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.