Gongol.com Archives: March 2025
| March 2025 | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | ||||||
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | |||||||
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | |||||||
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | |||||||
| 30 | 31 | ||||||||||||
March 1, 2025
Because life can only be lived in one direction, we mark it with familiar waypoints: Learning to walk, graduation, marriage, and a whole host of "firsts". This creates a seductive but faulty expectation that the same waypoints apply to society. ■ qqPolitical figures often use this expectation to their advantage by promising destinations. "Elect me and we will have/do/be something" is a common refrain because it satisfies our instinctive expectations. In human life, once a person has graduated, they don't un-graduate. Once they've learned to walk, barring a catastrophic accident or a stroke, they never have to re-learn. ■ The only thing politics of any sort can offer us is a direction of travel. More free or less free. More dignified or less dignified. More responsible or less responsible. ■ These things are much harder to sell because they depend upon abstract thinking. They also depend upon incrementalism: Taking steps, sometimes only small ones, and recognizing them as pieces of a bigger project which is never complete. ■ Under directional thinking, the work is never done: Good things must be secured through unrelenting attention and bad things must be fought without rest. Destination thinking relies upon appealing but false promises. Learning to recognize the difference doesn't often come naturally, but it's the essence of knowing what makes things tick.
March 2, 2025
The US needs to imitate Finland's forward thinking on media literacy
Finland's approach to educating young people about media literacy is something that can (and promptly should) be implemented in the United States, at the state level. State legislatures and education departments should not delay. And if they do, school districts should act. ■ Finland got ahead of much of the rest of the world because it's within the physical reach of Russian broadcasting antennas. A 100,000-watt FM radio station on a 2,000' tower can easily reach a radius of 100 miles, and there are portions of Finland within 100 miles of St. Petersburg (merely as one example). ■ Helsinki is just 50 miles as the crow flies from Tallinn, Estonia (which was long held under occupation by the USSR). In the United States, these places could easily fit within the same television or radio media market. ■ Circumstances on the ground forced Finland to adapt. And the Russian disinformation environment is mostly a continuation of Soviet disinformation. But now that we have the Internet, physicals limitation have been compressed -- everyone with a smartphone is within arm's reach of foreign propaganda. ■ Under those conditions, the the most important defense is to build up a public that knows how to resist mis- and dis-information. Reality is the best friend of liberty: Free people can face hard truths and good news alike, but trust in truthful representation is essential. That's why outlets like the BBC and the Voice of America treasure their reputations for journalistic independence. ■ It's the bad actors, like authoritarians, totalitarians, and fascists, who need lies to prop themselves up. Those regimes need the spectrum of bad information so much that they are incentivized to be both well-practiced and sophisticated at persuasion through untruth.
700,000 Federal layoffs could be pending
An aggressive plan to permanently eliminate a third of Federal jobs could materialize within the next month. That's big enough to have a measurable negative impact on the national economy.
US troops in Eastern Europe learn from Ukraine's innovations
The state of the art is moving forward, and it's critical for the world's preeminent military to learn. That's one of the reasons alliances are valuable.
Parents bring landlines back to keep kids off smartphones
When does it qualify as a trend or a movement? We'll see.
China's use of live-fire exercises puts airliners at risk
Unannounced use of real weaponry near civilian airplane corridors is massively irresponsible
March 6, 2025
When a CEO appears to be the recipient of a much-too-generous compensation package, it's a smart move for investors to ask how much talent the company could get for the same amount of pay, but doled out to a number of lower-level workers. Is one person's work really worth $89 million for a year, and how much would the company have gained from hiring 100 people at $890,000 each instead? The answer isn't a foregone conclusion, but it's a vital exercise in checking one's perspective. ■ The same is true for other investments. Open AI is about to offer a package deal on access to its highest-level artificial-intelligence platform for $20,000 a month. That's the price, but how much is it worth? ■ Like CEO salaries, investments insist on being understood as comparative values. There are certainly some occupations that would benefit from an AI assist. For others, though, a $20,000-a-month package shouldn't be spent on artificial intelligence, but rather on a pair of high-value, $10,000-a-month human employees. ■ Our ability to comprehend numbers goes away quickly once we cross a bundle as small as three or four. There's a reason American telephone numbers are descrbed with three-digit area codes, and it's because we can't be made to hold more than a few digits at a time in our memory banks. It will save some money up-front, but not much down the chute. ■ AI is a mania right now, and seemingly everyone seems to want to prove a use case for it. When it comes to being hired out, the choice isn't in the dollar figure alone. The real price of anything is what you give up to get it.
March 8, 2025
Adapt and amend it, but don't dare try to end it
Among certain circles on the left, it is fashionable to assert that the Constitution is a bad document. Not just imperfect, but wholly unworthy of keeping. Perhaps it appeals to a proto-revolutionary instinct that shares a strain of thought with Trotsky's "permanent revolution", or perhaps it is merely misguided frustration with the outcomes the Constitution has recently produced. ■ The assertion, though, is utterly without merit and should be dismissed with prejudice. The Constitution is a human-generated document, full of compromises and artifacts of past ideas since reconsidered. That human quality means it is inevitably imperfect. ■ The Founders knew that. That's why the Constitution contains a mechanism for revision -- the amendment process in Article V. Knowing that humans are imperfect, they incorporated a process for self-correction, right from the start. ■ Some may argue that we have used that process too little. Others may argue that we have depended too heavily upon extra-Constitutional mechanisms (like Supreme Court cases and executive actions) to arrive at Constitutional corrections. Both observations may be right. ■ But for any and all of its flaws, the Constitution reflects not only the decisions of 1787, but also the subsequent evolution of thinking ever since. The continuity is the point: Like almost every technological product of our built environment, it has been changed and updated, often incrementally, with the context and knowledge of the time. ■ The Founders had means to latch their doors. Later on came deadbolt locks. Today, electronic keypad locks can be found almost anywhere. Each step along the way has been evolutionary, building upon both prior and contemporary knowledge. ■ Someone might reasonably say, "I think the lock can be improved". It would be unreasonable to say, "People still break into houses, so I think the concept of the lock is a bad one and should be thrown out." Too much knowledge is already embedded in the modern lock to imagine that starting entirely from scratch would be a better idea. ■ Likewise for the Constitution. The core concepts of the Constitution are balance and restraint. If outcomes look like they have become imbalanced or unrestrained, then the answer isn't to jettison the concepts but to demand loyalty to them. The Constitutional system we inhabit is the result of 236 years of incremental progress, and the flaws of its results are human flaws, first and foremost. ■ To their credit, the authors of the Constitution accounted heavily for human nature -- a nature that hasn't fundamentally changed since their time. What we know has changed, but not our nature. And what we know has been incorporated into the system through the consent of hundreds of millions of people ever since. ■ Those who think they know so much better that they could replace the system wholesale from a blank slate reveal only that they are infected by a terminal case of hubris. James Madison himself was sure that we could improve upon his work. But to replace it altogether requires thinking that we know better than everyone who contributed over nearly a quarter-millennium to what we now possess.
March 9, 2025
Ghost stories have been around for as long as we have records of human storytelling. A ghost bearing warnings even makes an appearance in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Chances are good that ghosts have factored in human stories since well before we as a species figured out how to write. ■ It would be a mistake to think of ghosts merely as fright devices, when in the broader sense they symbolize the struggle to make sense out of conscience. Imagine for a moment that ghostly spirits really could appear to us, but only to say one thing: "You know better than that." ■ As a literary device, such a ghost could still make many a useful appearance in literature. After all, what is Clarence the Angel trying to tell George Bailey, other than "You know better than that"? It's a powerful thing to tell someone. ■ If you want a better world, perhaps you should encourage the writing of more ghost stories. Not for cheap frights, but because ghosts are the best literary vehicle for conveying the importance of conscience. The world self-evidently doesn't place enough value on conscience -- not if we can look the other way as grave cruelty is dispensed in so many places without shame. ■ We become the stories we tell ourselves, and not every story reflects a hero in the mirror. Sometimes the otherworldly needs to appeal to our better angels.
March 10, 2025
ABC News has abruptly shut down the polling-focused website FiveThirtyEight, obliterating the domain's content and redirecting traffic to the ABC News "Politics" page. Some story content can still be recovered by the names of individual "538" authors, like G. Elliott Morris, but the projects page is no longer visible. ABC is also cutting and consolidating elsewhere in its news division. ■ 538 alumni like Morris are understandably angry that their work has been functionally erased. The pre-erasure site was expansive and contained reporting, data, and interactive projects -- and though some content can still be retrieved from Archive.org's Wayback Machine, the way ABC obliterated the original site comes across like a form of digital arson. ■ Media jobs have long been precarious occupations. The itinerant radio DJ was a trope long before Dr. Johnny Fever and Harry Chapin's ballad about WOLD. But there is something different to the erasure that comes with being terminated from a media job in the digital era. ■ Being laid off by a media company is distressing enough. To have them nuke an entire body of work on the employee's way out the door (as is now the routine practice) is insulting. Libraries don't just purge their stacks of the books, magazines, and newspapers written by people who are no longer employed. That's not how civilization works. ■ Civilization is a cumulative process, and the people who document civilization's changes (one might even call them "journalists") think of themselves as playing a role in that accumulation. Even if it was work for hire, the journalist often still holds a sense of pride in the creation and sees its destruction as a mad act of needless vandalism. ■ Not everything is worth preserving in the Library of Congress, of course, but the wanton destruction of so much long-tail media content both diminishes the ongoing reputational equity of media outlets and encourages journalists to seek individual celebrity status that is bigger than the status of the outlets themselves. That's a recipe for long-term institutional decay, and there is little reason to believe it will be good for the public interest in the long term.
March 12, 2025
One of the things that gets lost amid the sea of rage-bait posts and faux-movement memes that crowd social media is the subtle art of reading between the lines. Perhaps that's an inevitable byproduct of an "attention economy", in which "Party A DESTROYS Party B" is a clickbait headline formula guaranteed to pay off. But subtlety will eventually have its day once again. ■ Some people call it "Irish diplomacy" and make a buck off selling knick-knacks with various iterations of "The art of telling someone to get lost so that they look forward to taking the trip". But treating any audience gently -- even one that stands in steadfast opposition to the truth, goodwill, or common sense -- is a practice with a long history, endorsed by many successful figures. ■ Calvin Coolidge wrote, "Perhaps one of the reasons I have been a target for so little abuse is because I have tried to refrain from abusing other people. The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately." ■ Booker T. Washington put it like this: "I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done." ■ And from Benjamin Franklin's writings, we read, "Tart words make no friends; a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar." ■ It isn't that direct language shouldn't be used from time to time, but that the right words to get things done may vary. Sometimes, subtlety is an impediment to getting a vital message across. But most of the time, a message that can be conveyed bluntly could also be delivered using just a little less firepower. We are human beings, after all, and pride is very good at creating filters through which contrary arguments and challenging logic must pass. ■ Some evils do need to be blasted with unconstrained, unrelenting criticism. But far more things are best combatted with enough restraint that the intelligent ally can recognize her argument being made while the opponent is forced to confront shortcomings in his own thinking without necessarily realizing that he is under fire of criticism. ■ These things aren't easy to do when the temptation to go viral is psychologically (and sometimes monetarily) rewarding. But if words are used not merely to make ourselves feel better or righteous, but to actually achieve persuasive goals instead, then much (if not most) of the time, making way for the audience to read between the lines is the best way to put words to work.
March 13, 2025
Sometimes it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of sharing this little planet of ours with 8 billion other people. We aren't naturally wired to think in quantities like billions, and that's just so very, very many other people on the same pale blue dot. ■ But at other times, it's a stark reality check to realize that for any particular skill, there exists a finite number of real experts who know how to do things well. Just as there are celebrity "A-listers", so too are there "A-lists" for every conceivable occupation, trade, craft, subject matter, and hobby on the planet. A great share of the time, the A-listers know one another (or at least know of one another), and they are recognizable to a degree of some celebrity-like status within their fields. ■ Events like mass layoffs and government shutdowns tend to put this into relief from what might be thought of as the supply side: We start to see how many people are (or are not) enough to get certain jobs done. ■ On the other hand, events like an anticipated major storm outbreak put a spotlight on it from what might be described as the demand side: Mass numbers of people will be hoping for expertise to be available on seemingly short notice. ■ Expertise can be a very fragile thing: It's almost never held entirely in isolation by individual geniuses, but rather depends upon collaboration, interaction, teamwork, and access to concentrated resources. We are fortunate to live in a time when most forms of expertise are at their historical best. ■ But we should carry always the humility to realize that it gets that way usually through patient, incremental, evolutionary progress -- rarely through big breakthroughs carried out by lone geniuses. Careless damage done to the environments that produce those desirable results can't easily be repaired. If the Mayo Clinic were disbanded, it's unlikely that it could ever be reassembled. And it isn't always evident that pulling an individual thread can cause an entire garment to unravel.
March 14, 2025
Taiwan's new president has declared China a "foreign hostile force" and warned that "China has been taking advantage of democratic Taiwan's freedom, diversity, and openness". ■ The most likely strategic opening for China to launch a military attack on Taiwan remains the cover of some kind of major natural disaster -- a crippling earthquake or typhoon. The island is vulnerable to both, and if it were to be hit hard enough by Mother Nature, then Communist China could be expected to use the event as cover for a massive mobilization under the cover of providing "relief aid". ■ Those events, though, remain sufficiently unpredictable that it could easily be a matter of decades before such an opening would occur. But the extraordinary uncertainty lately unleashed on the global order may create something close to a human equivalent of a massive natural disaster. The US has provided Taiwan a security umbrella of sorts for a long time, but if that umbrella is retracted -- even if only temporarily -- then China might take it as a signal to act. ■ Concerns over infiltration operations being conducted to undermine Taiwan's system of government are probably very well-founded. And that, in turn, ratchets up the danger of domestic overreaction. The balance is exceedingly hard to get right under the best of circumstances. And these circumstances are not the best, by a long shot.
March 16, 2025
The news paywall is one of the most ubiquitous irritants on the Internet. Nobody likes them, and no matter how reasonable the argument that ad-supported news is an unsustainable model, the plain fact is that most consumers have a finite budget for news and entertainment media, and that budget is far less than the prospective cost of paying for access to every service that might enlighten, entertain, and inform them. ■ This grows even truer for people who live in countries where the economy is still developing, or where the authorities are keen to restrict access to foreign voices. If $25 a month for a New York Times subscription seems like a lot to an American, it's proportionally twice as expensive to someone living in Greece, where the per-capita GDP is half that of the US, or three times as costly in a place like the Dominican Republic. ■ In North Korea, where Internet access to the outside world is basically forbidden to everyone? Such a subscription is literally beyond all price. ■ Yet into this world, the same governments that seek to repress news-seeking inside their own borders are happy to pay for RT, CCTV, and Press TV, among many other names. They know that the appetite for information is great, and that people who can't or won't pay for high-quality content may be satisfied with outlets that look news-adjacent. ■ There is no withdrawal from the competitive environment for influence in the modern media economy, only surrender. What the United States has furnished for decades through the US Agency for Global Media and its predecessors has been a diet of overwhelmingly balanced and straight coverage of the world via the Voice of America, RFE/RL, and other outlets. The prevailing wisdom has been that reality is the best friend of liberty: Telling the truth about events (warts and all) will reflect better on the free world than on oppressive regimes. ■ It was a good investment when the VOA went to air in 1942 as a counter-program to propaganda from Germany, and it's a good investment today. Ben Franklin once put it that "The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse." He may have been talking about pedestrian affairs like committee meetings, but it's no less true in the global media environment. Going dark is a sure way to let the propagandists of hostile nations flood the zone with lies about America's purported faults. Liberty only needs to tell the truth to prevail, but it can persuade no one if it remains silent.
March 17, 2025
St. Patrick's Day may have evolved into America's favorite freewheeling holiday in no small part because so many Irish people immigrated here. But for all the lighthearted joy that comes with the parades and the green-tinted rivers, Irish cultural resilience shouldn't be underrated. ■ Ireland spent hundreds and hundreds of years under English oppression. It wasn't just a modern invasion -- the first round happened in 1169, and the imperial era dates all the way back to 1541. That's 79 years, or roughly a modern lifetime, before any English expatriates set foot on Plymouth Rock. It wasn't until the early 20th Century that the Irish managed to reclaim their self-rule. ■ We may be most familiar with the "Fighting Irish" mascot of the University of Notre Dame, but it's good to see the bigger picture about Irish identity. It wasn't an outgrowth of English identity, but rather a separate and unique culture all its own which had to adapt to a long-term English occupation. Unlike most of Europe, it was never conquered by Rome, either. ■ The Irish patriot Michael Collins celebrated this unique history as the foundation for the free Irish state: "The love of learning and of military skill was the tradition of the whole people. They honored not kings nor chiefs as kings and chiefs, but their heroes and their great men. Their men of high learning ranked with the kings and sat beside them in equality at the high table [...] We have to build up a new civilization on the foundations of the old". ■ It's easy to let the high-spirited holiday overwhelm all other perceptions, but the Irish (both those living on the island and their many cousins in the vast Irish diaspora abroad) have rightful claim to an honorable history with a unique culture that goes well beyond having a pint on March 17th. From colonial subjugation just a century ago to one of the world's economic and freedom-loving powerhouses today, it's a testament to what can happen when people are free to determine their own course.
March 18, 2025
Historically rich, even if in the middle today
Using time worked as a means to standardize purchasing power over time, an intrepid researcher finds that the minimum-wage worker today can buy a lot of consumer goods for about the same time-based price as a median worker 100 years ago. The big exception is in housing: Both rent and purchase prices are much, much more expensive than they were three or four generations ago. ■ Today's median worker lives not all that differently (based on the time-worked measurement) than the top 1% of 1924. Again, housing is the outlier -- it's much more expensive today, and that should hold our attention. If housing is a third or more of most household budgets, and if that price is burdensome for half or more of the population, then we need an honest reckoning with the problem. Zoning in many places should be liberalized, restrictions like minimum lot sizes should be reformed, and we should do much more to encourage transformational methods of homebuilding like manufactured housing. ■ But it's important to recognize that improvements in material standards of living are important supports for making progress on non-material principles, as well. A materially secure society can put much-needed energy into matters like securing civil rights. ■ Wealth doesn't make a society morally strong, but it helps to eliminate distractions and stresses that permit the unscrupulous to appeal to lesser public instincts. The ever-present risk, though, is that material wealth can lead to a self-satisfied sense of distraction from important matters of character. That's the gamble upon which the Communist Party has bet so heavily in China: They're desperate for GDP growth as a substitute for recognizing the natural rights of their citizens. That's what makes current sustained downward trends in GDP growth such a problem for the regime. ■ Economic growth and progress in building the moral character of a nation have to go hand-in-hand. It's no use being rich but awful, and it's not sustainable to be highly just but poor.
60,000 fake domains are stealing toll money
Cybersecurity researchers think at least 60,000 fraudulent domains are in use right now to collect private information from people who fall for scam text messages telling them that they owe road tolls. It's a problem spreading like wildfire, with a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations.
Major radio station ownership groups are shutting down stations
Radio towers are going dark as owners run short of ideas to keep them profitable
March 19, 2025
Huge variances in public opinion
Presidential job approval swings by 79 percentage points just by changing a voter's gender and educational level
March 20, 2025
One of America's best public institutions is the National Transportation Safety Board. Its newly-issued interim report on the ship collision with the Francis Scott Key Bridge is a valuable example why. The report directly and plainly states that 68 other bridges are at elevated risk of a similar disaster, and points to exactly what ought to be done without a moment's delay to protect the people who use those bridges. ■ Bad events will happen from time to time, but they become tragic if we ignore the lessons we should have learned. The NTSB does just that. It's public service of the highest form, channeling technical expertise into the job of finding the root causes of incidents and accidents, then formulating clear advice to be followed so the bad events don't reoccur. ■ NTSB reports are written carefully, documenting information that needs to be digested not just by professionals, but also by interested non-professionals. This is important, because many public policies either need to be shepherded through the lawmaking process by non-professionals or otherwise be supported by them. Good policy isn't necessarily self-sustaining; it needs good advice and an audience capable of acting on what it's told. ■ The report on the Key Bridge collision lays out in clear language who needs to take action in response to the incident, and there are a lot of parties on that roster. Names are named, from the Federal Highway Administration to the Harris County Toll Road Authority. This is the way competent government is carried out.
March 21, 2025
Once a person begins to grasp that wind is just air trying to equalize its pressure on a colossal scale, a lot of other weather phenomena make a great deal more sense.
The airliner that flipped over at Toronto Pearson in February had warnings about a high rate of descent just a second or two before touchdown, according to the preliminary report of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. This fact, as well as the damage to the right main landing gear, will undoubtedly feature centrally in the mainstream news coverage of the incident. ■ "The pilot landed the plane too hard" is a convenient and attractive summary of the situation, but people need to digest the incident thoughtfully. Something can be both true and dangerously misleading if it overshadows facts that need to be examined in the daylight. ■ Fixating on "pilot error" -- whether it's actually the case or not -- is a really hazardous way to operate, since it causes us to miss the systemic factors undoubtedly involved. Those are the most important details involved. ■ Whenever something goes wrong within a complex system, "the human at the controls" is almost always a contributing factor, but the system itself that produced the result is what should get the most attention. The system includes training, guidance, rules, technology, and a whole range of other factors that matter. What makes for an attention-grabbing headline can easily obscure the story that demands to be told.
The National Weather Service has been placed under drastic personnel cuts by the Executive Branch, and the elimination of more than a thousand jobs is showing up in service reductions. ■ The Omaha office has suspended weather balloon flights due to the cuts. That may not seem significant at first, but small gaps in knowledge can have amplified consequences. ■ Omaha is the only close balloon site typically found upwind of most of Iowa, which means that the information captured by those radiosonde observations will no longer be available for forecasting purposes over the state. ■ That means no proximate upper-air data on pressure, temperature, winds, and humidity -- all of which can tell meteorologists a lot about the potential for conditions ranging from the ordinary to the severe. It's a significant loss of useful information.
March 24, 2025
Citing a report from Daily NK, TechCrunch says that North Korea is establishing a new hacker group within its intelligence service. The reports indicate that the group is going to focus on offensive hacking (like digital theft) while operating around-the-clock. ■ It's hard for those who had their formative years between the end of World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union to contextualize what the world's threats look like today. The two-superpower world of the classic Cold War didn't really make much room to consider countries as big as India, much less a nation like North Korea -- which, at 26 million people, is only slightly more populous than Florida, but with an economy so small that it's 20% smaller than Wyoming's. ■ But asymmetric techniques of warfare and conflict change that. If North Korea has just enough talented individuals, a modest Internet connection, and a few laptops, then it has enough capacity to potentially do consequential damage even to a country as large as the United States -- provided that it has no scruples about how the damage is done and nothing really to lose from being punished on the global stage. It's already a nation fundamentally cut off from the Internet; there's little left for it to lose. ■ Getting used to those systemic imbalances takes a level of adaptive thinking that not everyone in high office is prepared to demonstrate. The threat is very real and the damage that could be done is quite substantial. If our adversaries are unbounded by expectations of rules and norms, then our defenses must be robust and consistent. Inconsistent policy behavior will only impose costs in one direction: On ourselves.
Remembrance is valuable to the present
A memorial tribute to a 1910 train wreck received some notice in Iowa, as the event marked the 115th anniversary of the state's worst rail disaster. The Green Mountain crash killed 52 people when a passenger train traveling backwards derailed and wooden passenger cars were crushed by heavier steel ones. ■ Contemporary accounts of the crash were gruesome, and the death toll was awful. Yet it's still instructive, even if inter-urban passenger rail traffic is nonexistent in the state today. ■ For one thing, the coroner decided not to investigate because "it was evident that the wreck was caused by an accident". The railroad itself promised an inquiry in the immediate aftermath, but no thorough investigation of root causes was performed. Such a reaction would be unthinkable today; the NTSB looks at railroad accidents today, even if only a single fatality is involved. ■ For another, it's well worth appreciating that for however breathless the initial newspaper headlines, accidental death was a huge factor in daily life a century ago -- it remains much too significant a factor today, but it was astonishing back then. Hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of railroad workers died every year, and most years saw 25,000 to 40,000 of them injured. And those are just the workers, not even counting passengers. Today, the total number of occupational fatalities ranges between 4,500 and 5,500 among all occupations -- still too high, but strikingly fewer than the 10,000 or more annual fatal accidents that occurred a century ago, when the country was home to about a third as many people. The numerator has decreased, while the denomenator has grown: That's a tremendous success story. ■ Good outcomes like increasing workplace and transportation safety should never be taken for granted. They are the complex results of many individual events, experiences, and choices. Rules and regulations governing safety behavior should always remain subject to thoughtful revision and reform, as circumstances themselves change. But the much safer world we inhabit today should be appreciated as a cumulative outcome -- one not particularly amenable to radical reform, and one in which caution should always prevail over eagerness to make changes.
March 28, 2025
Don't oversubscribe to the hype
In the midst of another artificial intelligence hype cycle -- this one driven by an update to ChatGPT that permits users to mimic the cartoon style of Studio Ghibli and other animators with astonishing similarity -- OpenAI has announced a "temporary" rate limit on the number of images that users can request. ■ Popular new technologies are often swept up in irrational crescendoes of public enthusiasm. Looking back, there have been periods when adding the prefix "e-" or the words "atomic" or "electric" were enough to summon the same kind of enthusiasm that gets applied to any use of "AI" today. (To take just one example, the snack we know as Triscuit is a portmanteau of "electricity biscuit"; such was the power of that word in its heyday.) ■ Knowing that a neat new technology isn't god-like remains of the utmost importance. AI, for now at least, consumes lots of energy -- hence the throttling back of ChatGPT image requests -- and we put ourselves in grave danger if we overestimate its power without some modesty about how it is used. ■ No one is irreversibly harmed if a wave of image requests generates a few duds along the way. But things could go profoundly wrong if artificial intelligence is drafted to re-write the code that generates Social Security payments, as it appears may happen soon. Hype can be dangerous when it's untethered from caution to hold it back. Temperance isn't often a path to popularity, but it's a necessary insurance policy against the kind of irrational exuberance that creates huge mistakes.
March 29, 2025
In 2008, there was a brief spell during which President-elect Barack Obama's enthusiastic use of his BlackBerry raised eyebrows. The device couldn't be made sufficiently secure for his job, it was argued, and the risk of a Presidential PDA getting compromised represented just too great a hazard. Compromise was achieved, and the President got to keep his device. ■ Since then, VIP cybersecurity has been a long chain of embarrassments, from a Secretary of State wisecracking about wiping e-mail servers "with a cloth" to midnight tweets about covfefe. The problems have only gotten worse. ■ It's vital for everyone -- from VIPs to the ordinary citizen -- to realize that digital information can be in one of two states: It's either "in transit" between computers (or other devices), or it's "at rest" (when it's residing on a computer where it can be stored, read, or otherwise accessed). ■ "End-to-end encryption" is helpful for protecting data while it's in transit. Signal is one of many applications to provide that category of protection. But it doesn't protect data "at rest" -- when it's arrived at a destination device. If that device has been compromised (as with something like a malicious screen mirror), then the end-to-end encryption may have provided nothing more than a false sense of security. ■ It has been more than 16 years since the original Obama BlackBerry controversy, and we appear to have made exactly no progress whatsoever in either getting VIPs to take their own protection seriously or in developing and deploying thoroughly hardened personal devices for those VIPs to use (like the super BlackBerry desired by President Obama). It isn't safe to go on this way, and that's a problem which has nothing to do with party identification.
March 30, 2025
Not quite 60 days have elapsed since China targeted companies like Google with retaliatory measures in response to tariffs imposed by the United States on Chinese goods. It's a passage of time worth noting in light of the April 5th deadline for a sale of TikTok, which was set by an arbitrary 75-day extension created by the Executive Branch. ■ For the entire time the TikTok clock has been ticking, any reasonable person should assume that Chinese officials have been cooking up additional ways to retaliate against American companies. China will want to retaliate for the tariffs in general, but the TikTok dispute provides a useful focal point. ■ The original ban on TikTok was one thing; it may have been a bit ham-fisted, but it was a fairly clear and straightforward response to cybersecurity concerns. Worries about probable ties between the app and the Chinese government seem particularly well-founded in light of how that government responded to the threats of closure. ■ But suspending the ban in order to entertain a forced sale under duress looks like quite a different thing. And if it goes through, there's certainly a non-zero chance that China will attempt a mirror-image forced sale of some American digital asset. ■ So many other things have happened in the last 70 days or so that it's easy for people to lose track of the individual details, but short memories are dangerous. What happens if the President appears to have forced a sale of TikTok to one of his friends? Under those conditions, would anyone actually come to the defense of, say, Microsoft, if the Communist Party were to demand a sale of Microsoft's large operation in China? We have wandered into hazardous territory, and the more capricious American behavior appears, the more we ought to worry about the possible consequences for our interests abroad.
More than 105 million Americans under severe weather threat
More than 41 million are under the Level 3 "Enhanced" risk, which is an enormous number of people
Illegal burning leads to LP tank explosion
It makes for stunning video
Human behavior is quite often just social contagion
Tom Nichols points out that terrorist bombings happened at an appalling rate in 1970s America. The idea spread and self-perpetuated because it spread -- not unlike a contagious disease. Universities should probably make everyone in the social sciences go through a couple of courses in epidemiology. It would probably do a lot of good. Even in economics and finance, basically everything significant that Warren Buffett has ever said about investing could have been cross-pollinated from health topics like inoculation and viral reproduction.
A great ad, needed for the worst of reasons
(Video) Canada's new prime minister takes the spotlight in an ad defending his country's identity -- an identity any right-thinking American should have no trouble respecting.