Brian Gongol Show on WHO Radio - May 18, 2019
Please note: These show notes may be in various stages of completion -- ranging from brainstormed notes through to well-polished monologues. Please excuse anything that may seem rough around the edges, as it may only be a first draft of a thought and not be fully representative of what was said on the air.
Breaking news to watch
- Weather
Segment 1: (11 min)
BUT FIRST: The opening essay
Seek the biggest gap
- Graduation season
- "It's not an end, it's a beginning" -- if only we took that platitude seriously
- Three pieces of advice:
- 1. Really don't stop learning
- 2. Attach yourself to a good mentor (or many)
- 3. Don't do what you love -- seek the biggest gap
- 1. Really don't stop learning
- Progress comes from improvement
- If you want to benefit from progress, you have to contribute to the improvement
- 2. Attach yourself to a good mentor (or many)
- Have the humility to admit you don't know it all
- Find people who aren't going to give you shortcuts, but who will help you learn from their experience
- Tuition in the school of life: Learning from your own experience, or learning from other people's experience
- OPE is much cheaper tuition
- 3. Don't do what you love -- seek the biggest gap
- "Do what you love and the money will follow" is terrible advice
- Find what you can love about what you do
- Maximizing the gap between the compensation value of what you do (for most people, it's money -- but also fulfillment, enjoyment, cameraderie, a sense of purpose, etc.) and what you give up in order to get it (explicit costs like student loans, sure, but also other things you sacrifice -- where you have to live, what time you must give up with friends and family, what other opportunities you have to trade off)
- This is utility maximization, in economic terms
- Maybe LeBron James would be great at Major League Soccer, but that's not the game he's best at. He'd have to give up a lot to get to greatness, including trading off where he's already great.
The moral of the story:
Segment 2: (8 min)
Totally Unnecessary Debate of the Day
Totally Unnecessary Debate of the Day™:
— Brian Gongol Show (@briangongolshow) May 18, 2019
About that "Game of Thrones" finale...
Totally Unnecessary Debate of the Day™:
— Brian Gongol Show (@briangongolshow) May 10, 2019
Hardest "Iowa" food to explain to outsiders?
Segment 3: (14 min)
Iowa news
Dave Swenson interview
- Famous from his appearance on "Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas" last night
- Article: "Most of America's Rural Areas are Doomed to Decline"
- That's some bitter medicine
- "Most micropolitan and rural communities have no viable economic Plan B, so I believe that the majority of them are fated to dwindle until eventually reaching some level of stability."
- "It is important to develop policies that assure access to necessary public services, connect rural residents to modern technologies for the sake of participating meaningfully in modern society and safeguard that which is good and appealing about these less populated places. Academics are good at isolating the causes and the consequences of rural decline, but we have yet to figure out what to do about it."
"The most reliable way to deepen the stock of social capital is to allow people to move from low social-capital places to high social-capital places." - Ryan Avent
The moral of the story:
Segment 4: (5 min)
The moral of the story:
Segment 5: (11 min)
Make money
An observation on Uber "telling its story" to the stock market
Anyone who buys a stock and then complains that the price hasn't immediately escalated is just looking for a bigger fool to sell it to. If you really believe that a stock's price is too low, then you shut up and buy more.
Everyone in the world should have to take a 30-minute crash course in economics, consisting of 10 minutes on tradeoffs, 10 minutes on unintended consequences, and 10 minutes on sunk costs. And the world would be a better place for it.
Have fun
The TWA Hotel at JFK is now open, and the pictures are glorious. Eero Saarinen's magnificent building has a new life. The real question is, if so many people can agree that the design aesthetic of the building is such a treasure (and it is), then who's following the same path today, and why aren't there more of them?
Clean up after yourself
Iowa makes 44 states to sue over OxyContin
Five states filed suit, joining 39 others that had already done so. Paragraphs 4 and 6 of the introduction to the Iowa filing really hammer the crux of the problem: The state's attorney general alleges that the drug was marketed under false pretenses that set up patients for addiction, including misrepresentation of the duration of expected relief from pain. That's an enormously serious allegation.
Mind your business
Two Iowa Supreme Court decisions on collective bargaining
The moral of the story:
Segment 6: (8 min)
Hot (social) topics
The moral of the story:
Segment 7: (14 min)
Technology Three | The week in technology
Boeing wants a 100% tariff on Airbus planes
Imagine a world in which Boeing faces less competitive pressure to produce a safe, efficient aircraft. As Milton and Rose Friedman wrote, "The great danger to the consumer is monopoly -- whether private or governmental [...] Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world."
A batch of new vulnerabilities have just been exposed. They are complicated and pervasive -- and somehow, these problems need to be explained to a public that only a decade ago still couldn't get the VCR to stop blinking "12:00".
Tech flashback: What you could buy in 1991
We've upgraded from 2400 baud to 5G wireless, only to spend the time saved making faces on Snapchat.
The moral of the story:
Segment 8: (5 min)
Hyperbole is going to kill us all
Why does the President hate Toyota?
The White House has issued a truly cockamamie executive order which claims that "domestic conditions of competition must be improved by reducing imports", and that the Secretary of Commerce "concluded that the present quantities and circumstances of automobile and certain automobile parts imports threaten to impair the national security". Toyota and Honda have both very prominently developed massive operations in the United States, as have other "foreign" automotive manufacturers. This idiotic government manhandling of the automotive industry is outrageous, and the crude deference to "domestic" versus "foreign" ownership is a relic of the 19th Century.
The moral of the story: The easiest way to lose an argument is to overstate your case. Arguing that we need to put up with lower-quality, less-innovative cars from a couple of companies with "American" names while kneecapping rival automakers with huge domestic investments in the United States is an overstatement of epic proportions.
Unsorted and leftovers:
This week
Swiss movie theater installs beds
Ew. Just go home and watch Netflix.
Japan drops restrictions on American beef
Iowa has huge advantages as an agricultural producer, and free trade lets us capitalize on them. This is great news. Naturally, there are consequences to competition, and some people will zero in on those. But there are consequences of technological change, too. And there are a bunch of other factors that create consequences, too.
Disagreeing for the right reasons
Sociologist Bradley Campbell notes: "A common error -- if it's error and not dishonesty -- is speaking as if people who oppose what you support oppose it for the same reasons you support it." People may share your desired outcomes, but for the "wrong" reasons. It's useful to examine their reasons to test your own reasoning -- but it's also important not to judge others solely by their allies in a specific cause.
The obsession with putting images into social-media posts results in some odd choices
Someone actually advocates testing immigrants for their knowledge of "Big Brother" rather than, say, the Constitution.
Craig Ferguson, interviewed by Kathie Lee Gifford
One would never believe that it works, but it does. Ferguson may well be a quicker wit than anyone else alive today.
All other factors notwithstanding, Americans got 8 years of practice in picturing Joe Biden hanging around the Oval Office. America already took a test drive in the Joe-Mobile. All the other candidates, for better or worse, are still trying to get you to visit the dealership. Getting the "customer" to envision the end-state is really one of the most important tools in all of sales.
Think what you want about climate change, but...
It's hard to argue with the actions of real people on the ground. Louisianans are quite literally moving to higher ground. It's a pure example of revealed preferences: With real consequences and real money on the line, watch what people do instead of what they say.
Attention to the finer details
A dive into the nature of callout lines -- those little lines that let people add more information to maps when the space is already too densely filled
Letters of complaint to John Glenn
Matthew 6 has a thing or two to say about the criticism that he spent too little time publicly thanking God for his safety.
Much of what really constitutes "infrastructure" is concealed from view. You see roads and bridges, which is why politicians try to make hay from them. But the remainder of the spectrum is enormously important, and it's society's cost of doing business.
NYC used to be Nieuw Amsterdam...
...but now it's Las Vegas that wants to be the new Amsterdam, letting visitors purchase and use marijuana.
Trump lawyers claim Congress has no authority to investigate him
The entire legal team behind this argument ought to be put in stocks on the front lawn of Montpelier and flogged with a hardbound edition of the Federalist Papers. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the authority to fire the President (Art. II, Sec. 4), the authority to require reports from the President (Art. II, Sec. 3), and (of course) the authority "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof" (Art. I, Sec. 8). There's no ambiguity here: Congress is the boss, and the President is the employee. Whatsoever they find necessary and proper to investigate regarding the conduct of the government and the execution of the law, they have the power to do. Period.
Perpetrator in Mall of America attack gets 19-year prison sentence
The victim, a 5-year-old boy, is recovering from the attempted homicide. There's really no question the perpetrator should be kept away from the public. He's clearly a danger. But his public defender is probably right to be frustrated that there isn't a good place to send him.
Per NBC News: "A study of more than 45,000 women found more than half only visit their OB/GYN. Less than 6% visited a primary care physician."
We need better words than "liberal" and "conservative"
The best alternative to the shifting definitions of words like "liberal" and "conservative" would be to identify with individual leaders (Thatcherite, Churchillian, Reaganite...) -- but those leaders evolved personally over time, and so have the facts, so even those definitions would be ambiguous at best.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock enters the Presidential race
Send in the governors!
21st Century conservatism
It's not a revolution, but it is a vote against a judicial nominee who "had called [President] Obama an 'un-American imposter'" in public. Words have consequences.
More providential moralism in our public buildings, please!
On the side of an Art Deco-inspired courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee: "The first duty of society is justice" (a line courtesy of abolitionist Wendell Phillips).
Tin Foil Hat Award
Unions circulating the "Marxist" definition of business ought to reconsider
As with most forms of human organization, labor unions are neither inherently good nor inherently bad. The form doesn't determine their goodness, but rather the motivations and the things they actually do. Labor unions have done some great things (Solidarity, for instance, led a Communist-toppling revolution in Poland). But they've also conducted some terrible abuses, and the abuses have their roots in bad philosophy -- like Marxism.
Kickers
Fun fact: The 10th song at a Phish concert generally starts a week after the band takes the stage. https://t.co/C1FW7QyXVg
— Brian Gongol (@briangongol) May 15, 2019
Much of the best rock music ever was produced in the 1990s:
— Brian Gongol (@briangongol) May 14, 2019
Stone Temple Pilots, R.E.M., 4 Non Blondes, Alice in Chains, Cranberries, Soundgarden, Garbage, Nirvana, Bush, Goo Goo Dolls, The Offspring, Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Candlebox, Live, Meredith Brooks.
But...Sublime? https://t.co/qNJrqr85vl
Trick question: My sense of schadenfreude wants it to be released, but I see no reason to punish my own eyes with it. https://t.co/WnMLoXb0ug
— Brian Gongol (@briangongol) May 14, 2019
I didn't know they were interviewing for the UN Ambassador slot today. https://t.co/f9AZe2UFAE
— Brian Gongol (@briangongol) May 16, 2019
Whoa. My spam folder is experiencing an existential crisis. pic.twitter.com/vVYj4AaLMu
— Brian Gongol (@briangongol) May 16, 2019
Recap
♫ Listen to the full episode from May 18, 2019 here
① It's graduation season, so while everyone else is out giving their commencement speeches and personal advice to graduates ("Plastics!"), here's mine: Don't do what you love, hoping that the money will follow. That's a recipe for disaster. Instead, seek the biggest gap -- between how you're compensated (in all of its forms, from your paycheck to your sense of fulfillment) and what you must give up in order to do it.
② How does the "Game of Thrones" finale make you feel? I find it a lot like the World Cup: Lots of other people care a whole lot, and that doesn't bug me -- but I can't muster even the slightest bit of interest.
③ and ④ How are small towns in Iowa (and all over the country) going to survive? Dave Swenson is an economist at Iowa State, where he studies this very question, and he's come up with a serious warning: "Most of America's Rural Areas are Doomed to Decline". If there are even five topics more important for Iowa to be addressing, I'd like to know what they are.
⑤ Economics in 30 minutes, Iowa sues the makers of OxyContin, and a far-out new hotel.
⑥ Opioid painkillers vs. plain old aspirin: A listener argues we're overdoing the hard stuff.
⑦ Competition makes for better technology. Boeing and Intel both give us examples to consider in this week's Technology Three.
⑧ What does the President of the United States have against Toyota?