated and contended with. ■ It may be easier for external processors to discern which problems call for a plan and which can be simply "let go", simply by putting them on a physical page. That technique might be utterly useless for an internal processor, who might find such a list jarring or aggravating as it intrudes on their interior thinking. ■ Contrasts like these tend to make a lot of pop psychology look ridiculous to at least half the audience at any given time. The "Plus-Minus-Interesting chart" may seem like a godsend to some and a total boat anchor to others, which is why anyone's list of hot tips has to come with either an implicit or (preferably) explicit list of contingent factors. Otherwise, a fair number of people may encounter that advice and come away either disappointed or frustrated. ■ There is no single path -- and certainly no shortcut -- to mental wellness and balance. But the path for each person needs to be constructed with some guidance towards self-awareness from the outset. Until we can diagnose a person's psychological makeup as reliably as we can test their cholesterol, there will remain a great deal of important work to do.
October 14, 2024
Big Ten football teams -- of which there are now considerably more than ten -- are having a rough time with the sheer expanse of the conference. They are now 3-10 when traveling across at least two time zones away for games. ■ In aviation, it's called crew resource management (CRM): The study of how human factors affect conditions within and among the team flying the airplane. CRM was originally just an innovation within the cockpit, opening up a pathway for junior officers to question their superiors. It has since evolved to include the full crew, which means flight attendants have a say in safety as well. ■ Human factors surely apply outside of aviation, too. It's not just about permitting subordinates to challenge the senior members of a team, it's also about recognizing that not everything can be boiled down to equipment or practice. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of whether the people involved are physically, emotionally, and psychologically up to a task. ■ On paper, a conference stretching from sea to shining sea may look impressive. It certainly has a monster of a reach on TV. But if the student-athletes are so wiped out by marathon travel schedules that away games start to look like give-away games, then maybe it will be time to take a cue from the teams flying the planes.
(Video) A flaming fuel tank rolls right past as a witness films an explosion at a Russian fuel depot
October 15, 2024
It has long been easy to pay lip service to the notion of non-violent resistance to injustice; nobody gets into trouble for praising figures like Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet it seems easy to overlook that the moral force of nonviolence depends upon an upstream condition: A sense of honor. ■ The honor of the resisters isn't what matters, but the honor of the audience -- the public at large. Gandhi and King both depended upon the expectation that the public would respond with revulsion to the sight of their protesters being punished, physically and brutally, for behaving blamelessly. ■ They assumed that even people who might have subscribed to a sense of racial superiority of their own would have subscribed even more to seeing themselves as being more decent than the brutality put on display by the authorities -- ostensibly in their name. For its political ends, the entire concept depends upon a common sense of respectability. ■ Respectability starts small. It doesn't emerge out of the ether in adulthood; it has to be inculcated in children in little ways (share, play fair, treat others how you want to be treated) and then reinforced all throughout a person's lifetime. Something is fundamentally broken among those who reject the importance of respectability. Every member of the public who recognizes what good came from the nonviolent resistance movements needs to recognize that an essential way to honor its past victories is to reject disreputable behavior by those who wish to be leaders in the present.
October 16, 2024
The Department of Justice is considering a breakup of Google, or so it appears from a filing related to antitrust action being pursued against the company. There's no escaping notice of Google's considerable influence within some Internet-related markets, like search engines, video delivery, and smartphone applications. And intervention may be called for, depending upon what uses the company may have made of its market power to inhibit the growth of competitors. ■ Corporate disassembly, though, should be very much a last resort. It is one thing to prevent the bolting-together of a monopolist; if all of Google's components were independent and equally powerful without combination, then putting them together after the fact would certainly deserve to raise scrutiny. ■ But if organic growth is largely the cause of Google's success, then breakup may actually prolong the behaviors that the Justice Department finds undesirable. For one thing, obvious rival buyers with pockets deep enough to buy the spun-off companies may be unwilling to risk facing antitrust suits of their own, rendering them artificially less willing to promote competition. ■ For another, the risk of breakup could entice Google/Alphabet as it exists now to maximize its profitability before time runs out. After all, so doing might be in the best short-term and mid-term interests of its shareholders, regardless of what the long term might bring. ■ Moreover, if the constituent companies within today's Google/Alphabet are broken apart, they may be incentivized to engage in increased risk-taking as standalone entities -- which could in turn lead to even more aggressive sales practices than any in which they might be engaged now. ■ Categorical changes often overtake monopolistic behaviors anyway. AI could supersede search. Google could already be breaking its own search quality by contaminating the results with AI input, and the mass production of junk content could poison search engines altogether. Even better ad services could deplete the market for Internet advertising, just as Internet advertising mortally disrupted newspaper classified advertising. ■ Modesty should be the guiding principle for would-be regulators and trust-busters. Many if not most of yesterday's behemoth names in business are shadows of their former selves -- General Motors, General Electric, AT&T, and Sears are all vastly different than what they once were. Google is almost certain to experience the same, and market and technological changes will do more for the cause than anything that the government is likely to achieve.
October 19, 2024
There was a time when a car that reached 100,000 miles was a thing to be celebrated. But at least for some manufacturers, 400,000 miles might be the new 100,000. And that's something pretty remarkable. ■ The average American driver averages about 13,500 miles a year. So 100,000 miles represents seven and a half years of average driving, but 400,000 miles equates to more than a quarter-century. And while it's doubtful that most people who have high-mileage cars are also low-mileage individual drivers, the point remains: Getting a lot of service out of the same car means a lot of time driving the same model. ■ Cars and trucks on American roads are now almost teenaged, on average. While we're likely to be turning over many of our consumer goods much more frequently than that -- smartphones and televisions, especially -- we're sticking with our cars longer than we're sticking with our homes. ■ Automakers would like more consumer churn, because sales volume is what drives revenues and, ultimately, earnings. But considering the enormous resource demands that go with automaking, long-lasting, reliable vehicles represent an under-appreciated victory for green thinking.
October 20, 2024
Every civilization defines itself at least somewhat through the customs and rules by which the people abide. Early on in the formation of the American culture as a unique identity, Benjamin Franklin offered this advice: "It is ill-manners to silence a fool, and cruelty to let him go on." ■ The tension between freedom of expression and the need to control for quality isn't an easy one. Internet culture in particular dictates that we often have no choice but to let any given fool go on. ■ A friend might pull the fool aside and tell them to shut up; on social media it is all too often the angry reply that keeps some people going. "Poasters", "reply guys", and common loudmouths who used to just spout off from the corner of a bar take advantage of the deeply addictive nature of our interactive tools to stoke reactions from the wise and foolish alike. ■ That all would be bad enough on its own, but it is worse when we are under relentless attack by agitation propagandists: People using the unmediated attention people pay to the zeitgeist in order to get them angry about all the wrong things in service of sinister ends. ■ It's become a cornerstone of malignant foreign influence campaigns targeting the United States, and there are plenty of domestic voices who behave badly for their own self-interest. Contrary to what Elon Musk thinks, silence is sometimes golden. ■ We might be inclined to think that the most American thing to do is to consider all free speech equally good -- not as a matter of law, but as a matter of culture. But if Ben Franklin is right, it's even more American to use the non-coercive tools at our disposal (influence, attention, and the "mute" buttons, for starters) to silence fools before they go on.
Twitter users are being made to train AI by default
Anyone who's ever had to submit to an institutional review for performing any test involving human subjects has got to look at this kind of behavior in some measure of disbelief.
Tropical weather is all about energy transfer
Three cheers for analysis that frames tropical cyclones in terms of "energy", since that's the root of what really matters. 2024 had a very mild peak-season Atlantic hurricane season, but a very energetic off-peak season.
A colorful conclusion to the growing season
Purple aster, goldenrod, and other plants native to Iowa can supply some color into the end of fall
October 22, 2024
Never before has more time been afforded for the contemplation of a rich inner life than what is available now to the mainstream American. ■ Compared with previous generations, we spend less time sick, less time doing oppressive chores, more time at leisure, more time educated and informed, and simply more time alive than at any time in history. It isn't even a close contest. ■ All of this should leave the average individual better-poised to appreciate the majesty and wonder of existence itself, better than anyone at least since the philosophers of ancient Greece. ■ Of course, that the time is available does not mean that all are interested in the pursuit. That is a part of freedom. Nobody is forced to examine life like Socrates. ■ But there is certain danger in ceding power, whether in the form of time or money or political influence, to anyone who declines to engage in that sort of contemplation. And there are many, who either wield power or who want to get it, for whom there is nothing important except that power in the here and now. ■ Just as the person conducting a meeting owes it to the other attendees to spend time and effort optimizing the quality of the time spent in the meeting, so too does anyone with power owe it to their subordinates to put real energy and consideration into questions of meaning and purpose. ■ This applies in the workplace, the clubhouse, the church, and the halls of elected power. If you aspire to make decisions for others, then you owe it to them to at least have some due consideration for what makes those decisions right or wrong. ■ A person without a well-considered inner life is still a person, of course, and entitled to all of the dignity that entails. But if it's obvious that a person never invests any time or effort into really struggling with big questions, then that person is unsuited to telling others where to go and what to do.
The high temperature in Iowa for the week of October 14th through 20th was 85°. The low was 17°.
(Video) KABC-TV in Los Angeles takes viewers on a walk from Dodger Stadium to the nearest subway station. It's a nearly half-hour hike, and the first-person camera view makes it perfectly clear that long stretches of the walk would violate a basic toddler test -- a reasonable person wouldn't feel safe walking side-by-side while holding hands with a well-behaved toddler. In many places, it can't even be physically done. That's a design choice, and it's a very bad one.
October 25, 2024
What made "The Americans" such compelling television (aside, of course, from strong writing and skilled acting) was the premise that, even during the height of the Cold War, you could have been living next door to a Soviet secret agent without even knowing it. Even the FBI counter-intelligence officer living across the street could be fooled. ■ It's a premise locked in time. The Cold War was a unique era in history, and the technological limitations of the day played a noteworthy supporting role in the show. The Soviet Union couldn't exactly take over one of the big three television networks, so the reach of their propaganda was limited and much of the spy technology was dedicated instead to sneaking intelligence across the border. ■ Today, everyone is potentially "next door" to Russian influence and disinformation operations every time we venture online. In a non-trivial joint statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and CISA, the American public has been warned that "Russian actors manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania [...] part of Moscow's broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans". ■ The problem now, when compared with the Cold War of the Reagan era, is that Russia's government today can devote its resources to doubling down on confirmation bias -- it doesn't have to convince anyone to become a Communist anymore. It serves the Kremlin's interests merely to have Americans fighting stupidly among ourselves, assuming the worst about our perceived opponents. And they can do it without even leaving home. ■ It matters quite a lot indeed whether we can disagree without being disagreeable, open ourselves to persuasion in light of new facts without falling for disinformation, and adhere strictly to the sanctity of the political process even if we dislike the ultimate outcomes. If all that matters to our geopolitical foes is that we remain contentious and in disarray, then it's far easier for them to stir trouble now than when they had to dispatch highly-trained spies from Moscow. ■ What matters now is how many real Americans are willing to believe the worst of their fellow Americans when impersonated by people hostile to America. Any number greater than zero is probably too many.
October 26, 2024
TSMC, the enormous Taiwanese manufacturer of computer chips, has cut off its shipments to a Chinese company that appears to have been funneling chips to Huawei. Huawei is the Chinese electronics manufacturer of dubious ownership: It claims to be employee-owned, but the State Department and other observers say it's controlled by the Communist Party. ■ TSMC operates in a fascinating domain: It might well be Taiwan's most important asset. But it's also expanding in Europe and the United States in a huge way. Their new plant in Arizona is reportedly even more productive than the mature plants in Taiwan.
The administrator of NASA wants someone to investigate Elon Musk and why he has been in personal contact with Vladimir Putin. Musk owns at least a plurality of shares in SpaceX and is thought to have overwhelming voting control of the company. ■ NASA has an obvious interest in the conduct and management of the company. If the controlling partner in the operation is having secret gab-fests with the president of a very large and frequently hostile country, that's something quite different from a pipefitter in Brooklyn calling his grandma in Irkutsk. And the Wall Street Journal reports that it's a matter of "regular contact" between the two since 2022. ■ Starlink, for instance, is a SpaceX subsidiary, and the availability of (and access to) Starlink is playing an important role in Ukraine's war to repel Russian invasion. ■ Americans have broad rights to engage in international business and to hold opinions on global matters. But US Code imposes serious penalties on those who insert themselves into foreign policy to the detriment of the country. Musk occupies such an extraordinary place in economic and technological life that it would be dereliction not to probe more fully what's going on.
Apple is about to update its software to permit certain versions of AirPods to act as over-the-counter hearing aids. The FDA started allowing over-the-counter sales of hearing aids two years ago, and this is the first time they've approved a non-dedicated device to act as a hearing aid using software. ■ We shouldn't underestimate just how useful steps like this can turn out to be. For example, the history of education for children who are deaf or hard of hearing is chock-full of very big struggles to obtain seemingly small accommodations. But today nothing would seem out of place about a teenager wearing AirPods -- and if this development makes the difference to some high-school freshman who might otherwise not be able to afford prescription hearing aids, or who might be self-conscious about wearing them, then it all accrues to the good. ■ All too often, the public perceives accommodations as things we do "for the handicapped". But the reality is that almost all accommodations end up helping some "normal" people all of the time, and almost all of the public some of the time. The same ramp that makes it easier for a paraplegic to get in and out of a building also helps the former marathoner with worn-out knees, as well as the kid who twisted her ankle playing soccer. ■ Likewise, closed captioning, which wasn't even introduced for live programming until 1982, was originally "for the hearing-impaired". But now it would seem out of place to see a TV without captioning activated in a crowded bar or another public place -- locations where even people with abnormally good hearing benefit from the accommodation. And captioning can help many children learn to read. ■ The arrival of hybrid earbuds and hearing aids may not seem like much, but it's exactly the sort of modest, incremental progress that ends up looking much more significant in the rear-view mirror than it looks in advance.
The US Navy is currently operating with two "strategic ends" on the books: "1) Readiness for the possibility of war with the People's Republic of China by 2027, and 2) Enhancing long-term advantage". It's not a secret plan: That's the published policy. And they've chosen 2027 as a target because that's what the Communist Party of China says is its target for surpassing us in war. ■ Here, though, is the deeply unsettling takeaway from the Navy's "Navigation Plan": "The PRC's defense industrial base is on a wartime footing, including the world's largest shipbuilding capacity now at the hands of the PLAN" [People's Liberation Army Navy]. ■ The United States, by contrast, has almost negligible active shipbuilding capacity and has turned away from shipbuilding as a strategic priority. We can change course, but that will require considerable investments in workforce development and production processes. ■ It would also require budgetary commitments from Congress. Big ones. For many years to come. At a time when preparatory investments aren't especially popular and huge deficits are already the norm ($1.8 trillion this fiscal year!). ■ This is a problem that some observers have seen coming for quite a while. And unless we take it seriously now, the amount of future catching-up to be required will only compound. ■ The world is very big and the oceans cover most of it. Spin the globe on Google Earth sometime and see how much of it can only be criss-crossed by long-distance aircraft or patrolled by a blue-water navy. In the absence of guaranteed world peace, stability, and liberalization for a century to come, America needs to maintain, preserve, and enhance the world's biggest navy. Circumstances don't offer us a viable alternative choice.
Would Greek food sell better in America if we knew how to pronounce "gyro"?
It's hard to say it without sounding like either a moron or a pretentious jerk. It might also matter that it's more fun to say "pizza" than "souvlaki".
October 27, 2024
Scientists document an invasive Burmese python in Florida eating a 77-lb. deer.
October 28, 2024
Expect less from your government
Epistemological modesty needs voters, too. Don't expect, ask, or want a government that does too much. Demand one that can't cause too much damage when it gets things wrong, because it will get things wrong. Humans are imperfect, and imperfect humans wielding great power can do a lot of harm.
Lightning: It's not just a bolt from the blue
A lovely illustration from NOAA illustrating the many different forms of lightning and related "transient luminous events"
October 29, 2024
The three models of news editorials
USA Today has joined the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post in announcing it will not publish an editorial endorsement for President in 2024. This has caused controversy, but what does the decision not to endorse actually mean? It depends on what the audience expects a newspaper editorial to represent. ■ In one model, the editorial reflects the reasoned opinion of a publication's editors on current newsworthy events, enlightened by the facts (presumably) reported in the same publication. In this model, the editorial is shaped by some basic underlying values of the publication, but the conclusion is rarely ever foregone -- if it were, an explanation of the editors' judgment would not be necessary and the editorial writing would only be a waste of space. ■ In a different model, the publication itself is institutionally committed to advancing a cause, and the form and shape of both the news content and the opinion content serve the cause. The conclusion of any piece of editorial writing can be reliably predicted in advance, because the nature of the cause is preordained. ■ Contemporary audiences seem to be increasingly fond of the latter model, preferring the comforts of their own confirmation bias to the frequent discomforts of being presented with novel arguments and subjects that require some new effort to understand. ■ There is a third model, though, emerging prominently in the 2024 general election. It is one that says "We will take no position on newsworthy events, either out of fear or aversion to accusations of bias. Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, has signed his name to an opinion piece saying just that: "What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it's the right one." ■ Bezos, in effect, says that he fears that publications have become institutionally unwell by subscribing to the second model. There is probably some truth to that diagnosis. But the cure is not to run into the arms of the third model, avoiding claims to an opinion altogether. ■ News coverage is always affected by constraints, and thus it always reflects some kind of editorial judgment: What news to cover, how to report it, what priority to give the coverage, when to break the news, even which journalists to assign the story. Ideally, an editor should want to optimize the quality and quantity of information available to make an informed judgment. ■ After all, news is anything that materially changes our understanding of the status quo. If the status quo has been disrupted, then good self-governing citizens need to think about the consequences, and news publications ought to be informing them well enough to make some kind of informed judgment. ■ A good test of whether they are doing so is to go back to the first model -- the one under which the conclusion isn't foregone -- and ask the editors to produce a reasoned opinion on the subject. If they cannot, either they haven't covered the news thoroughly enough, or they may lack the integrity to admit their motivations.
An almost perfect entry from "Art But Make It Sports"
There's no experience truly comparable to the launch of a large space rocket. The noise, the heat, and the rumble of thunder in the chest combine for an overwhelming sensation -- one that almost inescapably causes the witness to react reflexively.
October 30, 2024
While other newspapers have abstained from offering endorsements in the Presidential election, one local newspaper has gone on record with a fiery editorial: El Nuevo Dia, widely regarded as the newspaper of record in Puerto Rico. ■ Puerto Rico occupies a complicated place in American consciousness: Its residents are citizens, but the territory has no vote in Congress, and consequently, no vote in the Electoral College. As a territory, claimed along with Guam at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, it is held awkwardly at arm's length: Spanish-speaking but legally American, taxed but unable to leave or upgrade to statehood without the blessing of Congress, well-represented in the US Armed Forces but entitled to its own Olympic team. ■ Citizenship means that Puerto Ricans are just as free to move about the country as Kansans, Californians, or Kentuckians. That, in turn, means that El Nuevo Dia's fury at a repugnant joke at a political rally echoes and amplifies a sentiment that is likely being felt in other places. New York City, for instance, is home to 574,000 Puerto Ricans -- effectively the same as the entire population of Wyoming. ■ With a non-binding referendum on Puerto Rico's status on the ballot there, the territory could make more news than usual for the rest of the country on Election Night. Considering the lingering consequences of Hurricane Maria on the island and the evident ways in which its legal status appears to hold the island back, it should come as no surprise if the people there decide to assert their status and demand full respect as Americans in a vigorous way.
October 31, 2024
Few things are both awful enough and plausible enough that they should keep anyone up at night. But the non-trivial probability that someone will terrorize a large gathering of Americans using weaponized drone aircraft should be very, very high on that list.
November 1, 2024
Whether it takes place on Halloween proper, on the Saturday before Halloween, or on Beggars' Night, the annual practice of children's trick-or-treating is one of our best secular rituals. Neighbors share treats with young people and children get to spread a little joy. It's all quite wholesome and a good reminder just before Election Day that we all have to live within our communities no matter who wins office. ■ Even though the ritual looks a little like a sugar-welfare program (except in special places like Des Moines, where children are expected to earn their candy with bad joke-telling), it can actually be a wonderful lesson in capitalism. ■ On the first round of trick-or-treating, kids don't have a lot of say in what they get: It's simply whatever the neighbors choose to give away. But the economics lesson comes when the bags and buckets are overturned and kids start to compare what they hauled home. Then the great bartering period begins, as one child trades whatever they can in exchange for more chocolate, while another trades to maximize fruity candies. One might be willing to give away their Almond Joy bars, while another might treat Reese's Peanut Butter Cups like gold. ■ Subtly, the Halloween candy exchange teaches kids that different people place different values on the same things. Not only that, they learn that trading with others (when there's no coercion involved) leaves everyone better off than when they started. They might even pick up the clues that things work even more smoothly when people start to put prices on things they want -- three miniature Snickers bars for one bag of Skittles, perhaps? ■ Nobody has to be hit over the head with a lesson in market economics while they're enjoying a momentary sugar rush. But the exchanges often linger for a few days after the treats have been collected, as kids go to school and soccer practice and Cub Scout meetings where they continue to trade loot with one another. And it can't hurt for parents to gently help their little ghosts and goblins recognize the virtue in a little bit of free trade, even if it's only spilled across the kitchen table.
November 2, 2024
In 1922, Ireland was in the midst of liberating itself from British colonial rule. The Irish Free State had established independence from the UK on paper, but a civil war was still to take a year and hundreds of lives before a true state could be recognized. ■ One of the harshest aspects to the civil war was that it pitted two groups who effectively wanted the same thing (a free Irish republic) against one another -- because some thought an incomplete freedom from the UK was the most that could be achieved at the time, while others opposed the treaty on the grounds of its incompleteness. The resulting violence didn't hasten Ireland's freedom, but it did scar the nation. ■ Of those instigating the violence, the youthful general and political leader Michael Collins wrote, "Worst of all, their action has been a crime against the nation in this -- that the anarchy and ruin they were bringing about was undermining the confidence of the nation in itself. So far as it succeeded it was proving that our enemies were right, that we were incapable of self-government. When left to ourselves in freedom we could show nothing of the native civilization we had claimed as our own." ■ Collins himself would be assassinated in the fighting, his life cut far short. Born in 1890, Collins easily should have lived to see the Republic of Ireland Act enter full force in 1949. ■ But that is what interior political violence does: It deprives some individuals from seeing the fruits of their struggles, while, in Collins's words, "undermining the confidence of the nation". A war for independence or to overthrow an autocrat is one matter; sometimes, the only thing an oppressive regime will recognize is violence. Among a people, though, differences have to be settled -- always imperfectly -- through votes, debates, lawmaking, and consent.
Imagine a common EU nuclear deterrent: Think of the academic papers! "Ambiguous Ambiguity: The Strategic Posture of an Unconstrained Monte Carlo Simulation"
November 3, 2024
Who's got the plan to shoot down evil drones?
One of the things that should land near the top of any list of problems that should keep thoughtful public leaders awake at night is the risk that someone is going to weaponize a remotely-piloted aircraft and use it to cause harm to a large gathering of people. Hampering efforts in this regard appears to be a dreadfully murky legal framework that doesn't appear to shed any of the much-needed light on who bears responsibility or authority to do anything about it. ■ The vast majority of drone applications are harmless or even helpful. But the lack of a framework for deciding how to do things like protecting large gatherings with some kind of anti-aerial defense is an unconscionable omission. A thing that is 99.999% good but that happens a million times still needs some kind of framework for addressing the bad. ■ This is one of the problems that emerges from letting our political debates be driven by individuals who are chronically dishonest, self-absorbed, and prone to fabulism. The more we let crazy talk set the agenda and crowd out real policy discussions, the more we hobble ourselves from preparing for the problems of the future. ■ Our problems don't get easier to solve just because we ignore them, nor because crazy talk gains more click traffic than sober debates. Making politics into a form of entertainment is an act of civic self-harm. ■ We have lunatics reviving long-debunked conspiracy theories about fluoride in drinking water instead of serious proposals to keep people safe from a threat like drone attack -- a threat that is obviously already serious (see how Russia has been using them to assault Ukraine) and utterly certain to become even more hazardous with time. There is a real cost to letting carelessness and unseriousness prevail in politics -- unfortunately, it's not always obvious what that cost is until it's too late.
China swaps crews at its space station
As part of its pursuit of a Moon base -- and probably quite a few other ambitions in space -- China has launched three astronauts into orbit to staff the country's space station. The launch was an impressive sight -- witness the reflexive grin on the face of the correspondent from The Australian in his video report from the launch. The noise, heat, and chest-rattling rumble of a large rocket launch are an incomparable sensation. But beyond any one launch, the direction of any national space program tells a lot about the country's ambitions.
Nigeria's death penalty threatens kids
CNN reports that 29 children, ages 14 to 17, could face the country's death penalty for participating in a protest over economic hardship. Nigeria should get more attention than it already does from America's news media, if for no other reason than that it is a country of 236 million people, making it the 6th largest in the world. When a country that large is experiencing a 30% inflation rate, it's a situation of increasing hardship on a very large scale. To put children in the potential peril of a death sentence over political protest is both newsworthy and morally unconscionable. AAnd while the treatment of those particular minors is a matter for serious legal protection, the conditions that lead to a per-capita GDP of $1,600 a year merit tough scrutiny from those who know anything about economics. That kind of poverty on that kind of scale is injurious to so much human welfare that fixing it ought to be both a national and an international priority.
A 550' tall building in Manhattan has no windows except for some glass panels at its entrance. This architectural curiosity began as an AT&T switching center, and has evolved into a role in other telecommunications-related duties since then. While it stands out for its height, the alert observer will note that there are windowless buildings in almost all cities of any size -- generally on the periphery of the downtown core. That's what the land-line phone system once required (and to some extent still does). In mid-major cities like Omaha, they're usually as close as possible to downtown without being close to any high-rent features like the local waterfront. In small towns like Stuart, they're usually a block or two away from the town square or Main Street. For those who travel to new places with some regularity, finding the old telephone building can be a fun puzzle to solve, since they're usually found near the most interesting parts of a town anyway.
November 4, 2024
The allegation that the Kremlin attempted to sabotage airplanes traveling between Europe and the United States is morally shocking. Yet it can scarcely be called "surprising", considering the barbaric way it has made war on Ukraine and the lengths to which it has gone to use asymmetrical means to achieve its ends, in part by threatening Ukraine's friends and allies. ■ By any rational assessment, Russia should have long ago become a productive and peaceful member of the fraternity of nations. It has enormous natural wealth and a historical reputation of scientific achievement, both of which ought to have positioned it well to benefit from trade and peaceful cooperation. ■ But instead, its government has acted not just with beligerence but with reckless, callous hostility to human welfare. And yet there are dupes, tools, and willing agents of that evil who applaud what they choose to see and defend what they should not. ■ There is nothing laudable or admirable about a government that relentlessly terrorizes its neighbors. There is nothing defensible about a regime that literally tries to set fire to global trade. There is nothing friendly or agreeable about a nation that tries to stoke violence to undermine democracy. It's evil. And anyone who seeks power by promising to give in to those tactics should be kept far away from authority in any country that wants to remain free.
Democracy's pump-up theme song
(Video) "Right Here, Right Now", by Jesus Jones. It's the right choice.
November 5, 2024
Vote like your great-great-grandma is watching
You don't have to vote like her -- she might have had some pretty bad opinions. But vote like she's watching over your shoulder, and in a way that ought to make her proud. A great-great-grandmother is sufficiently far removed from the present generation that most of us never knew our own. But it's also close enough that she probably loved someone who loved you. There are exceptions, of course, but few things are more generally true than that it is hard to exceed the love of a mother for her child. It's also true that a matrilineal chain is the one genetic bond that can't be faked: A mother knows with absolute certainty whether she gave birth to her own child. So your (matrilineal) great-great-grandmother almost assuredly cared at least a little bit about the world you would occupy, even if she never knew you.
November 8, 2024
The case of the female Iranian university student who defied both policy and policing by walking around in public in her underwear should draw the world's attention for at least two reasons. ■ The first is the case itself and what it says directly about the appalling condition of women's rights in Iran (though certainly elsewhere, too). That dress codes can lead to de facto death penalties anywhere should be an outrage. But in a country of nearly 90 million people, it represents malignant repression on a vast scale. "Woman, Life, Freedom" hasn't gotten its due hearing yet. ■ The second reason is how it serves as a vivid reminder that there is nothing magically truthful about "official" statements. Officially, the protester -- named in some reports as Ahoo Daryaei -- was taken to a "medical center" for treatment of "severe stress". Nobody should take that official statement at face value. ■ Taken too far, skepticism risks stumbling into cynicism or even nihilism. Those are dangers to be avoided. But failing to apply certain tests of reasonable doubt to the official pronouncements of any government leaves the audience open to manipulation. ■ No one should accept the claim at face value that Iran's government cares about the welfare of this individual student, neither in light of current law nor of the government's past behavior. Official channels can be abused, in governments both free and anti-free, especially because the ability to define truth is itself a valuable power. We should take care to witness what happens to the protester herself for her well-being, but we should also take care for our own sakes to remember that "official" and "true" should never be assumed to be synonyms.
The Ukrainian embassy to the United States asks for "Strengthened air defense, the ability to destroy Russian military aircraft & permission for Ukraine to carry out long-range strikes against legitimate military targets in Russia"
November 9, 2024
"Neutral" isn't synonymous with "good"
"Neutrality" is a word often loaded with positive connotations. It conjures up the image of Switzerland, whose deliberate policy of neutrality makes it appear to be above the lowly act of "choosing sides". ■ This is, of course, an incomplete view of things -- "neutrality" made Switzerland and its banks a hotbed of money laundering for evil during World War II. It may be to Switzerland's defensive advantage to take no sides in war, but it corrupts the soul to believe that neutrality in the face of evil is a moral good. ■ Vladimir Putin has adopted an even more sinister definition of neutrality which he wishes to apply to Ukraine, saying, "If there is no neutrality, it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good-neighborly relations between Russia and Ukraine". ■ The world shouldn't be even remotely fooled: In this context, he plainly means "neutrality" to mean "involuntary neutralization". Submission to the will of an aggressor. Incapacity to act defensively. Not just harmless, but helpless. ■ No one should expect Ukraine to submit to a policy like that. It is a throwback to the Soviet-era notion of spheres of influence, when big powers used their neighbors as buffers, as though the world were a giant board game of Risk. ■ Ukraine deserves to choose its own future, its own alliances, and its own way of life. The Ukrainian people will have no more peace if they have been involuntarily neutralized by a violent neighbor than if they were to remain openly at war. "Neutral" isn't a synonym for "good".
Despite what fatuous and gullible talking heads tell themselves, John Adams was never a party leader in the Senate. Actual history is almost invariably more interesting than the fairy tales and fever dreams people tell themselves, but it's really easy for the ignorant to convince themselves that fiction is fact.
November 10, 2024
People in at least six states received racist text messages following the election, suggesting that they were being taken to "plantations". The stunt is not funny, nor clever, nor even remotely tolerable. ■ But it's also probably not domestic, either. The language of the text messages sounds like the kind of thing a person with a 19th-Century understanding of the United States might write if they hadn't ever been to the country. Even the stupidest American knows there aren't any working plantations. ■ It also appears to have been conducted at scale, meaning that the messages had to have been sent at a cost of some resources. Bulk text messages aren't really that expensive, but they aren't free, either. ■ Moreover, it seems evident that the messages were racially targeted, which suggests that the perpetrators used a database that contained profiles containing names, telephone numbers, and racial identity information. This is the kind of information exposed during large-scale data breaches. ■ The messages have been traced to a VPN operation in Poland, which could make it difficult if not impossible to hunt down the original perpetrators. It fits a pattern of general mayhem and discord that is consistent with what a malicious foreign government might try to do. If that is the case, this incident is probably a pretty nasty harbinger of what more is to come.
Until January 19, 2025, Joe Biden still has the option to turn Kamala Harris into the first female President. Food for thought.
November 11, 2024
A misleading figure is often circulated on Veterans Day: The estimate that American military veterans take their own lives at a rate of 22 per day. While that figure has had a mobilizing effect on certain resources, it may also be misleading in its apparent precision. ■ Regardless of the actual number, society certainly has a common interest in reducing it to as few as possible. And the particular way in which we furnish health care for servicemembers and veterans alike presents an opportunity. ■ There is an obvious intersection between mental health care and suicide prevention. But even though we have population-level care for things like infectious-disease prevention, we have only made limited progress has ever been made in supplying population-level care for mental wellness. ■ That presents an opportunity, were we to grasp it: The Department of Veterans Affairs has a unique level of reach through which to address mental wellness care at a population-level scale. ■ To do that well, though, we need policy-makers to commit resources towards that kind of research not as an effort to "solve" a particular problem affecting veterans, but rather as a way to address mental wellness as part of a holistic approach to human health generally. The veteran population doesn't look exactly like the public at large, but it's coming closer in several significant ways. ■ As it does so, we have the opportunity to make progress on those population-level efforts not by treating veterans as an intrinsically "broken" population needing to be "fixed", but as an increasingly representative fraction of the general population needing (and deserving) mental-wellness care in much the same way as the population at large. Just as it improved society for the military to lead the vanguard of racial integration (imperfectly, but significantly), so too would it improve society for the same population to help lead a more holistic approach to treating the brain as an essential part of the body.
November 12, 2024
The demographic shadow looming over colleges
The good news for Iowa's three state universities is that enrollment has held mainly steady in the face of some meaningful headwinds. But the bad news for them is that total in-state enrollment is down from a decade ago, and the broader demographic trends indicate that high schools are going to graduate fewer prospective college freshmen for a while to come. ■ Iowa has three state schools: A land-grant university (Iowa State), a public research school (Iowa), and a comprehensive university (Northern Iowa). It's a compact arrangement by comparison with some states that have far more institutions. But it's still hard to keep the budgets balanced without attracting out-of-state tuition dollars. ■ What makes a university system worth subsidizing is the return on the public's investment -- though never strictly in terms of dollars. A university can (and should) generate real cultural, civic, and economic returns to the community that funds it. And even though those can be difficult to measure well (if even at all), there has to be a relentless pursuit of both incremental improvement and substantial innovation in everything the institution does. ■ That's a lot to ask, but it's also a fair expectation, considering that a majority of American adults do not hold four-year degrees, yet their taxes subsidize the effort. That investment has to come back in more than just some athletic rivalries. It's imperative that college leaders recognize those needs sooner rather than later; if the demographic drop-off turns out to be as real as expected (and as the population pyramid makes real in black and white), they won't want to be caught flat-footed trying to explain why they need continued support as enrollment drops.
Nebraska homeowner dies with 40 bombs in the basement
They were not live munitions any longer, but they were WWII-era bombs that required a state patrol bomb squad and the National Guard's explosive-ordnanace team to check out. Folks, if you're going to indulge in some kind of weird collecting obsession, maybe tell the people you love some of the details about it before you die, OK?
(Video) A public service announcement telling Irish voters how to make sure they're registered to vote comes across so friendly, it might as well be a tourism video
November 13, 2024
The naming of a new slate of Cabinet secretaries is one of the strangest of all league draft events: There's only one team on the field, and the players can be chosen for reasons ranging from proven past performance to growth potential to naked patronage. The team has precious little time to prepare before hitting the field of play, and each of those main players must immediately turn around and recruit their own team of assistants and deputies. ■ America has endured some pretty awful picks: Ulysses S Grant had a notoriously corrupt Cabinet, and Warren Harding's administration contained some downright filthy characters. At least one person rose to Vice President while flirting with outright Communist sympathies and Richard Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was forced to resign over tax and other charges. And let us not overlook the villainy of VP Aaron Burr. ■ All of which is to say that the biggest mistake when assessing an incoming Cabinet is to assume that the nation has never seen anything like them before. History begs to be our guide -- both for Presidents as they make their choices, Senators as they pass judgment on qualifications through advice and consent, and the loyal opposition as they seek to impose accountability. ■ Calvin Coolidge, who assumed the Presidency upon Harding's death and had to disentangle some of the mess behind, wrote in his autobiography, "When a man has invested his personal interest and reputation in the conduct of a public office, if he goes wrong it will not be because of former relations, but because he is a bad man [...] What we need in appointive positions is men of knowledge and experience who have sufficient character to resist temptations." Whoever finds their way into office, whether of good character or not, it only makes sense for us to bear Coolidge's advice in mind. Very few human behaviors are ever as new as we imagine them; the specific conditions may vary, but human nature is almost never new.
November 14, 2024
When in doubt, consult Silent Cal
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence ... The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." - Calvin Coolidge
November 15, 2024
A Chicago man, who long felt conflicted about the family in which he was raised, was able to uncover that he had been adopted as a child. And upon some genetic investigation, he discovered that his birth mother not only lived nearby -- she was the proprietor of a small bakery he frequented often enough that the owner (his birth mother) already knew him by name. Reunited with her now, the son is taking over the bakery's operations from his mother as she commences her retirement. ■ It's hard to imagine a story that could better distill the human urge to belong: Vamarr Hunter only went looking for his birth mother after succumbing to a feeling that he didn't rightly belong to the family he had known for his first 35 years. Then, upon discovering his genetic connection to someone with whom he already had a friendship, he changed his entire career path to fit in. ■ There's a reason that rituals like school homecomings and family reunions and retirement parties are so durable: They confirm that urge to belong and reinforce the binding ties among our different tribes. ■ With the exception of some extremely rare types who truly are confirmed loners, most people want to belong so instinctively and so strongly that we pick multiple identities -- around our schools, our workplaces, our faith traditions, our families, our citizenship, our interests, and even our entertainment choices. Swifties and Deadheads alike are not to be dismissed. ■ Smart people seeking to triumph over the challenges that confront humanity ought to take belonging into account, in many cases much more seriously than has often been the case in the past. It can rarely be forced artificially (see the common resentment of any number of "team-building" exercises in the workplace), but to be durable it has to grow out of something more than just a cult of personality. Personalities retire, fade away, and ultimately die. Belonging is an act that begins among people -- as few as just a mother and child. But there are few forces more powerful than the urge to be one of those who belong.
November 16, 2024
Trade policy commentator Simon Lester offers the observation, "As economic competition with China heats up, it's worth remembering that in the late 1980s/early 1990s, people were writing books with titles like 'Trading Places: How we are giving our future to Japan and how to reclaim it'". That seems like a text from an era long ago and far away, but the copyright date is only 1989 -- making the text younger than the median American. ■ Japan was on a hot streak in the 1980s, but it never overtook the United States. That doesn't mean it didn't still end up quite rich: Japan has the world's fifth-largest economy today and a wealthy per-capita GDP. But it also still feels the effects of an interventionist industrial policy based upon the government imposing a scarcity mentality on the private sector. ■ In other words, Japan was on the rise, but it wasn't on an inevitable path to overtaking the United States. And a major contributing factor was (and remains) that the United States benefits from being an unplanned economy. We don't win because brilliant people are in charge; we win because nobody is in charge. Despite the way people wildly overestimate the power of the President to "manage the economy", often at the encouragement of those very Presidents who want to take credit for work they didn't really do, the lack of any real centralized control is both the secret ingredient and the secret recipe. It is both the "what" and the "why". ■ The United States is clearly in an economic rivalry with China, as well as a rivalry for other forms of power and influence. Nothing is certain about the outcomes, but there is a very safe way to forecast the future: Always bet on the side in a competition that is most genuinely open to new ideas, new people, and new partnerships. The freedom to fail (or to simply be wrong without catastrophic consequences) pays huge dividends. ■ On that basis, the people of the United States need to know what's best for ourselves: The maximum possible freedom of movement for goods, people, money, and ideas. On that same account, China's government is actively choosing to hobble itself: Consider the stealth required merely for people to discuss academic ideas freely. ■ Ideas don't move freely across a Great Firewall. Nor are people free to move about when arbitrary and capricious punishment looms over anyone trying to do business inside their borders. Just moving goods isn't enough. ■ The only way for America to lose our place in such a competition is to surrender the advantages that ought to come most easily to us. Let people make choices, leave them free, welcome new arrivals, think liberally (like John Stuart Mill), and make lots of room for failure. That's how to win.
November 17, 2024
A change to the terms of service on the platform formerly known as Twitter has taken effect, granting the company permission (in its words) to "analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models", a permission not explicitly discussed in the previous edition of the terms. ■ That change is roughly coincidental with the results of a Presidential election in which X/Twitter's owner has played a prominent and possibly manipulative role, and the unpopularity of the recent activity has triggered a significant exodus from X/Twitter to competing platform Bluesky. It's unlikely that anyone will successfully tease out how much of the exodus is due to the behavior and how much is due to the policy change, but both are certainly contributory. ■ Content-scraping of any platform in order to train artificial intelligence is sketchy behavior at best. It's already been done by lots of rivals in the artificial intelligence marketplace -- X/Twitter is merely one among several. But it does have a captive data set, which makes the AI training seem particularly targeted at the incumbent users. ■ We've never grappled before with what happens when the whole world has equal access to the same publishing platforms. There was a time not long ago when everyone knew who had published copyright-protected content and who had not: If you didn't have a book on the shelf of a library or a published article in a newspaper or a magazine, then your thoughts hadn't really reached a domain that ever would have been accessible to use for training. ■ The instinct to object to having one's content used to train someone else's computer model is understandable. But there's an uncomfortable inversion to the problem: If all people of goodwill withdraw their ideas from the data sets, then what's left behind will only be a concentrated collection of the bad. What would a library be if John Stuart Mill was omitted while Karl Marx remained? ■ It's a terrible Catch-22. Opting in (to allowing one's content to be used for AI training) means implicitly rewarding bad behavior. Opting out means that what's left behind has a higher concentration of the bad. And it's become evident that artificial intelligence tools are here to stay. ■ Thus what we have is like an inverted tragedy of the commons: What matters to artificial intelligence is not how much of it is "consumed" (since the whole point is that it is an effectively inexhaustible source of output), but how much it can draw from raw inputs that are, on balance, good for society. That those inputs are intermediated by actors who may themselves be of dubious character makes the whole matter even more complicated. It is a complex dynamic without an easy solution.
November 18, 2024
Scholarly research points to a contagion effect that goes along with incivility in the workplace. While social virality seems to explain some things, and certain social conditions may be raising some tempers, it also seems increasingly evident that lots of people were raised with a bunch of negative rules against which they feel like rebelling as adults, rather than being raised with positive or aspirational rules that give them guides for growth. ■ Negative rules, like "Don't talk back", are quick and easy for an adult to dispense. See the undesirable behavior, then issue an edict against it. Not much thought required. ■ Affirmative rules, like "Speak to others like you want them to speak to you", are usually a little harder to concoct. Usually not much more than the time required to take a single deep breath, but often more than frazzled adults want to take. ■ While negative rules are sometimes necessary, especially in a pinch ("Don't touch that hot stove!"), they're harder to follow. They are literally more challenging to process cognitively. They set up constraints, and it's hard for even adult minds to know where all of those different boundaries lie: In the words of Warren Buffett, "If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you're going to get a ticket." ■ Aspirational or affirmative rules are harder for the rule-maker to concoct, but much easier to follow because they offer a pathway for the curious young mind. "Don't make a mess" puts the burden on the child to know what qualifies as a mess and what to do about it. The affirmative alternative is simply, "Clean up after yourself", which gives them a behavior to adopt rather than a punishment to avoid. Affirmative rule-making helps to structure a growth mindset in the developing young brain: One can strive towards greater compliance with a positive goal, while a negative boundary can only be violated. ■ Too many people act as though defiance is their dominant personality characteristic. As they get older and have more resources and power at their disposal, the damage their defiance can do increases as well. It's an anti-social feedback loop, the seeds of which were often sown decades before.
November 19, 2024
What was the point of taking Hong Kong?
The lead sentence from the BBC says in a flat tone, "A Hong Kong court has sentenced key pro-democracy leaders to years in jail for subversion". But the real story should be said something like this: "A Chinese court has used a 2019 law imposed by the central government to send 45 pro-democracy leaders from Hong Kong to prison for 4 to 10 years each". ■ The way the Communist Party treats Hong Kong, it is a wonder that it ever fought to take the territory in the first place. Promises of "One country, two systems" have been viciously jettisoned (in a way that ought to be particularly alarming to anyone who fears an involuntary annexation of Taiwan).
Threads drops a huge early lead
Despite starting with the backing of Facebook (and its enormous reach to potential members), Threads has been overtaken by Bluesky in the number of active daily users in the United States. And it's happened thanks to Bluesky basically tripling its active user base in three weeks. It's never enough just to have a head start.
Sabotaged cables in the Baltic Sea
Germany's defense minister says two telecommunications cables were cut in the Baltic Sea -- one between Germany and Finland, and one between Lithuania and Sweden. And he says it wasn't an accident. This is a story that tests how much attention the world is capable of paying to hybrid or gray-zone hostilities: Activity that doesn't quite meet the standard to be called warfare, but far more belligerent than not. ■ Finland, officially, is "not jumping to conclusions yet", but the reality is that two like incidents of such a scale happening in close succession hardly looks like the mere impact of chance. And it isn't hard to guess which country with a presence in the Baltic region might be interested in harassing the neighbors. ■ There's a fundamental asymmetry to this kind of behavior: It's almost always vastly cheaper to cause damage than to repair it. And for the malicious actor who manages to cause the problems while remaining just barely cloaked enough to avoid outright attribution, it can be an efficient way to introduce a little bit of mayhem to its rivals. Not enough to merit a full-blown counter-response, but enough to cause something between nuisance and real pain: Death by a thousand papercuts. ■ Fundamentally, that's how reasonable people can recognize which side is closer to right in any kind of rivalry: The side that behaves more constructively, working towards commonly-agreed rules and norms, aiding more than it tears down, is probably the one on the side of right. But that doesn't preclude showing firmness in addition to being right. Someone caused the damage in the Baltic Sea, and consequences ought to follow. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, "Pardoning the bad, is injuring the good."
Fraud comes hard for older Americans
The Federal Trade Commission has released a report estimating that older Americans may have been scammed for as much as $61 billion in 2023, including 4,600 who were taken for $100,00 or more.
November 20, 2024
Who manages the UK's national newspapers?
A gallery of the editors-in-chief at Britain's eighteen "national" newspapers highlights the huge difference between the apparent influence of Britain's papers and what remains of those in America. The US doesn't even have a half-dozen papers that even aspire to be considered "national" in nature: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Times, and (maybe) the Washington Post. ■ The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune both contracted their aspirations long ago, and further down the metro population rankings, they don't grow any more ambitious: The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, and Arizona Republic don't look much beyond their own turf for influence. By contrast with the UK's eighteen "national" publications, the #18 newspaper in the US circulates to fewer than 50,000 print subscribers. ■ Britain's much greater population density probably gave it a lot more of a natural market for a newspaper-heavy culture: Back when newspapers had to be delivered by hand, having nearly ten times as many people per square mile was certainly an advantage. But now that daily publications can be delivered digitally, it's remarkable that America's incumbent newspaper institutions haven't tried harder to stake out more significant influence beyond their physical turf. ■ Even the New York Times, which shamelessly appeals to its readers' high sense of self-regard, now reaches more people through its games than its news content. Why aren't there more efforts to appeal to psychographic identity, particularly now that so much news is already homogenized nationally? ■ We can look to a lot of reasons why it may be outdated to even constrain ourselves to an examination of "newspapers", per se, but the fact remains that newsgathering and editorial operations that have in many cases been around for more than 100 years offer at least some kind of institutional memory and ought to at least try to distinguish themselves in recognizable ways. Perhaps paradoxically, blanket criticisms of "the media" might find a little more resistance if individual outlets retained more distinctive personalities. ■ "Personality" in an editorial outlet doesn't have to mean "political identity" any more than it does for a human being; in fact, both individuals and newspapers are generally better off when politics are far down the list of identifying characteristics. A publication can stand out for its writing style, its heroes, its features, its special beats, its witty commentary, its peculiar hobby horses, its imagined audiences, its imaginary friends, or the unusual things that interest its writers. All of those things should easily make a market for at least two dozen recognizable "national" outlets in the United States, by virtue of our enormous size alone.
Justice Department wants a judge to break up Google
The department wants Google to be forced to spin off the Chrome browser and stop giving preference to its own search engine within the Android operating system
Boeing layoffs are a bad economic signal
The company is planning a 10% cut to its workforce -- a large number on its own, but also clearly worth wider attention: Aircraft sales make up a lot of the US export market.
November 23, 2024
It has been noted for some time and by different surveys that Americans who regularly attend religious services have the highest rate of good feelings about Sundays, and rate Sundays the best day of the week. Theologians might point to the specifics of theology as the source of those good feelings, and they might be right; by nature, their claims are difficult if not impossible to falsify. ■ But it's also fair to consider that it may be enough simply that Sundays represent, for many, a day of voluntary belonging. Bonding between people happens mainly through the sharing of experience -- especially constructive experiences, though those constructive bonds can help to form a social glue for living through painful experiences, too. ■ With regular religious attendance on the decline in the United States, perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities in our history is that Benjamin Franklin never got around to founding the quasi-religious movement he described in his autobiography as a "bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection". ■ Franklin effectively described a project to drive people towards moral improvement through self-examination and cooperation, but his "Society of the Free and Easy" never took permanent form. The name may have been clunky, but the idea probably had merit. ■ An enormous number of Americans have adopted "spiritual but not religious" as a substitute for established theology and the need for moral self-improvement has never dissipated. People will always seek those answers, and they will always gravitate towards places of belonging. Franklin was probably on to something well over 200 years ago when he wrote that there should be a distinctly American creed professing that "the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man." The question is where people gather to celebrate it, and if they're free to do it on Sunday mornings.
November 24, 2024
The City of Waterloo, Iowa, (metro population 168,000) has agreed to furnish millions of dollars to demolish and redevelop the Crossroads Mall. The whole project is budgeted at $87 million. It was once a significant retail center, but is down to a dozen or two employees in the entire facility. ■ Shopping malls once had their heyday because they delivered variety, availability, and proximity, all in a climate-controlled package. The model made sense until online shopping managed to provide more variety and nearly the same availability -- what the shopper sacrifices in having to wait for a next-day delivery, they gain in not having to look for a parking spot. And an online store is always at least as proximate as the nearest mall. ■ The malls that manage to survive much longer will do so because they offer something social or cultural that goes farther than a good layaway program. Some retail destinations are a little like Disney World and others are places to be seen consuming conspicuously. Many of them will go on. ■ But a lot of others will have to be replaced. Leaving them to die and turn into ghosts isn't much of a plan, especially for those places where a mall that once depended on anchor stores itself becomes a boat anchor dragging down the real estate around it. ■ America doesn't have much of a track record of developing high-quality centers for civic activity and social life; reimagining our many dead and dying malls as lively public spaces in the spirit of European opera houses with attractive community-building features may be a necessary way forward, at least for some.
November 27, 2024
A small town in Kentucky has voted to disband itself. By a slim margin, a tax revolt has overturned the status quo. ■ Then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a lot of hassle for saying, "Corporations are people" during a speech in 2011. If he'd only said, "Corporations are made up of people", then his point would have been clearer -- and irrefutable. Corporations are indeed very little without the people who form them. ■ It's no small matter that cities are corporations, and thus they are, in turn, largely made up of the people who live within them. Had Romney said something like, "Cities are people", then it's likely that many of his detractors would have charitably welcomed him making the point. ■ As corporations, cities exist mainly to offer economies of scale in delivering important services: Police, fire, rescue, water, streets, sewers, drainage, and parks. Some offer their own utility services, some manage the local schools, and some even run opera houses and run television stations. But the main purpose of the city as a legal entity is to take care of a lot of necessary chores in order to make it easier for settlements of people to live together in clean, safe, and economical ways. ■ Obliterating a city government doesn't obliterate the needs managed by the city. It just makes them harder to perform. Even in the case of little Bonnieville, the county will have to take over for some of the same administrative chores that had been the work of the city before. Others, like keeping the street lights on, will be abandoned. ■ The local power company has suggested that individual households could pick up the tab if they wanted to keep the streetlights on. And therein lies the heart of the matter: Residents might still be able to obtain most of the services they had before by paying for them a la carte. But it's pretty hard to get the same bundle of services one piece at a time for the same price as a municipal corporation can furnish by offering a one-stop shop. Taxes are never popular, but few people really give fair consideration to the deals they're getting close to home.
November 28, 2024
The rabbi and scholar Jonathan Sacks wrote, "How tragic it is that we so often keep our gratitude to ourselves, speaking it aloud only when the person to whom we feel indebted is no longer here, and we are comforting his or her mourners." It is a tragedy, indeed. ■ Naturally, some time often needs to pass between a good act and a display of gratitude -- you don't stop a person in the process of dropping off a casserole and have them wait in the doorway while you hand-write a thank-you note. And in some cases, a good deed long remembered can bring great joy when acknowledged long afterward -- consider the kindergarten teacher greeted with love by a graduating high-school senior. ■ But it generally betters us to do the work of recognizing others for their good works earlier rather than later. Yes, good behavior should generally be its own reward. But humans are social creatures, and we are formed by the norms and institutions around us. If we want to see more good choices being made in this life, then we need to praise (and be seen praising) those good works as early as can be sensibly justified. Reinforce good behavior and you might just get more of it.
November 30, 2024
There has been no shortage of notice paid to the astronomical growth in active users on the Bluesky social media platform. After a long and slow period of organic growth, the service has exploded with activity, surging right past services like Threads, which had a much more favorable starting position. Many of the new Bluesky users are adopting it as a substitute for X/Twitter, where erratic leadership at the very top has undermined years of goodwill. ■ In the process of moving, a noteworthy share of users have remarked on the uneasy sense that they are abandoning many years of remarks on the old platform. And while it is, of course, entirely possible to export the archives of one's X/Twitter activity, the process naturally causes some to reflect on whether there is any point to preserving such a record at all. ■ For most of the natural world, life is a struggle for survival. But for human beings, it is something different. We haven't conquered mortality altogether, but tools like vaccines and clean drinking water have smashed the old limits that used to keep many of us from growing old. For human beings, life is predominantly a struggle to be remembered. ■ We can't be sure that dolphins and bonobos aren't telling tales of their ancestors, but it's pretty unlikely. Yet we humans struggle constantly with the matter of memory: We visit gravesites, take DNA tests, watch historical documentaries, subscribe to Ancestry.com, fund archaeological research, and digitize the contents of the Library of Congress. Our nations fight one another, but even those that lose battles and wars -- even to the point of being completely conquered -- still have champions who insist upon being remembered. ■ It might not be obvious, but the same natural urges are behind the celebration of National Native American Heritage Month each year and the compulsion to save one's own social media archives. We may be far from knowing everything about big questions like the meaning of life, but our gift of self-awareness tells us that unless and until we find those bigger answers, the next closest thing is to make some kind of impression on the common memory of the species. Whether that takes the form of having a name chiseled in stone, registering for copyright protection on a literary work, or etching a signature into an heirloom craft, almost all of us are captive to the same instinct.
December 1, 2024
Sentences that would have once been incomprehensible
The broadcasting journal TV Technology reports with no apparent surprise: "Twin Cities PBS (TPT) said it will premiere 'Broadcast Wars,' an original documentary about local broadcast news in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The program will be available on Nov. 26 at 7 p.m. as a two-hour film on TPT 2 and as a three-part streaming limited series available on the PBS App." ■ For one thing, the thought that the rivalries among different news operations within a major (but not top-ten) market would merit a documentary would almost certainly have shocked anyone living through the time period that is the focus of the project. Producing anything of a scale close to that of a feature film would have been a massively expensive project in the 1980s or times before. "60 Minutes" was a groundbreaking television show in part because only the major commercial networks had the resources to do big feature projects -- certainly not local Public Television affiliates. ■ Then there's the matter of distribution: To anyone living in the Reagan Era, it would seem incomprehensible for a media outlet to develop an ambitious production like a three-part, 120-minute documentary and then distribute it mainly via the Internet, with the thought of possibly broadcasting it later on a digital TV subchannel little more than an afterthought. ■ And then there is the matter of the unspoken subtext: That the era when local television news really, really mattered would someday be a matter more suited for historical documentary than hot topic of current conversation. And yet, that's how it is: Local TV news still matters and still brings in a lot of revenue, but streaming and other digital platforms are where to find the real growth. ■ Self-respecting communities still need journalists and documentarians. The Minneapolis-St. Paul television market is big and robust, and due to geography, it dominates most of the state of 5.7 million people. That would put it roughly between Denmark and Finland in population, both of which can easily claim to have distinctive cultures (including media) of their own. The same could and should be easy to say about Minnesota. ■ But there is also no doubt that the environment generally has become harder for "local" media of all types, as classified advertising has evaporated (massively undercutting the traditional workhorse of newspaper revenues) and conventional synchronous viewing and listening have been widely displaced for television and radio. How we work out what comes next -- which isn't just a business or media question, but a major social one as well -- will have no small impact on the shape of the future.
The massive death toll caused by Russia's continued assault against Ukraine really is hard to fathom. The Kremlin could stop the pointless dying in an instant.
December 2, 2024
While the news of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend placed considerable attention on the President's decision to pardon his long-troublemaking son, another prominent father passed judgment of a different sort on his offspring. Warren Buffett, who has a nearly $150 billion fortune to his name, announced a plan to entrust the charitable distribution of his wealth to his children when he passes away. ■ Buffett's announcement is unusually frank in its assessment of how his children came to this point: When his first wife died and left behind a $3 billion fortune, "they were not ready to handle the staggering wealth that Berkshire shares had generated". That was in 2004, when they were in their late 40s and early 50s. ■ "Not ready" says a lot, even if it's objectively true that taking over a $3 billion fortune would test the judgment of most people. Barack Obama became President of the United States at age 47. Dwight Eisenhower was 53 years old on D-Day. Plenty of big decisions have been made at middle age. ■ To his credit, though, Buffett has sought to be clear-eyed about his own offspring and their preparedness for big responsibility -- which now includes giving away his enormous fortune (about 50 times larger now than $3 billion) when he dies. "I've never wished to create a dynasty or pursue any plan that extended beyond the children", writes Buffett. "I know the three well and trust them completely. Future generations are another matter [...] And tomorrow's decisions are likely to be better made by three live and well-directed brains than by a dead hand." ■ It's a lesson worth considering in contrast with many other prominent parental choices, including the exercise of a Presidential pardon. Everyone must make their own choices in adulthood, but nobody should be held more responsible for forming a future adult than their parents. The eighteen years (or so) of childhood are both an eternity and an instant. But, actuarially speaking, most people will know their own offspring far longer as adults than as juveniles. Every bit of effort that goes into producing good people from the start matters to what character emerges when they come of age.
December 3, 2024
Feedback loops in political economy
An enlightening paper on political attitudes in the United States reveals that zero-sum thinking has a deeper effect on many people's preferences than any conventional partisan alignment. It's a conclusion based upon survey data collected from a sample of more than 20,000 Americans, and the results are convincing. ■ Even more eye-opening is the observation that zero-sum thinking, which is quite convincingly related to economic conditions in one's youth, is also demonstrably related to previous generations' experience within a family. If your parents or grandparents (and maybe even great-grandparents) experienced economic mobility, there's probably an effect that shows up, measurably, in your attitudes today. ■ The research certainly helps to build a case for seeing economic growth and progress as an important pillar for what we historically called a "liberal" world order: One based on liberties and freedoms for all. Setting up false rivalries between groups (an exercise in zero-sum thinking) is a long-standing weapon of those who want to use power in bad ways. ■ It's also a mild case for supporting those programs, initiatives, and institutions that help young people to appreciate constructive and non-competitive activities in their youth. If our political attitudes in adulthood are partially formed by whether we see the economic pie as a thing that can grow or not, surely we are also formed by whether our recreational and developmental activities convince us to see everything as matchups between teams, one of which must lose in order for the other to win. ■ It's all quite insightful, and probably unexpectedly helpful in illuminating why some of the conventional assumptions about the two-party political system in the US seem to be falling apart before our eyes. Feedback loops can be very real -- and have very long periods.
December 5, 2024
America's enormous prosperity is so vast and such a part of the background of ordinary life that we don't often have the ability to see how much it pervades even the smallest aspects of our national experience. This can ultimately be hazardous, especially if it causes us to become disengaged from the sources of that prosperity. ■ Take, for example, the incredible network of four-lane highways that connect so much of the country. Roads have been important to commerce for as long as humans have gathered in settlements, and four-lane divided highways are basically the pinnacle of what a road can be: Fast, useful, and comparatively safe. ■ America has so many of them that some go lightly traveled. In places, a motorist might have a whole lane to travel with no other vehicles around for a mile or two ahead or behind, even in broad daylight. But while those highways are so common as to be seemingly everywhere to an American, there are US counties with more four-lane highway miles than entire nations abroad. ■ Even the Trans-Canada Highway, which one might expect to be the biggest and widest in its country, still contains segments of only two lanes. (And Canada is one of the rich countries!) Meanwhile, there are multiple four-lane routes across mid-sized states like Iowa, built at typical costs of around $10 million per mile. ■ When prosperity seeps into every aspect of life experience like that, it can become hard to notice without intentional focus. That is in many ways a blessing, but it also means we have to be on guard against the blissful ignorance of the conditions that make prosperity possible: Trade (mostly free), standards (wisely set), and competition (lawfully maintained), among others. These goods don't appear merely by accident.
December 6, 2024
Bits and bytes of Woodward and Bernstein
One of the many unusual aspects of content generated by artificial intelligence is that it is not eligible for copyright protection under current interpretations of US law. This happens to coincide with another exception in copyright law, which holds that facts cannot be copyrighted. Due to this loophole-within-a-loophole, virtually every piece of factual news reporting is rather suddenly up for grabs via a backdoor route to the public domain. ■ That's because artificial intelligence is being used to generate (one hesitates to use the word "write") "news" stories, and the essence of generative AI is that it draws from the available written content in the world to create new material based upon the old. All it takes is for an AI tool to recognize factual content, and it is more or less at liberty to generate an offshoot or derivative piece of content -- which it can do in virtually unlimited volume, without sleep, until the end of time. ■ Facts, though, can be costly to obtain, and real judgment remains an exclusive advantage of thinking human beings. That hasn't stopped the companies backing AI technology from dabbling with experiments in the news business anyway. And it's only set to grow in intensity: One thing that human beings (who possess the eyeballs whose attention pays the bills for online services) are always likely to crave is new information about the world around them. ■ Lacking judgment is no small handicap: Computers might get pretty good at predicting what will generate clicks, but that doesn't mean they'll ever know when they've uncovered the next Watergate. ■ But if big computing companies, in the rush to try to generate any kind of profit off of AI experiments that they can, bluster their way into the news business with such force that they choke out the painfully dwindling number of journalists still on the job by "re-packaging" what the true shoe-leather reporters uncovered and wrote, then we're not only heading towards a future where everywhere is a news desert, we're also en route to a day when few human beings will have any practice (or resulting intuitive judgment) left to know when something advertised as "news" really is news.
Nevermind what the government has been saying and how it has been acting for many years now: Americans are being told to switch to encrypted messaging services rather than old-fashioned texts between friends and family. It's a significant reversal, instigated by the revelation that China's government and its affiliates have seriously compromised the security of America's telecommunications infrastructure. ■ So, all that stuff we used to hear about the importance of having backdoors for law enforcement? Forget it! Now it's all encryption, all the time! ■ It's all a matter of finding the lesser among evils -- or, perhaps, of making weighted-risk assessments of the available options. It may be bad if domestic law enforcement can't crack criminal cases because people were encrypting messages and rendering wiretaps useless. It's probably a whole lot worse if a hostile adversary can plug into the essential lines of communications that we've always used with almost no hesitation because what's domestic feels secure (even when it's not). ■ End-to-end communications encryption is rising to the surface as a matter of vital national interest, but it's also time to start considering what to do with data when it's "at rest" -- not traveling from place to place, but residing on the user's devices. We're going to regret not taking storage encryption more seriously than we do now; depending on what else our adversaries have already compromised, it may already be too late for much of what is stored.
December 10, 2024
Senator Bernie Sanders, who remains crankily "independent" while still trying to sway the Democratic Party by caucusing among them, has offered some unsolicited senatorial legitimacy to the efforts of the incoming Presidential administration. Sanders opines: "The defense budget is bloated. Defense contractors engage in fraud and waste. That's why we should cut military spending by 10%. I hope Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will support that effort." ■ It's a literally disingenuous claim. Sanders doesn't want to cut military spending because he thinks that 10% of the spending is fraudulent. He wants to cut that spending because he is broadly opposed to military power projections abroad. That is an opinion shared by others, even if it is troublingly wrong-headed at a time when the Communist Party that runs China is acting aggressively towards our friends and allies and Russia is engaged in a violent invasion of Ukraine. ■ To think that a world from which the United States withdraws or retreats is a safer one is to imagine that, somehow, the many things we ought to know about human nature do not exist. There will always be some balance of power in the world; the question is merely whether forces of good will control that balance. ■ If the problem were really one of fraud and abuse, then the solution wouldn't be a 10% across-the-board cut anyway: Fraud and abuse are controlled by spending more, not less, on auditing and enforcement. But that's an inconvenient fact of accounting. Undoubtedly, there is some wasteful spending to be found in the defense budget, just as there is waste to be found elsewhere. But the Constitution gives the power of the purse, in no uncertain terms, to Congress. ■ It is up to Congress to decide how much spending is the right amount, and by how much to oversee that spending. That isn't the province of any made-up departments of the Executive Branch. To pretend otherwise is deeply dishonest dealing.
December 11, 2024
Andrew Carnegie famously donated an enormous fortune to the construction of more than 2,500 free public libraries around the world, the majority of which were built in the United States. Carnegie's library campaign comprised one of the largest philanthropic gifts in history, when adjusted for dollar value, and it would be hard to imagine the consequential value of that gift. Free public libraries are treasured institutions that have the potential to create enormous welfare benefit for individuals and for society as a whole. ■ The philanthropic choices of wealthy people have always attracted great attention. And the inevitable question that must be weighed is: Can wealth do more good now, or should it be endowed for future use? ■ That's an especially challenging question, philosophically, because the kinds of people who accrue enormous wealth generally show a predisposition to delay gratification and a strong belief in the power of compounding. In the words of Warren Buffett, you want to build a snowball by finding a lot of snow and a really long hill. ■ But it's hard to ensure that a foundation designed to do philanthropic work (like giving away an enormous personal fortune) will remain true to its founders' intentions -- or that it will adapt appropriately as times change. What might have been a good charitable cause in 1924 might be entirely outdated in 2024. ■ Thus it is interesting to note the choice of the Kiewit Foundation, a philanthropy established on $150 million donated in 1980, to wind itself down by its 50-year mark, giving away $500 million in remaining assets in an enormous blitz. ■ The Kiewit Foundation has focused mainly on causes in and around Omaha, and some of its beneficiaries have relied a great deal on its support, so the transition could prove difficult for some. But on the larger scale, it's probably best for the wealth to be put to work sooner rather than later, since, like Carnegie's public libraries, the real benefit isn't in the first-order spending but rather in the second-order consequences of the spending that then leverage future possibilities. ■ In the Carnegie case, society benefits directly from having the books, but it benefits even more from the human potential that is unleashed or expanded by those books. In the Kiewit case, it's still to be determined which investments will take up the balance of what is to be distributed. But if they spread the investments around among a reasonable number of well-considered possibilities (say, perhaps, two dozen or so), and if good management is involved at the non-profits who get the funds, then even if a few of the initiatives turn out to be duds, at least a few of the remainder ought to be big enough victories to make the investment a permanent inflection point for the community overall.
December 12, 2024
A fire in Minneapolis started in a lot that was vacant of any permanent structures, but apparently crowded with tents and other temporary shelters. By the time it was extinguished, the fire had consumed the encampment and spread to a neighboring house -- one which had evidently been maintained with care. A second house nearby was also damaged. A similar event happened in the same neighborhood about two weeks ago. ■ Urban fires used to be grave and frequent threats in America. The Great Fires in Chicago (1871) and San Francisco (1906) are well-remembered, but lots of other American cities had huge and devastating fires, too, including Pittsburgh in 1845 and Atlanta in 1917. ■ Building codes have made a huge difference, as have professional firefighting crews. A huge difference is made by automatic fire sprinkler systems, which like modern fire departments, depend upon the public water systems that supply water faster than any tanker truck could deliver it. ■ But if people are living in informal or makeshift arrangements (like a tent encampment), then many of the protective advancements of modern living are lost. It's one of the reasons why people shouldn't have a knee-jerk response when asked to reconsider using the word "homeless". In a very real sense, the people in the Minneapolis encampment probably considered their tents "home", so they weren't really homeless -- but they were literally "unhoused". ■ The condition of going unhoused may have been voluntary or involuntary. There are plenty of social, economic, and health factors involved. But the consequences of living in conditions of heightened danger -- like using propane tanks to fuel their heat sources, which are at high risk of exploding in a fire, as happened in Minneapolis -- ended up harming people both inside and outside the encampment. ■ Nothing resolves these problems better than housing supply. A generous supply of housing that is safe and dignified is, in a very real sense, a matter of public safety, even if that isn't always obvious. Reasonable minds can differ on how to achieve that supply, but no one who wants to secure the benefits of modern safety practices should ignore the most important upstream factor. ■ Markets are very good at filling voids, even for goods like low-cost housing, but they often run into opposition from people who use zoning ordinances and other tools of political pressure to try to stifle that supply. The fires in Minneapolis show how the consequences can turn out to be dangerous for everyone.
December 13, 2024
One of the most information-dense graphics in all of weather, and it's one that ordinary people can gain a lot from learning to read
"All of north India has been pushed into a medical emergency"
Air pollution, long a chronic condition in places like Delhi, has become an acute problem this year, leading one high-ranking politician to declare that "all of north India has been pushed into a medical emergency". It's a problem culminating from combustion engines, construction activity, agricultural fires, and other sources. Even fireworks are part of the debate. ■ Anything significant that happens in India already tends to have consequences for a noteworthy share of the world's population, but in this case, India is simply experiencing an acute encounter with a problem that plagues almost all of us from time to time. Just this summer, wildfires in Canada's west caused spikes in doctors' visits in Baltimore, Maryland. ■ In a parallel with that other inescapable necessity, water, the best way to fix air pollution is to prevent its creation at the source. But failing that, it seems like there's still a lot of public-health ground to gain by figuring out how to economically clean large volumes of outdoor air and ultra-purify indoor air. ■ Neither consideration is anything new; people have talked about ideas as far-out as building giant fans to blow the smog out of Los Angeles. But if non-point-source pollution looks like a big problem for water quality (and it is), then it's an even bigger problem for air. By nature, gases tend to spread. Whatever pollutants start bumping around with air molecules become very hard to capture again. ■ But given that lots of what gets us sick is just floating around amid our indoor air, there ought to be more energy going into improving air quality even for places that don't have Delhi-level pollution. ■ It does go to show what a misstep it has been for America's public consciousness to think of problems like air and water pollution as "environmental" issues. Sure, there's a sense in which they are; but what really matters is that they are health issues that harm and even shorten human life. That should command a lot of energetic attention.
December 14, 2024
NATO's secretary-general wants a message to go to the leaders of European countries: "Tell them they need to spend more on defense so that we can continue to live in peace, tell them that security matters more than anything". In the words of Ulrike Franke, "No one wants to hear this. No one wants to say this. But it's crucial that this becomes part of the conversation." ■ It's true; nobody wants to be told to spend lots more money on tools they hope will go unused. But it's a paradoxical relationship: Build up a lot of weapons, and (at least in one dynamic) the odds of having to use them go down. Fail to armor up raises the odds that a vicious adversary will take advantage of the relative weakness. ■ "We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years. Danger is moving towards us at full speed," says Mark Rutte, the secretary-general. Some might dismiss his alarm because he has an incentive to encourage preparedness. But we shouldn't discount his warning any more than we might ignore the advice of a cardiologist worried about a patient whose cholesterol is on the rise. ■ What's it going to take to get the most sluggish partners to wake up to the threat, a thousand-day land war in Europe?
December 15, 2024
Don't leave talent on the sidelines
An approving profile of Pearl Young, the first woman to work in a technical role at the predecessor to today's NASA, notes that her gender made her a target for supervisors in the 1930s who complained of her attitude. "Attitude", of course, is the kind of complaint that is just plausible enough that it can't be dismissed out of hand, but it's vague enough that it can't really be proven either true or untrue. ■ It's generally worth noting who is so insecure in their status that they turn to non-falsifiable complaints about others in order to try to hold on to their own positions. Young's co-workers might have been aggrieved by a workplace attitude, but they also might have resented seeing a woman competing with them in the workplace. ■ Few things seem more likely to reflect the actual state of nature than to assume that raw talent is distributed widely throughout the human population. It would be close to madness to assume that any gender, ethnicity, or other inborn trait puts any individual closer to some kind of special claim to genius than any other. ■ This means that the bigger the net cast by a society to try to capture great talent, the more of it they should find. Arbitrarily and systemically excluding women from the scientific and technical fields, as was a widespread practice in the US until not all that long ago, was an incredibly stupid "own-goal". And yet it's still practiced by some of our rivals yet today. ■ For instance, China still doesn't have more than a handful of women in its space program, even in 2024. This doesn't mean they would be better off with a system of quotas to raise that number; the disparity is the evidence of some much deeper problems. ■ But if a group is selected from a large population that ought to have widely-distributed talent and the resulting picks look badly skewed to the notable exclusion of significant groups, then it's a strong symptom that the selectors are probably leaving much of the available natural talent on the sidelines.
December 17, 2024
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have published a joint statement telling the people of New Jersey to stop panicking over rumors of drones flying overhead. It's no small dismissal for them to say, "There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space." ■ Panics happen from time to time, and it's not especially surprising that people are looking into the sky at night and misinterpreting what they see. Lots of airplanes are flying overhead, almost all of the time. Especially along the Eastern Seaboard. ■ What we don't need is a nation full of Yosemite Sams firing off their guns (or even their high-powered lasers) at things they don't understand. ■ The United States certainly does need a sensible, well-calibrated approach to protecting civilians (especially at large gatherings) from the hazards of malicious uncrewed aerial vehicles. Ukraine has demonstrated just how useful drones can be in combat operations. ■ But vigilante behavior is virtually always in error, and the odds are much too great that Americans taking matters into their own hands (including members of Congress). Almost everything can be given a reasonable explanation to those who are reasonable enough to listen. We don't need the unreasonable among us taking amateur anti-aircraft potshots.
December 18, 2024
What democracy really looks like
The short-lived attempt to impose martial law on the Republic of Korea was a remarkable news event -- not least because it happened on a timeline with which even social media tools could scarcely keep pace. The president who attempted the stunt has been suspended and faces the first court hearing about whether to remove him permanently from office before the end of the month. He's also going to be investigated by a Corruption Investigation Office. ■ The incident was a lesson for the world about the elements of democracy, especially under stress. Since at least 1999, American protesters (usually on the left) have adhered to the idea that big gatherings are the best way to show, in their words, "What democracy looks like". And while there is nothing wrong with the exercise of the Constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of peaceable assembly, mass gatherings are only useful in certain circumstances. ■ The 1963 March on Washington, for instance, was a powerful symbol because it showed just how many people were ready to redeem, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., the "promissory note" written into the nation's founding but long denied in practice. It was also an event resulting from a very long crescendo of determined, persistent action against unjust laws prevailing in the South. ■ In South Korea's case, it's entirely possible that mass gatherings may have been effective, ultimately, in repelling the attempted autogolpe. But South Korea got something much better: Its legislature responded with steadiness and firmness to a fundamental appeal to civic duty. ■ They said no, in no uncertain terms. And they did it even though guns had been drawn. ■ That, even more than any gathering, is "what democracy looks like". It looks like officials putting the interests of their laws, their future, and their honor ahead of personal hazard. That isn't always a given: Some politicians are cowardly, craven, or selfish. ■ Korea's legislators have modeled for the world exactly what it means to serve as leaders -- to put their duty and honor in front of their fears. "Public service" can become a hollow cliche, but we have just witnessed what can happen when people authentically believe in putting others before themselves.
December 20, 2024
The chaotic race to hold off a government shutdown ought to serve as a spur for the public to demand something that might seem contrary: To demand an expansion of the House of Representatives. ■ The reflexive response goes something like, "Why should we pay for more politicians when we don't like the ones we already have?". But the problem we need to solve is that as House districts grow ever larger by population (remember, we've been fixed at 435 seats in the House for a century, despite enormous population growth since then), the costs of getting elected (and re-elected) have risen. Those costs are both direct (as in the cost of campaign ads) and implied (since any individual incumbent feels greater pressure not to endanger their own re-election by taking chances). ■ Is there room to do it? Yes, we could make space within the existing chamber to fit a lot more Representatives. (If airlines can squeeze passengers into ever-smaller seats, surely we can pack a few more elected officials into a room for debate.) And the additional support staff required could fit into some new buildings, if we were to be smart about it. ■ Among many arguments for making the House bigger -- among them, making the Electoral College more proportional without tweaking the Constitution -- one we shouldn't overlook is the value of getting a variety of new perspectives and sources of expertise into the room. We have a lot of lawyers (30% of Representatives have law degrees) but not a lot of people with more varied backgrounds, like auto-repair shop owners and psychologists. ■ In a world marked by increasing complexity, a dose of multidisciplinarity among the voting members would make Congress better. Change is unlikely, of course, unless and until the members see it in their own self-interest to expand the House. But it's worth pressing the issue from the outside, since our frustrations are often more systematic than not.
December 21, 2024
The most reliable way to the top in many occupations is often portrayed as a monomaniacal focus on that career success -- doing whatever it takes to continue climbing the ladder. Young attorneys are told to devote everything to becoming partners, actors move to Los Angeles and do whatever it takes to get by, and athletes endure grueling training and practice regimes to make it to the next league. ■ Yet it's not really good life advice. Everyone knows the adage that nobody ever laid on a deathbed wishing they'd spent more time at the office. Work is inevitably a big component of most people's lives, but it's hazardous to let it choke out choices that make for a more complete view of life. ■ Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson just got a chance to perform a cameo in a Broadway musical. The appearance fulfills a life-long aspiration, even if it's not a career pivot. ■ It's good for high-profile people to have well-rounded interests. It's good for regular people, too. Interests become sources of identity, and having a self-identity that takes the shape of a blanket woven from many different threads is a way to steer clear of becoming one-dimensional. ■ Different sources of identity can overlap, fill gaps, and even create conflicts and internal contradictions that we have to sort out. That's a healthy part of the human condition, especially if it helps one see the texture and color in others' humanity. We ought to beware those who want to be seen only in caricature as a single thing; either they're hiding things that should matter to them, or they're missing out on vital aspects of what should be a normal and complete life.
December 22, 2024
A hot rumor is usually too much for a tabloid-style paper to pass up, and the rumor that Jeff Bezos is about to have a $600 million wedding has proven too much for the Daily Mail to resist. Predictably, Bezos has denied the story. ■ Just as predictably, critics have latched on to the story to decry the very possibility that anyone could have access to such wealth that a $600 million event is even a possibility. We can have endless arguments about whether lavish weddings are in good taste, but critics need to get one thing clear: Second-order effects matter. ■ Even if you have a moral objection to the accumulation of wealth, probably the best thing the ultra-wealthy can do for society is to spend lavishly, especially on events and experiences. If someone is planning a $6 million wedding, let alone a $600 million one, they're not out to cut corners and drive down profit margins for their vendors. They're out to put as much cold, hard cash into the hands of florists and bakers and drivers and housekeepers and decorators and pilots and wait staff and dry cleaners and photographers and bellhops and stylists as possible. ■ That's the redeeming quality of conspicuous consumption: Lavish spending puts people to work. And unless everyone is taking home a new Lamborghini as a party favor, then an extravagant event is an extremely efficient transfer of wealth from the ultra-rich to lots of working people. ■ The best response that the opponents of wealth could possibly have to a rumor like this isn't "We shouldn't have billionaires", it's "Why stop at $600 million, Jeff? What's keeping you from dropping a cool billion on the most important day in your life?" Why wait for the tax collector to conduct redistribution slowly and inefficiently, when a rich person's ego can redistribute their money faster?
December 25, 2024
Safety briefings and Christmas greetings
In a delightful long-form takedown essay reviewing an over-the-top airline safety video from 2013, humorist Daniel O'Brien asks a question that is more serious than not: "[G]iven that no lives were provably saved, at least one of the performers sued the production and it potentially made passengers less safe all in an attempt to help a now-dead airline GO VIRAL on a now-mostly-dead social media website [...] Who was this for?" ■ Airline safety briefings unexpectedly share something in common with Christmas church services, and it's a matter that applies in several important areas of life: How do you communicate a high-value message to an audience that is highly variegated and whose motivation to pay attention ranges from "extremely alert" to "potentially already napping"? The same factors apply to issues of public health, weather awareness, cybersecurity, and no small number of other topics. ■ It's a tough and surprisingly under-studied field. As O'Brien notes, when certain stylistic and production techniques are put to work, it's entirely possible that the end result can actually leave the audience less informed than before they sat down. From what little we do know, there are three big points to keep in mind. ■ The first is to ensure the audience knows what's in it for them -- and is given fresh motivation at least every five to seven minutes. (Minds wander quickly.) The second is to connect new information to old knowledge: Starting from scratch takes a lot more active thought than having a familiar point for jumping off. (This is why metaphors are so often helpful.) ■ The last point is to keep the whole affair simple. An audience that has heard the same fundamental message at least a dozen times before won't take well to condescension, and it's likely to bore easily. Yet, at least for some of those messages, when people don't listen, very bad things can happen. But when the message gets through, lives can be saved.
December 26, 2024
"Shadow fleet" cuts power cables in the Baltic
While most of Europe is still celebrating the Christmas holiday, Finnish border guards have been busy detaining a ship from Russia's "shadow fleet" over some strong evidence that it dragged an anchor in order to cut an undersea power transmission line between Finland and Estonia. Telecommunications cables have been cut, too. ■ It's a good time to have Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, in the seat as vice president of the European Commission and its chief foreign-affairs representative. Her statement on the incident was direct and plainspoken: "We strongly condemn any deliberate destruction of Europe's critical infrastructure. The suspected vessel is part of Russia's shadow fleet, which threatens security and the environment, while funding Russia's war budget. We will propose further measures, including sanctions, to target this fleet." That's the kind of talk that ought to be the standard everywhere. ■ If you are involved in any way, shape, or form with anything that might be considered critical infrastructure (power, water, telecom, gas, or whatever else keeps civilization functioning), this incident is a bright flashing sign to lock down whatever you can. Do it in the physical world. Do it in the cyber sphere. This behavior is both intentionally escalatory and in the process of getting worse. ■ It's clear that the Kremlin is out to use attacks on critical infrastructure to achieve asymmetrical gains against the countries that favor a rules-based order in the world. It's easier and cheaper for bad actors to go around causing damage and creating chaos than it is for good actors to protect their assets. Painful as that disproportionality might be, it's the unfortunate reality. If this is how they're acting on Christmas, we shouldn't expect anything better by spring. We need to plan for much worse.
December 27, 2024
One of the best sight gags in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" (a movie spilling over with such jokes) is a throwaway. As Clark Griswold illuminates the world's most over-the-top set of Christmas lights, the power dims all over Chicagoland -- and for a split second, the audience is treated to a hand flipping the switch to activate a (misspelled) Auxiliary Nuclear power supply to keep up with the Griswold family light show, as though nuclear power plants were simply sitting idle all around, just waiting to be activated. ■ The Energy Information Administration reports that 18.6% of all US electricity comes from nuclear power plants, while renewable fuels -- led by wind -- are up to 21.4%. Nuclear power generation figures really haven't changed much at all this century: The total change between total megawatt-hours produced in 2001 and in 2023 is less than 1%. ■ Wind, on the other hand, is up by a factor of 62 over the same time period, and utility-scale solar (which was utterly negligible in 2001) is hot on wind's heels. Once we account for small-scale solar generation, total solar generation is almost as big as hydroelectric. ■ These are subtle successes that ought to be celebrated. Even if it's not possible to simply flip a switch to spin up an "auxiliary nuclear" reactor, we may even be getting closer to the widespread advent of small-scale modular reactors, which when used in coordination with the growing renewable sector, could help us chip away even faster at the remaining 60% of electrical generation that comes from carbon-emitting sources. ■ Big, slow changes are hard to celebrate well, unless there are obvious milestones built around them. But the fact that so much has been done to make the generation mix evolve in a good direction, with so much growing promise coming from solar and so much potential to do more with nuclear, ought to be enough for us to applaud: "It's a beaut, Clark!"
December 28, 2024
(Hyper) Local on (More Than) the 8s
When the Weather Channel debuted on May 2, 1982, it was a novel innovation in telecommunications. Up until that point, anyone without an oversized thermometer mounted outside their window had to either wait for a periodic weather check from a radio station or place a call to the local time and temperature line. ■ Then the Weather Channel, with all the convenience of a click of the cable converter box, the viewer could be assured of getting current conditions every ten minutes. That local temperature report, in most cases, was almost certainly just a rehashing of the hourly weather roundup from the local office of the National Weather Service and thus could be as much as 59 minutes old and no more precise than whatever conditions prevailed at the nearest airport. But what was eventually branded "Local on the 8s" still felt a lot more predictable than what had come before. ■ It hasn't been all that long in historical terms, but the difference between the turn of this century and today in terms of the density and freshness of weather observations is at least as dramatic as the move from the phonograph to streaming music services. Dozens of personal weather stations are available for $200 or less, many capable not only of measuring temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, and rainfall, but also of reporting those results automatically over the Internet to data aggregators like Weather Underground. ■ West Des Moines, Iowa (population about 70,000) is blanketed with dozens of such stations, a situation not at all unusual for an affluent suburb. Compared with "Local on the 8s", the resulting granularity of data is astonishing -- temperatures reported to the tenth of a degree, current to the very minute, and precise to within half a mile of just about anyone in an urbanized area. ■ Is that level of precision necessary? Absolutely not. Is there anything meterologically advantageous to having sensors spaced no more than a half-mile apart? Apart from reporting on rare severe weather events, probably not. And yet it's a massive triumph, both technologically and economically. ■ The fact that a mid-sized metropolitan area can easily contain hundreds of personal weather stations -- virtually all installed voluntarily and at private expense -- is a symptom of a real economic triumph. A pure luxury good ends up becoming widely affordable, and in furnishing their data to aggregators, the buyers create a useful public good that any of their neighbors can access for free.
December 29, 2024
NPR offers a retrospective on the Y2K bug that caused colossal worry a quarter-century ago, unhelpfully dismissing the outcome by saying that the Y2K bug "didn't live up to the hype". The event still resides in living memory for enough people still involved in the computer sector that some have quite vocally skewered NPR for the tone of the article, with others noting that Y2K occupied a unique intersection between society's dependence upon technology and the relatively juvenile stage of technology management at the time. ■ It is very hard to make the general public understand that technological issues are worth confronting head-on. Much of what saved us from Y2K disaster took place behind the scenes, and things are a quarter-century more complex today than they were then. ■ Yet some of the problems emerging now are potentially just as dreadful as the Y2K bug. Microsoft, for instance, has declared that it will end support for Windows 10 on October 14th of the coming year, having already ended support for Windows 8 and what came before. A plausible case can be made that Microsoft can't continue to secure anything older than Windows 11, so forcing customers to upgrade is the only safe way forward. ■ But the move will absolutely put a lot of Windows users in a much less safe environment, since they either cannot or will not upgrade their hardware and operating systems. This will leave them using platforms which are no longer receiving security updates, which effectively turns every newly-discovered security flaw into a zero-day vulnerability. And a lot of important things still run on old equipment. ■ The American cultural mainstream is pretty soft on its appreciation for sustained maintenance. More often than not, people prefer "fix on failure" to preventative or predictive maintenance approaches. Chewing gum and baling wire keep a lot more things together in the physical world than they should. ■ As bad as that is in the physical realm, it's vastly worse in the digital world. It's not about gears wearing down or grease slowly drying out -- things that typically fail slowly. Digital maintenance is often (literally) a binary issue: It is either correct or not, vulnerable or not, protected or not. The only grace period is how long it takes for bad actors to find the holes. ■ We learned the wrong lesson from Y2K: The bill for lots of deferred maintenance came due on a high-profile date, and a lot of frantic work fixed the problem and saved the day...but the general public never realized it. And in not making a bigger deal about the rescue, we missed the opportunity to reinforce a message about sustained attention and responsibility. The next disaster, unfortunately, won't come with such a memorable deadline as Y2K.
Lost in the very strange debate over whether mainstream American culture has "venerated mediocrity" is a vital distinction about America's extreme devotion to laissez-faire as an ethos. ■ The worst advice commonly given to new graduates is "Do what you love and the money will follow". That's a recipe for a very high rate of disappointment -- not to mention, also one for turning a lot of very good hobbies and recreational interests into drudgery. But a very close second in the bad-advice race is "Do whatever will make you the most money". This advice, often doled out both directly and indirectly by well-meaning parents and other influential adults, proposes a perilously imbalanced lifestyle. ■ The right advice goes like this: "Do whatever maximizes the gap between how you're rewarded and what you have to give up to get it." Maximizing that difference is what economists would call utility maximization. ■ Every occupational choice comes with some form of reward: Usually it starts with money, but the basket of rewards also includes things like social status, personal pride, joy in the work itself, potential for growth, leisure time, job security, and more. ■ Likewise, every occupational choice comes with trade-offs: How long it takes to obtain education and training, the stress of the job search, foregone opportunities to try other careers, and all of the ordinary stresses and drawbacks that come from devoting some 40 hours a week to performing a task in exchange for a paycheck. ■ If the only thing that gets measured is the size of the salary, then it's like looking only at a company's revenue figures and ignoring the expenses. Doing so would be daffy, yet many people pressure young people into doing just that -- not just in America, but around the world. ■ America's secret superpower is the sense of freedom to experiment, to try lots of things (especially in youth), and above all, to fail early and often without that failure derailing an entire future. The more introductory courses and extracurricular activities a young person tries, the better: Some won't click at all, but a few might. ■ And it's especially when those low-stakes encounters pay off that Americans benefit most from our culture -- like Bill Gates discovering computers in a club atmosphere while in junior high. The growing backlash against all-absorbing youth sports (and the crowding-out effect those leagues have been having on other free-ranging childhood endeavors) is a sign many parents understand implicitly that an over-structured adolescence is overrated. ■ It may seem contrary to logic, but it's precisely the way America avoids high-pressure circumstances for young people that liberates them to find the things that maximize the gap, rather than just chasing what pays the most. Does that sometimes lead to laziness and sloth? Sure. But it also leads to an efficient allocation of skills and resources, chosen by the people who will live those lives and careers, rather than by their parents (or, worse, their government).
December 30, 2024
Honor Jimmy Carter by fixing housing rules
The two Presidents to live the longest in post-Presidency were Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Hoover outlived John F. Kennedy, dying in 1964, 31 years after leaving the White House. Carter, having just passed, made it a remarkable 43 years. ■ Other than their longevity, both are remembered far better by history for what they did as humanitarians than for their time in the Oval Office. Hoover had the relative misfortune of making his humanitarian mark prior to the White House; Carter became known for his humanitarianism after leaving office, particularly for his dedication to Habitat for Humanity. Recency bias is real, and it favors doing good works after finishing the dirty job of President. ■ In honor of Jimmy Carter, every municipal government in America should affirmatively repeal one restrictive zoning ordinance or regulation that holds back the development of housing. The aggregate effect, if everyone were to do it, would be a worthy boon to affordable housing -- more valuable in total than any wave of housing that Habitat for Humanity could possibly build. ■ Housing built with volunteer labor can do good things at the margins, of course, but it simply cannot have an impact as large as framing the right legal and regulatory environment to encourage the construction, improvement, or redevelopment of safe, dignified, and affordable housing at a very large scale. ■ City councils and county supervisors, heed the moment: Legalize duplexes and extend tax advantages to four-plexes! We need more "missing middle" housing. Promote manufactured housing and let it qualify for conventional mortgage financing! Manufactured homes are better-built and much less costly than site-built houses, but they're hard for first-time buyers to get. Encourage the building of ADUs! California has gained tens of thousands of new homes by streamlining the process to let people build them statewide. ■ Local governments can pick just about anything to improve and they'll make people's lives better. That would be the most fitting possible tribute to former President Carter: Not to motivate thousands of Americans each to show up for one day of lending their low-skill labor to a worthy cause, but to improve the aggregate conditions for housing affordability for millions of people at once.
December 31, 2024
Every year comes to have its own character, and sometimes it's unknowable in advance. But sometimes it's possible to forecast that character in advance. For 2025, it appears that the defining word will be "persistence". ■ It's easy to find reasons to be discouraged about any number of challenges. It always has been. But in the words of Calvin Coolidge, "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence ... The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." ■ In most cases, it's better to be able to walk five miles than to sprint for only one. The act of sticking to the pursuit of a worthy goal builds character, and not just in the abstract. Most problems take a long time to develop, and untangling them naturally takes a long time as well.