Gongol.com Archives: January 2025
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January 1, 2025
Protections on intellectual property (primarily patent and copyright law) are valuable means of encouraging people to generate original thoughts in a world where copies, rehashes, and knockoffs can be profitable. Originality still matters, whether it's in the development of new technological advances or the production of new works of culture. ■ But especially as the artificial intelligence "learning" models have been set loose to gather data on almost everything that has ever been published online, it's good to see that intellectual property ultimately enters the public domain, just like several items have just done with the turn of the new year. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and the Marx Brothers film "The Cocoanuts" have both entered the public domain with the turn of the calendar page. ■ There's going to be a lot of tension for the foreseeable future, between those humans who create novel ideas and those humans who corral computers into generating new material of their own. Public-domain content is especially important under those conditions. ■ We probably privilege intellectual property too much; copyright doesn't really do much economic good to most copyright owners beyond the first couple of decades, and it's hard to believe that copyright terms of nearly a century really reflect the Constitutional intent "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". ■ If life expectancy is around 80 years, then a 95-year protection term isn't effectively "limited". The 14-year, once-renewable terms of 1790 probably had the right general idea. AI models are getting away with effectively converting everything to public-domain work (but keeping the value to themselves), while real people are kept from using material that by any reasonable estimation ought to have entered the actual public domain long ago. ■ Anything that connects new thinking to old works -- including putting old human-made content to renewed work in the hands of new humans -- is a way to extend the threads that remind us of the continuity of the human condition. The more that people feel atomized and isolated by cultural and social conditions, the more important it is to be reminded that we're all part of a vast chain extending back through the millennia.
January 3, 2025
The weather forecast for the Midwest is looking terrible, but all credit is due to the National Weather Service in Omaha/Valley for its extremely creative public messaging about the event.
$80 billion in computing power
Microsoft is planning to spend $80 billion on data centers before the end of the fiscal year -- an amount that ought to make people sit up and take notice. As an infrastructure project, it's huge. ■ $80 billion is more than the $65 billion in electrical grid upgrades promised by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. It's comparable in scale to one of our biggest industries -- roughly the value of net aerospace exports from the US. ■ It's more than the market capitalizations of businesses that are household names, like Ferrari, US Bank, Marriott, BP, or 3M. Most notably, $80 billion is more than the gross domestic products of at least seven states. ■ But Microsoft says it "is on track to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world". AI is the subject of immense hype and enormous amounts of overstatement. But $80 billion is an extraordinary amount of real money. ■ If the figures are true (and as a publicly traded company, Microsoft is subject to reporting requirements that will bear them out), it's an investment -- or perhaps a speculation -- of historic proportions.
Finding the January 6th bomber
It's been four years since someone left pipe bombs at the headquarters of the two major political parties, and the FBI still hasn't identified the presumptive terrorist. They've published an estimate of the perpetrator's height (5'7") and a halting security camera video of one of the drops.
January 4, 2025
The perfect domestic buyer isn't coming
In issuing an order prohibiting Nippon Steel from buying United States Steel, President Biden claims to be acting on an "unflinching commitment [...] to defend U.S. national security". In theory, domestic ownership of major manufacturing operations may be favorable to national security, at least in the sense that their decisions may, in some sense, reflect a set of values which may include a greater sense of the national interest. ■ But the order has many of the markings of a choice to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Nippon Steel had made promises to invest in facilities in Indiana and Pennsylvania that would have measured in the billions and might well have done a considerable amount to secure the long-term health of US operations. There is no such guarantee that any alternative buyers (should they even be found) will do the same. ■ There is no shortage of investment money lying around: Private-equity companies are estimated to have done more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars in deals in 2024. The $15 billion offer from Nippon Steel would barely move the needle on the $320 billion of cash and Treasury bills burning a hole in Warren Buffett's pockets at Berkshire Hathaway. If a better offer were coming from stateside, we'd know it already. A perfect domestic buyer just isn't forthcoming. ■ What is the concern, after all? That, in a time of international crisis, Japan will abruptly abandon us as an ally? Of all the unlikely scenarios in an uncertain future, Japan making a hard turn against us is about the unlikeliest. The US is a huge trading partner for Japan, a defense treaty partner for well over half a century, and the source of Japan's nuclear umbrella. ■ The only plausible scenario that could threaten the mutual partnership in the short- to intermediate-range future is the unlikely prospect that China might conduct an invasion of Japan. Nothing is really impossible, of course, but were it to come to something as drastic as that, not only would the US be involved in repelling the invasion, but occupied-Japanese ownership of US Steel would become a mere formality, which Washington could waive through an emergency nationalization. ■ It's old and tired thinking to treat Japanese ownership of distressed smokestack industries as a hazard to American national security. If Nippon Steel can run US Steel better than domestic ownership while reinvesting heavily in facilities and promising at least ten years of stability, then blocking the deal is, on balance, the bigger threat and an entirely unforced error by the White House.
A community really thrives when it has a steady source of profitable "exports" that mean its people aren't just exchanging goods and services among themselves. And it further prospers when it can grow its own local enterprises from scratch, usually on the backs of skills developed or demanded by the flagship employers.
January 8, 2025
Americans may not be particularly close readers of the minutiae of terms and conditions, but all competent adults at least ought to be aware that they exist for most goods and services that we exchange with one another. In particular, the most hotly-contested subset of terms and conditions -- especially with online services -- is typically the privacy policy that governs how user information may be bought and sold. ■ Indeed, if you want to get people riled up, get them arguing over what Facebook is allowed to do with their personal information. The level of consumer sophistication on the subject is often very low, but the feelings run extremely high. Nobody wants to believe that something personal to them can be bought or sold without their express consent. ■ Yet from the same population that holds strong feelings on what Mark Zuckerberg can do with the knowledge of your favorite brand of toilet paper, no small number of people have jumped aboard a bandwagon that says the citizenship of people in foreign places can be bought and sold without their control, like trading Baltic Avenue and Park Place in a game of Monopoly. ■ People everywhere have a right to self-determination; it's the violation of this principle that makes Russia's invasion of Ukraine so vile and obnoxious. Citizenship isn't to be traded like a matter of commercial real estate. ■ In a rational world, the United States would have a clear, published, and widely-known set of conditions for any established civic entity to apply for accession. There's a published policy for how to join the European Union; we should have a plain and rational way to join the United States, too. ■ To do so would tend to have a stabilizing effect on the world, which is the least we could do as a benevolent superpower. Regarding others as little more than pieces on a game board not only subjects us to scorn from abroad, it undermines the goodwill upon which we depend for alliances and trade in a tightly-connected world. We must not be more cavalier with the citizenship of others than we are with our own privacy rights on social media.
January 9, 2025
The denunciation of first and often last resort is to call an opponent "stupid". It is a word that gets applied everywhere from the playground to the bully pulpit, a catch-all for dismissing someone else as being too dense to "get it", whatever point "it" may be. ■ Besides being unoriginal, "stupid" is a pretty faulty ground on which to dismiss anyone. After all, some people may be stupid about many things, but everyone is stupid about some things. That's the inescapable curse of living in a complex world: You may be smart about corporate income tax strategies, but do you know how a small modular reactor works? You might be able to recognize a three-phase Delta transformer from 50 yards away, but do you know what a normal white blood cell count should be? Maybe you speak five languages, but can you explain the CIA triad in cybersecurity? ■ No one can entirely avoid being stupid, at least about some things. And in many cases, an individual has little control over either their innate intelligence or their exposure to a wide range of subjects. Even when we want to know, we often encounter gatekeepers who depend on making their own knowledge seem mysterious. ■ But we could stand to revive a much more useful rebuke: "Unlettered". Unlike "stupid", "unlettered" is a matter of at least some choice. Never before have there been so many things to read on so many subjects, in so many translations, and across so many formats. ■ We can even "read" even when normal reading would be impossible. A phone can translate written text instantaneously and artificial intelligence can convert entire manuscripts to customized reading levels. Where audiobooks are lacking, text-to-speech synthesis can step right in. To read -- in a world where literacy rates have never been higher -- has never been a more accessible act. ■ Yet there is no intelligence so stupid as the one which thinks it knows best by mere instinct and does not need to learn. And that offense -- to be unlettered by choice -- is far more deserving of scorn than to merely be stupid. Stupidity can easily lead us astray, but it is not always a matter of choice. Being literate but deliberately unlettered is. And it's a shame.
January 10, 2025
It's an arresting headline from the pages of the journal Science: "Ants best humans at test of collective intelligence". The story is a distillation of a research study conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, which found that groups of ants trying to solve a puzzle-like spatial problem did better than humans solving an identical (but scaled-up) version of the same problem. ■ The reported conclusion is tantalizing, but there's a problem: "To make the comparison as meaningful as possible, groups of humans were in some cases instructed to avoid communicating through speaking or gestures, even wearing surgical masks and sunglasses to conceal their mouths and eyes." ■ That's no small caveat. By "leveling the playing field" in such a way, the researchers denied their human subjects the use of what makes our intelligence collective. We are a cooperative species, but our cooperation depends upon communication. Not just among ourselves, either -- part of what makes our relationship with dogs so special is that they know how to follow our gaze. That's an enormous factor! We can't share our intelligence effectively without a combination of both our extraordinary verbal skills and our advanced nonverbal skills, too. ■ Perhaps if ants had the same evolutionary advantages, they'd be even better at collective intelligence than humans (again, "on a level playing field"). But if you take away from humans some of the most defining features that make us human, then it should be no surprise that the denial leaves us looking pretty stupid. ■ Communication doesn't always make our decision-making better; we have social media, TV talent shows, and no small number of democratic election results to disavow us of assumptions otherwise. We would be fools, though, to underestimate the scope of communication as part of human intelligence or to disrespect the importance of communication as a skill.
January 11, 2025
With the Palisades and Eaton fires alone accounting for the incineration of more than 37,000 acres and at least 12,000 structures, the Los Angeles fires are nearly incomprehensible in scope. Yet they seem oddly personal because so many household names have been affected: Anthony Hopkins, Ricki Lake, John Goodman, Paris Hilton, Jeff Bridges, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Billy Crystal are all named as having lost their homes to the fires. ■ The high concentration of entertainers in the area means that we will likely hear other stories like what happened to music producer Bob Clearmountain, who lost his home recording studio and who thinks many others have been lost, too. There's a good chance that many original recordings themselves have been irreplaceably lost, just like what happened when some 500,000 master recordings were destroyed in a 2008 fire at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. ■ At first, it seems strange to lament the likely loss of recordings in a time when Taylor Swift grossed $2 billion on ticket sales in one concert tour. For many people, the experience value of a concert can be priced far higher than the ongoing enjoyment value of a recording. ■ Still, great musicians should create gobs of recordings so that posterity can sift through them. Not everything has to be "A" material to still be worth saving! Imagine what a corpus of work we might have gotten from Beethoven or Mozart, had they been armed with modern tools for recording and transcribing music. Each wrote more than 600 pieces when they had to do all composition by hand. By hand! ■ To leave behind an enormous body of work isn't the only thing that matters in art, to be sure. But just like Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" re-imagined Beethoven's original without replacing the original, consider a world in which someone digs through the titanic unreleased archives of hundreds of songs recorded at Paisley Park and finds some random Prince riff that's never been developed before, then turns it into an original (if postmortem) collaboration. That would be a richer world than one in which a fleeting composition had crossed Prince's mind and been lost forever. ■ This need for talented artists to record what comes to their human imaginations will only become more important as AI slop takes up ever more space. The potential for computers in the hands of custodians -- rather than click-hunters and engagement-farmers -- to help enhance and grow our humane cultural footprint is great. But it won't get very far if the recordings are lost or the ideas are never recorded in the first place.
January 12, 2025
Four voices that should shut up
Whenever a calamity of shocking proportions comes about, four entirely predictable voices are sure to pipe up. One blames the victims, usually for vaguely defined moral failings. One calls the tragedy a judgment from God. Another blames it on "late-stage capitalism". And the fourth uses it as a case for hoarding weapons and preparing for the collapse of civilization. ■ All four of these voices ignore one of the foremost characteristics of human life, if not the most important aspect of all: We are a cooperative species by our very nature. We are not the strongest, nor the biggest, nor the fastest members of the animal kingdom. But we are endowed with the ability to communicate, cooperate, and organize among ourselves -- and to do so quickly, spontaneously, and voluntarily. Wild animals don't lift cars off crash victims or resuscitate heart attack patients in mid-flight. ■ The knee-jerk reactions either ignore or deny this reality at their own peril. If your philosophy depends upon denying aid when others are in need, then you'll find yourself without friends sooner rather than later. If you blame all bad things on godly judgment, then you'll probably succeed mostly in converting people to disbelief in God. If you wave your arms and vaguely decry the social systems around you, then you'll mostly find yourself isolated inside your own ideological rigidity. ■ And if your plans for a nightmare scenario consist of shooting people rather than cooperating with unlikely allies, then in the unlikely event of an apocalypse, you'll probably make it just long enough for an even bigger warlord-wannabe than yourself to discover your cache of stuff and take it for his own, with you left behind as collateral damage. ■ No social order is perfect. Democracy needs to be maintained within the rule of law. Shortcomings of market economies need to be corrected through regulation or intervention. Peace must often be maintained by stockpiling (and occasionally showing off) the weapons of war. ■ But in any contest among economic or political systems, what perpetually emerges on top is whichever alternative does the most to facilitate freely-chosen cooperation. When people have agency and get to choose what skills and resources they can share, we often share better and more productively than when told what to do. ■ It's rarely flawless; human choices never are. Thus, no social, political, or economic system will turn out perfectly, either. But the application of free, uncompelled choices -- in markets, elections, and in day-to-day life -- more consistently gets us to better outcomes than anything else. The voices that scream otherwise are best told to shut up.
January 15, 2025
If it hadn't been for a particularly ungraceful snub of the Vice President by the husband of a returning Senator, it's likely that few Americans would have noted that the 119th Congress has been in session since January 3rd. Hearings are underway, bills and resolutions have been submitted, and leaders have been elected. ■ The election for the Speaker of the House garnered more attention than usual this year, but the entire seating of the new Congress receives a mere fraction of the attention paid to the farewell activities of the outgoing President and the inaugural preparations for the next. The latter shouldn't so dramatically overshadow the former. ■ The Constitution of the United States addresses the formation of Congress first, in Article I. The Executive Branch is created in Article II. By a reasonable interpretation of the plain language, that should be an indication that we should show at least as much enthusiasm when Congress gets its work underway as when a new President is sworn in. ■ But the unfortunate way in which the Presidency has been treated more and more as an imperial office -- and the steady surrender of real Congressional expertise and legislation to the whims of executive orders and administrative rule-making -- has given the public the impression that the individual person of the President matters more to the direction of the country than the makeup of the Congress expressly elected to represent their interests. That isn't a party problem; both major parties have taken an active part in enlarging and extending the Presidency and in neutering the Congress. ■ It is a national problem instead. And it is one in which it is hard to imagine change coming about without steady, committed effort. Things shouldn't change dramatically just because the Oval Office changes hands; that's not how checks and balances are supposed to work. The House of Representatives is supposed to be where we get our whims and tempers out, the Senate is supposed to put the brakes on bad ideas, and the President is supposed to reject the worst of the bad ideas that still get through, while primarily doing what he or she is instructed to do by Congress. The State of the Union address should never have turned into a campaign-style stump speech; it's supposed to be the report of an agent back to the principals who have the authority to fire him or her. ■ Some complain that they think the Constitution is inadequate to the task of running the United States in its current size. To the contrary, the Constitutional order -- the very thing that officers of the government are sworn to uphold -- is entirely capable of scaling itself effectively, provided that we choose to observe it rigorously. But the demand to do that can come only from the voting public.
January 16, 2025
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization best known for the Wayback Machine, a storage point for billions and billions of snapshots of web pages collected for almost 30 years. The "Wayback Machine" is an incomparable archival resource that preserves the ephemeral history of the digital world that would often otherwise blow away forever. ■ But the Internet Archive has taken on a much larger portfolio than just saving copies of old web pages. It's become a repository for noteworthy video recordings and genealogical source materials, among other treasures. ■ Perhaps most extraordinary among their collections, though, is the software emulation section, where it is possible to not just read the information about old computer programs, but to actually play them (over a web browser) in almost exactly the same condition they would have appeared originally. ■ It may not seem like it should matter that one can play Mortal Kombat or ride the Oregon Trail in its earliest form, but they are authentic preservations of cultural experience -- just as much as a way to re-live history as any other interactive museum experience. And the skill of figuring out how to emulate old computing devices may turn out to be the only way for us to recover data stored on old floppy disks and magnetic tapes. ■ A lot of history -- especially that part preserved only on electronic media -- is lost through neglect, obsolescence, and even mold. Some of the technical experts who sustain the archives are colorful characters in their own right, and their work is well worth supporting. In a world where the digital-first mentality is literally driving history out of print, electronic archivists and librarians are doing irreplaceable work today.
January 17, 2025
A healthy, even vigorous, skepticism of certain high-profile technology moguls is entirely justifiable. Elon Musk took Twitter private, changed its name in the hope of turning it into an all-encompassing lifestyle brand, and implemented policy changes that have opened the door to giving thoroughly antisocial voices all too prominent a platform. Mark Zuckerberg has deftly managed to turn Facebook into a publicly traded company while maintaining strictly dictatorial voting control, all while collecting vast amounts of data on the behavior of more than a billion users -- and their intellectual property. ■ To be wary of their intentions and behavior is a rational act. But as with virtually all human behaviors, their choices -- even the ones that may be selfish or even malevolent -- land on a spectrum. There are gradations to "bad", ranging from things we dislike to things that are purely evil. What constitutes a poison is often determined by the dose. ■ Robert Reich doesn't like their behavior. But for a person who has held a Cabinet office and has access to such an ample megaphone, he demonstrates a chronic disingenuity when he reaches for an applause line on social media. Consider this pronouncement on Reich's Bluesky account: "So it's dangerous for China to have the ability to access our data and manipulate us via social media apps. But it's okay for America's billionaires to have the ability to access our data and manipulate us via social media apps. Do I have this right?" ■ It is, of course, entirely fine to have concerns about how user data is treated -- whether it's in the hands of Facebook or Twitter/X or Snapchat or (as is the subtext of Reich's comments) TikTok. It is not, however, fine to pretend as though there is a true equivalence between what happens with data in the hands of American companies -- subject to supervision by the FTC, the SEC, American courts, and many other domestic legal structures -- and what happens with it in the hands of Chinese companies. ■ Facebook didn't conduct the OPM hack. Twitter wasn't responsible for the Equifax breach. Snapchat isn't running Volt Typhoon. All of those sinister acts -- and many others -- have been conducted by arms, agents, or allies of the government of the People's Republic of China (or, more precisely, of the Communist Party which controls China's government, military, and police). ■ TikTok and its parent, ByteDance, can protest all they want, but their social media platform is plainly considered a state asset by the government of China. ByteDance may be a state-owned enterprise or not -- those facts are hard to make plain. But even that ambiguity alone is enough to cast a very long shadow of doubt over any claims they might make to independence. ■ This doesn't make the TikTok ban a good policy. Nor does it make it a bad one. It simply means that Reich's pseudo-clever attempt to draw a false equivalence is far outside the bounds of reality. No matter what an American might think of Musk or Zuckerberg or any American social-media executive, recourse against them exists, should they commit misdeeds. That recourse may be slow and imperfect, but that's the way of law. ■ China's government, by contrast, exists far outside the reach of American law. It has shamelessly exploited that protection from consequences and weaponized data theft on an incomprehensible scale. And it wouldn't squeal so much about TikTok if it didn't have a hand in its operation. Reich is an objectively intelligent person. But in coloring people he doesn't like with the same brush he uses to paint a known malicious adversary, he's conducting himself like a useful idiot.
The first "Cold Weather Advisory" touching both Iowa and Nebraska
January 19, 2025
Almost 9,000 single-family homes destroyed in California
Almost 9,000 homes were destroyed by the fires around Los Angeles -- that's the early estimate being used by reinsurance brokerage Gallagher Re. For perspective, the US builds about 1.4 to 1.5 million new homes a year. But that's a national figure. In California alone, new single-family housing starts run about 8,000 to 9,000 per month. ■ In other words, the Los Angeles-area fires aren't just substantial in their scale and impact, replacing them is going to materially affect the construction rate for the largest state in the union. It's extremely unfortunate, but the event is going to present a dramatic set of natural experiments for economists. ■ For one, the differences between the post-disaster rules imposed on rental versus owner-occupied housing will have significant consequences. Price limits in the name of "gouging prohibitions" will only affect rental housing: Nobody can tell you not to price your house for sale for an exorbitant amount. Indeed, nobody can force you to sell your home at all (aside from exceptional circumstances involving public domain). ■ For another, the process of local regulatory approval is going to discourage innovations. Local authorities have already said they want to see like-for-like replacements, via statements like, "if you got a mid-century modern, we want to see that mid-century modern come back". The mayor's executive order includes "Clear the way to rebuild homes as they were" as an express bullet point. ■ It's understandable why regulators would prefer like-for-like replacements; the less change, the easier to review. But the mayor's executive order says that for expedited review policies to apply, "The structure or facility to be repaired, restored, demolished, or replaced does not exceed 110% of the floor area, height, and bulk of the structures or facility existing immediately prior to the Wildfires" and says, "the project cannot result in a change of use from [...] a less intensive use to a more intensive use, or an increase in density or units (including accessory dwelling units)". ■ The problem for residents is that they need as much square footage to be built as quickly as possible: It's not hard to imagine neighbors helping neighbors by offering them temporary space in a freshly-built accessory dwelling unit (ADU), like a granny flat or a prefabricated tiny home, while more neighborhood homes are reconstructed. Most people probably want to get back into their original neighborhoods as quickly as possible, and living temporarily in a neighbor's back yard studio probably beats having to live for a longer time in an RV. ■ Likewise, manufactured and modular housing doesn't fit neatly within a regulatory model that favors like-for-like reconstruction, but it could provide a significant way to expedite the reconstruction process and get people home faster than waiting for site-built assembly. Manufactured housing is wildly under-appreciated in America today, and that under-appreciation has stifled much-needed innovations. Helpfully, California's recent statewide liberalization of ADU rules has done much to boost the market. ■ Regulators and city officials too often assume that what matters most in a community is the superficial stuff: Architectural styles, paint colors, and the like. That's a mistake. The lesson of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is that people want to get home, but if there are too many obstacles, they'll be forced to make their homes elsewhere. Neighborhoods are made of people, not just the buildings where they live. If the fire-devastated communities around Los Angeles are to recover, what matters most is getting the people back as soon as possible. How the homes look should be a far-distant lesser consideration.
Users surge to all the wrong services
American users of TikTok, facing the app's shutdown over national security, have joined another China-based social media platform in such numbers that it is scrambling to find English-speaking content moderators.
Enough with the "red state/blue state" stuff
According to Pew survey data, there are five states where a majority of voters are registered Republicans and eight states where a majority of voters are registered Democrats. The largest majorities are just 57% each (Republicans in Wyoming and Democrats in Vermont). No party has an impenetrable majority anywhere, and every state has a substantial number of minority-party voters. Things are not as binary as they seem.
FTC goes after Pepsi for giving pricing favors to Walmart
Is this really what the government needs to be using its law-enforcement powers to manage?
Self-interested Crankery Rules Everything Around Me
People whose bread is buttered by the exchange of cryptocurrency have come out in favor of a "strategic Bitcoin reserve", which might be the most transparently self-interested proposal imaginable. ■ Even in the most favorable of interpretations, cryptocurrency is an extremely speculative asset: Something that Party A purchases strictly in the hope that Party B will purchase it later for a higher price. The greater the speculative excitement, the better for Party A -- because there is no true underlying value to the asset. ■ It's not an enterprise that produces an ongoing stream of valuable output, like farmland or a share in a productive business. It's not an investment in future returns, like a college education. It's not even like a pile of gold bars, which, even if they had no exchange value, could at least be melted down to make dental fillings. ■ Cryptocurrency, at least as an "investment", is entirely a gamble that a greater fool can be found. Anyone proposing that the government should purchase lots of cryptocurrency isn't seriously arguing that there is a "strategic" reason for so doing. They're doing it to get the government to take a pile of their asset class out of the marketplace in order to artificially drive up the market price that the next fool might be willing to pay. ■ It's not one iota different from collectors of any other "asset" -- like Beanie Babies, Hummel figurines, or baseball cards -- proposing that the government needs a strategic reserve of their plush toys, porcelain statuettes, or cardboard-backed photos. And in the case of those other assets, the producers at least knew enough to limit total production. Whole new cryptocurrencies are still being invented, and even the biggest names (like Bitcoin) aren't promising to stop producing new "assets" until 115 years from now. ■ Can cryptocurrencies be used to store value? Potentially -- just as value can be stored in the form of fur coats or antique paperback books. But the government doesn't need any such store of value when it's got the U.S. Treasury Department. A "strategic Bitcoin reserve" is nothing more than a proposal to enrich a handful of speculators at the expense of every taxpayer. Its proponents should be laughed out of the public square.
January 23, 2025
From the local forecast office
When television broadcaster Allen Media Group announced that it would be replacing local TV weather teams with a centralized forecasting hub tied to the Weather Channel, it made the announcement under an avalanche of words like "groundbreaking format", "cutting-edge technology", and "superior weather content". The disquieting reality was that the plan was a move to cut the costs of employing at least 100 local meteorologists. KWWL-TV in Waterloo, Iowa, was among the stations affected. ■ Some changes represent progress. Not all do. The plan to replace local expertise with a centralized weather office represented neither strategy nor initiative. It was fatally flawed judgment rooted strictly in cost-cutting with insulting disregard for the viewing public. ■ Weather coverage isn't just about technical proficiency in reading a Skew-T plot or looking for a hook echo on a radar screen. ■ It's about knowing how to pronounce obscure but meaningful local place names (good luck to someone cold-reading the Eastern Iowa town name "Maquoketa"). It's about recognizing meaningful local patterns, like the impact of a strong westerly wind during an ice storm for drivers traveling over the Iowa River bridge at Steamboat Rock. It's about having a sense for what numerical data doesn't always tell you (yes, there are days when acute observers can smell tornadoes in the air). ■ Authentic experience on the ground matters when you're talking about the intersection of physical science and social science -- that's the essence of weather reporting. ■ Broadcast licensees don't "own" the airwaves; they borrow them. And their products should serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity. That's a matter not of opinion, but of law. Indications are that Allen Media Group has reversed its decision, at least for some individual employees in some markets. That's good, because the plan as announced was anything but a public service.
January 24, 2025
The cost disease that's hard to cure
The concept of Baumol's cost disease holds that the cost of some services will rise even without improvements in quality because the work itself cannot be achieved more efficiently, and the people performing the work have to be incentivized to choose doing it over doing other work for which wages are rising. There are, for instance, only so many surgeries that a surgical team can perform -- the cap on productivity is relatively immobile. ■ At the extreme end of the example, there's no way to increase the productivity of a string quartet playing a piece of music with a known tempo. Three people cannot play all four parts adequately, and playing the song at twice the tempo won't enhance the experience of the audience. Despite these hard limits, musicians' wages have to rise or else they will find work doing something else -- perhaps composing music for YouTUbe videos. ■ There may be something even more sinister than Baumol's cost disease, though: Whereas the cost disease isn't anyone's nefarious design, there are certain occupations where people are rewarded for halting the progress of others. ■ It is generally easier to destroy than to build; look no farther than any war. Destruction can happen in a moment; reconstruction can take generations. When an economy induces too many people to become obstacles to productivity, it asks implicitly to become hamstrung and listless. ■ Lee Kuan Yew could be an autocrat, but he also knew how to make sure Singapore could grow economically, despite its meager natural resources: "Those with good minds to be scholars should also become inventors, innovators, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs; they must bring new products and services to the market to enrich the lives of people everywhere." ■ There are disruptive forces all around, both in the public and private sectors, who are rewarded mostly for getting in the way of initiative shown by others. Americans need to be on the lookout for drift in that direction, particularly as people get their hands on the levers of regulatory and other legal powers and see opportunities to favor their own preferred outcomes. It's already easy for that kind of creep to settle in as large private firms see opportunities to squeeze out rivals not by innovation but by litigation (and contract-terms inflation).
January 26, 2025
The metaphor of the "long arm of the law" has roots that are nearly 500 years old, but it has a whole new applicability in the Internet age. The US Department of Justice has indicted a group of people for using computers in the United States to facilitate remote work done by North Korean IT workers in order to fill North Korea's government treasury with income earned at wages prevailing in the US market. ■ The DOJ says that "North Korean IT workers could individually earn more than $300,000 a year in some cases [...] The North Korean government withheld up to 90 percent of wages of overseas workers, which generated an annual revenue to the North Korean government of hundreds of millions of dollars." ■ For a country with virtually no meaningful international trade other than a busy market in exporting wigs and fake eyebrows to China, "exporting" IT labor is a clever solution to generating some foreign cash. If the trade were legal, it would still be awful for the government to rob the workers of 90% of their earnings, but it would still be a rational strategy for the government. ■ But for good reasons, including those abuses of North Korean workers by their government, the United States has severe sanctions on doing business, electronic or otherwise, with North Korea. That's why the indictment points to an elaborate scheme to cover tracks and maintain the fraud. Nobody should underestimate the need for people in unlikely fields (like law enforcement) to develop and apply high-technology skills in ways that weren't on anyone's radar 25 years ago.
January 28, 2025
Dr. Mark Lewis, a Utah oncologist with a substantial social-media following, once earned a lot of laughs for sharing a patient review: "Dr Lewis saved my life! [4/5 stars]". His wry rejoinder? "Honestly don't know how to earn that 5th star". ■ Ratings can serve useful purposes, especially when used for low-stakes choices for which a lot of investigation would waste useful time: Which restaurant in the neighborhood serves the best steamed dumplings? Did other people like this toaster they found in an online store? Expertise isn't always useful; sometimes, the wisdom of crowds is more than enough. ■ But ratings can also deceive, particularly if they are solicited poorly. One Ukrainian points out that her review of the Air Alert app is five out of five stars, but takes issue with Apple's way of asking for the rating: "Enjoying Air Alert!?" Considering that it's an app designed solely to warn of incoming aerial attacks from Russia, there is nothing enjoyable about it. ■ It does speak to the chronic infantilization of the user experience by companies like Google and Apple that they use "enjoying" as the test verb by default, as though every experience with a product should "spark joy". Some of the most important and useful things in the world (like vaccine shots, sewage treatment, and air raid alerts) aren't enjoyable at all, but they can be literal lifesavers. It's nobody's job to make those experiences enjoyable -- the important question is whether the solutions are useful, efficient, and reliable. ■ Some people only wish to be treated like perpetual adolescents, but they shouldn't steer the rest of society. Life comes with hard times, tough choices, and burdensome sacrifices. Learning to muddle through those with the help of friends, family, and a cheerful disposition is one of the defining ways we become adults.
January 29, 2025
The quailty of content on Saturday Night Live has ebbed and flowed with the times, but other than the cold open and the guest host monologue, no feature has come to the rescue of an episode more often than "Weekend Update". Sketches can be about anything (and often are), but "Weekend Update" is constrained by the news of the week. Anything older feels dated. ■ The constraint often works. Whereas the monologues on the Monday through Friday late-night shows are often trite or predictable, having all week for a team of writers to refine the content helps to sharpen the wit and make it consistently the first- or second-most-rewatched segment of the show. It's not always good, but it's generally much better-watched than nightly monologues written mainly about the same news items. ■ It isn't hard to find breathless but serious commentary and analysis about the news. The torrent is often too much for anyone to digest and remain of sound mind. If, after 50 years, "Weekend Update" has a lesson for the real news, it is that the American media landscape is in need of something not intuitively obvious: More mass-market literary magazines. Or, to be more precise, more outlets aiming to reach a broad audience, devoted to a restrained frequency of publication, and interested in ideas more than individual people or instantaneous events. ■ A big part of publishing survival seems to have pivoted towards having more to say, more often: What used to be the Atlantic Monthly is now very much a daily publication rivaling the country's newspapers of record (literally even recruiting journalists directly away from the Washington Post). Much the same could be said for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, which are not always quite CNN-like in their coverage of breaking news, but which no longer see fit to wait. ■ If even those with access to the best information-gathering tools in the world still can't refrain from speculation in light of news events, perhaps that is a sign our social appetite for instant commentary has outpaced what's really good for us. "Weekend Update" proves that people are willing to wait a week for a good laugh about the news. We could use a diverse array of editorial voices to prove that we're willing to wait a week for good insights into the news. Impatience hasn't paid off that well up to now, and there are no signs the news will abate a week, a month, or a year from now.
January 30, 2025
The problem with website monoculture
A huge share of websites are managed through the same platform: WordPress is the 800-lb. gorilla. Some claim that it serves as the foundation for more than 40% of sites on the Internet, which is a huge fraction, if true. Thus, even if it isn't technically a monoculture, it is the decisive player in the content-management market. ■ But any time a large number of attractive targets are lined up in one place, that presents a danger. Having the same website backbone as 40% of all other websites makes every individual site using WordPress more attractive as a target for both crime and mischief, because the vulnerabilities discovered for one are replicable for many others, if not all. ■ That is presently the case, as a coordinated attack campaign appears to be underway. Outdated plugins and obsolete versions of WordPress are being exploited by the crooked in order to snare information they shouldn't have. ■ WordPress is nice in that it does permit people to put up websites without having to develop in-depth coding expertise. But that's a vulnerability, too, since a user base heavily populated by those with modest technical skills is also one in which precautions (like a regular schedule for installing platform upgrades or a policy for user data securuty) may be few and far between. It's a little like having lots of banks use the same keypad on their vaults -- especially if many of them don't know how to. ■ Farmers raising row crops know that a healthy soil environment often depends upon rotating among crops. The website owners and managers of the world need to learn that monoculture is equally problematic when so many websites are driven by the same tools on the backend.
The relative humidity recorded in Des Moines on January 27th was 20%, the lowest since 2002
Collier's, once an influential publication, has been partially preserved in certain online archives
January 31, 2025
For most of the electronic media age, one of the key steps in any military invasion, popular uprising, or coup attempt was to seize control of the broadcasting outlets. It's why the BBC went to such great lengths to make contingency plans during World War II, and why the Russian people learned a peculiar connotation to broadcasts of "Swan Lake". ■ As the Internet has displaced the airwaves as the leading conduit for communications, the strategic significance of seizing the radio and television stations has fallen behind the significance of capturing control of the official websites and domains. Thus the sweeping disruptions to the online domains of the Federal government reveals just what is now valued most, by all sides in political conflict. ■ Controlling the words people use for outward display on public-facing government websites is so important in some quarters that it effectively eclipses all other considerations, including the basic availability of the websites themselves or content contained therein. Sections of some government websites have been blanked, while other sites have been sent offline altogether. ■ It's interesting to note the similarities in outcome between a self-imposed content purge and what would happen if a hostile entity (like an adversarial foreign government) were to disable a government website for tactical advantage through malicious hacking. Either way, the site becomes unavailable. ■ Few systems are as fragile and as susceptible to breakage as the computer systems belonging to government agencies -- and their website servers are no exception. Breaking things is easy; repairing them is hard. Prudential treatment of those high-tech outlets is today as important as not breaking the vacuum tubes once would have been at a captured radio station.
After getting subsumed into the Google-borg and fading away altogether, the Pebble smartwatch is set to return later in 2025
Cyberattack "compromised the personal data of more than 134,000 students"
Evil people are targeting information belonging to children, and we should be a great deal more clear about the fact it's neither inevitable nor benign. It's sinister stuff they're up to.