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December 3, 2024
Feedback loops in political economy
An enlightening paper on political attitudes in the United States reveals that zero-sum thinking has a deeper effect on many people's preferences than any conventional partisan alignment. It's a conclusion based upon survey data collected from a sample of more than 20,000 Americans, and the results are convincing. ■ Even more eye-opening is the observation that zero-sum thinking, which is quite convincingly related to economic conditions in one's youth, is also demonstrably related to previous generations' experience within a family. If your parents or grandparents (and maybe even great-grandparents) experienced economic mobility, there's probably an effect that shows up, measurably, in your attitudes today. ■ The research certainly helps to build a case for seeing economic growth and progress as an important pillar for what we historically called a "liberal" world order: One based on liberties and freedoms for all. Setting up false rivalries between groups (an exercise in zero-sum thinking) is a long-standing weapon of those who want to use power in bad ways. ■ It's also a mild case for supporting those programs, initiatives, and institutions that help young people to appreciate constructive and non-competitive activities in their youth. If our political attitudes in adulthood are partially formed by whether we see the economic pie as a thing that can grow or not, surely we are also formed by whether our recreational and developmental activities convince us to see everything as matchups between teams, one of which must lose in order for the other to win. ■ It's all quite insightful, and probably unexpectedly helpful in illuminating why some of the conventional assumptions about the two-party political system in the US seem to be falling apart before our eyes. Feedback loops can be very real -- and have very long periods.
December 2, 2024
While the news of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend placed considerable attention on the President's decision to pardon his long-troublemaking son, another prominent father passed judgment of a different sort on his offspring. Warren Buffett, who has a nearly $150 billion fortune to his name, announced a plan to entrust the charitable distribution of his wealth to his children when he passes away. ■ Buffett's announcement is unusually frank in its assessment of how his children came to this point: When his first wife died and left behind a $3 billion fortune, "they were not ready to handle the staggering wealth that Berkshire shares had generated". That was in 2004, when they were in their late 40s and early 50s. ■ "Not ready" says a lot, even if it's objectively true that taking over a $3 billion fortune would test the judgment of most people. Barack Obama became President of the United States at age 47. Dwight Eisenhower was 53 years old on D-Day. Plenty of big decisions have been made at middle age. ■ To his credit, though, Buffett has sought to be clear-eyed about his own offspring and their preparedness for big responsibility -- which now includes giving away his enormous fortune (about 50 times larger now than $3 billion) when he dies. "I've never wished to create a dynasty or pursue any plan that extended beyond the children", writes Buffett. "I know the three well and trust them completely. Future generations are another matter [...] And tomorrow's decisions are likely to be better made by three live and well-directed brains than by a dead hand." ■ It's a lesson worth considering in contrast with many other prominent parental choices, including the exercise of a Presidential pardon. Everyone must make their own choices in adulthood, but nobody should be held more responsible for forming a future adult than their parents. The eighteen years (or so) of childhood are both an eternity and an instant. But, actuarially speaking, most people will know their own offspring far longer as adults than as juveniles. Every bit of effort that goes into producing good people from the start matters to what character emerges when they come of age.
December 1, 2024
Sentences that would have once been incomprehensible
The broadcasting journal TV Technology reports with no apparent surprise: "Twin Cities PBS (TPT) said it will premiere 'Broadcast Wars,' an original documentary about local broadcast news in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The program will be available on Nov. 26 at 7 p.m. as a two-hour film on TPT 2 and as a three-part streaming limited series available on the PBS App." ■ For one thing, the thought that the rivalries among different news operations within a major (but not top-ten) market would merit a documentary would almost certainly have shocked anyone living through the time period that is the focus of the project. Producing anything of a scale close to that of a feature film would have been a massively expensive project in the 1980s or times before. "60 Minutes" was a groundbreaking television show in part because only the major commercial networks had the resources to do big feature projects -- certainly not local Public Television affiliates. ■ Then there's the matter of distribution: To anyone living in the Reagan Era, it would seem incomprehensible for a media outlet to develop an ambitious production like a three-part, 120-minute documentary and then distribute it mainly via the Internet, with the thought of possibly broadcasting it later on a digital TV subchannel little more than an afterthought. ■ And then there is the matter of the unspoken subtext: That the era when local television news really, really mattered would someday be a matter more suited for historical documentary than hot topic of current conversation. And yet, that's how it is: Local TV news still matters and still brings in a lot of revenue, but streaming and other digital platforms are where to find the real growth. ■ Self-respecting communities still need journalists and documentarians. The Minneapolis-St. Paul television market is big and robust, and due to geography, it dominates most of the state of 5.7 million people. That would put it roughly between Denmark and Finland in population, both of which can easily claim to have distinctive cultures (including media) of their own. The same could and should be easy to say about Minnesota. ■ But there is also no doubt that the environment generally has become harder for "local" media of all types, as classified advertising has evaporated (massively undercutting the traditional workhorse of newspaper revenues) and conventional synchronous viewing and listening have been widely displaced for television and radio. How we work out what comes next -- which isn't just a business or media question, but a major social one as well -- will have no small impact on the shape of the future.
The massive death toll caused by Russia's continued assault against Ukraine really is hard to fathom. The Kremlin could stop the pointless dying in an instant.
November 30, 2024
There has been no shortage of notice paid to the astronomical growth in active users on the Bluesky social media platform. After a long and slow period of organic growth, the service has exploded with activity, surging right past services like Threads, which had a much more favorable starting position. Many of the new Bluesky users are adopting it as a substitute for X/Twitter, where erratic leadership at the very top has undermined years of goodwill. ■ In the process of moving, a noteworthy share of users have remarked on the uneasy sense that they are abandoning many years of remarks on the old platform. And while it is, of course, entirely possible to export the archives of one's X/Twitter activity, the process naturally causes some to reflect on whether there is any point to preserving such a record at all. ■ For most of the natural world, life is a struggle for survival. But for human beings, it is something different. We haven't conquered mortality altogether, but tools like vaccines and clean drinking water have smashed the old limits that used to keep many of us from growing old. For human beings, life is predominantly a struggle to be remembered. ■ We can't be sure that dolphins and bonobos aren't telling tales of their ancestors, but it's pretty unlikely. Yet we humans struggle constantly with the matter of memory: We visit gravesites, take DNA tests, watch historical documentaries, subscribe to Ancestry.com, fund archaeological research, and digitize the contents of the Library of Congress. Our nations fight one another, but even those that lose battles and wars -- even to the point of being completely conquered -- still have champions who insist upon being remembered. ■ It might not be obvious, but the same natural urges are behind the celebration of National Native American Heritage Month each year and the compulsion to save one's own social media archives. We may be far from knowing everything about big questions like the meaning of life, but our gift of self-awareness tells us that unless and until we find those bigger answers, the next closest thing is to make some kind of impression on the common memory of the species. Whether that takes the form of having a name chiseled in stone, registering for copyright protection on a literary work, or etching a signature into an heirloom craft, almost all of us are captive to the same instinct.
November 28, 2024
The rabbi and scholar Jonathan Sacks wrote, "How tragic it is that we so often keep our gratitude to ourselves, speaking it aloud only when the person to whom we feel indebted is no longer here, and we are comforting his or her mourners." It is a tragedy, indeed. ■ Naturally, some time often needs to pass between a good act and a display of gratitude -- you don't stop a person in the process of dropping off a casserole and have them wait in the doorway while you hand-write a thank-you note. And in some cases, a good deed long remembered can bring great joy when acknowledged long afterward -- consider the kindergarten teacher greeted with love by a graduating high-school senior. ■ But it generally betters us to do the work of recognizing others for their good works earlier rather than later. Yes, good behavior should generally be its own reward. But humans are social creatures, and we are formed by the norms and institutions around us. If we want to see more good choices being made in this life, then we need to praise (and be seen praising) those good works as early as can be sensibly justified. Reinforce good behavior and you might just get more of it.
November 27, 2024
A small town in Kentucky has voted to disband itself. By a slim margin, a tax revolt has overturned the status quo. ■ Then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a lot of hassle for saying, "Corporations are people" during a speech in 2011. If he'd only said, "Corporations are made up of people", then his point would have been clearer -- and irrefutable. Corporations are indeed very little without the people who form them. ■ It's no small matter that cities are corporations, and thus they are, in turn, largely made up of the people who live within them. Had Romney said something like, "Cities are people", then it's likely that many of his detractors would have charitably welcomed him making the point. ■ As corporations, cities exist mainly to offer economies of scale in delivering important services: Police, fire, rescue, water, streets, sewers, drainage, and parks. Some offer their own utility services, some manage the local schools, and some even run opera houses and run television stations. But the main purpose of the city as a legal entity is to take care of a lot of necessary chores in order to make it easier for settlements of people to live together in clean, safe, and economical ways. ■ Obliterating a city government doesn't obliterate the needs managed by the city. It just makes them harder to perform. Even in the case of little Bonnieville, the county will have to take over for some of the same administrative chores that had been the work of the city before. Others, like keeping the street lights on, will be abandoned. ■ The local power company has suggested that individual households could pick up the tab if they wanted to keep the streetlights on. And therein lies the heart of the matter: Residents might still be able to obtain most of the services they had before by paying for them a la carte. But it's pretty hard to get the same bundle of services one piece at a time for the same price as a municipal corporation can furnish by offering a one-stop shop. Taxes are never popular, but few people really give fair consideration to the deals they're getting close to home.
November 24, 2024
The City of Waterloo, Iowa, (metro population 168,000) has agreed to furnish millions of dollars to demolish and redevelop the Crossroads Mall. The whole project is budgeted at $87 million. It was once a significant retail center, but is down to a dozen or two employees in the entire facility. ■ Shopping malls once had their heyday because they delivered variety, availability, and proximity, all in a climate-controlled package. The model made sense until online shopping managed to provide more variety and nearly the same availability -- what the shopper sacrifices in having to wait for a next-day delivery, they gain in not having to look for a parking spot. And an online store is always at least as proximate as the nearest mall. ■ The malls that manage to survive much longer will do so because they offer something social or cultural that goes farther than a good layaway program. Some retail destinations are a little like Disney World and others are places to be seen consuming conspicuously. Many of them will go on. ■ But a lot of others will have to be replaced. Leaving them to die and turn into ghosts isn't much of a plan, especially for those places where a mall that once depended on anchor stores itself becomes a boat anchor dragging down the real estate around it. ■ America doesn't have much of a track record of developing high-quality centers for civic activity and social life; reimagining our many dead and dying malls as lively public spaces in the spirit of European opera houses with attractive community-building features may be a necessary way forward, at least for some.
November 23, 2024
It has been noted for some time and by different surveys that Americans who regularly attend religious services have the highest rate of good feelings about Sundays, and rate Sundays the best day of the week. Theologians might point to the specifics of theology as the source of those good feelings, and they might be right; by nature, their claims are difficult if not impossible to falsify. ■ But it's also fair to consider that it may be enough simply that Sundays represent, for many, a day of voluntary belonging. Bonding between people happens mainly through the sharing of experience -- especially constructive experiences, though those constructive bonds can help to form a social glue for living through painful experiences, too. ■ With regular religious attendance on the decline in the United States, perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities in our history is that Benjamin Franklin never got around to founding the quasi-religious movement he described in his autobiography as a "bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection". ■ Franklin effectively described a project to drive people towards moral improvement through self-examination and cooperation, but his "Society of the Free and Easy" never took permanent form. The name may have been clunky, but the idea probably had merit. ■ An enormous number of Americans have adopted "spiritual but not religious" as a substitute for established theology and the need for moral self-improvement has never dissipated. People will always seek those answers, and they will always gravitate towards places of belonging. Franklin was probably on to something well over 200 years ago when he wrote that there should be a distinctly American creed professing that "the most acceptable service of God is doing good to man." The question is where people gather to celebrate it, and if they're free to do it on Sunday mornings.
November 20, 2024
Who manages the UK's national newspapers?
A gallery of the editors-in-chief at Britain's eighteen "national" newspapers highlights the huge difference between the apparent influence of Britain's papers and what remains of those in America. The US doesn't even have a half-dozen papers that even aspire to be considered "national" in nature: The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Times, and (maybe) the Washington Post. ■ The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune both contracted their aspirations long ago, and further down the metro population rankings, they don't grow any more ambitious: The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, and Arizona Republic don't look much beyond their own turf for influence. By contrast with the UK's eighteen "national" publications, the #18 newspaper in the US circulates to fewer than 50,000 print subscribers. ■ Britain's much greater population density probably gave it a lot more of a natural market for a newspaper-heavy culture: Back when newspapers had to be delivered by hand, having nearly ten times as many people per square mile was certainly an advantage. But now that daily publications can be delivered digitally, it's remarkable that America's incumbent newspaper institutions haven't tried harder to stake out more significant influence beyond their physical turf. ■ Even the New York Times, which shamelessly appeals to its readers' high sense of self-regard, now reaches more people through its games than its news content. Why aren't there more efforts to appeal to psychographic identity, particularly now that so much news is already homogenized nationally? ■ We can look to a lot of reasons why it may be outdated to even constrain ourselves to an examination of "newspapers", per se, but the fact remains that newsgathering and editorial operations that have in many cases been around for more than 100 years offer at least some kind of institutional memory and ought to at least try to distinguish themselves in recognizable ways. Perhaps paradoxically, blanket criticisms of "the media" might find a little more resistance if individual outlets retained more distinctive personalities. ■ "Personality" in an editorial outlet doesn't have to mean "political identity" any more than it does for a human being; in fact, both individuals and newspapers are generally better off when politics are far down the list of identifying characteristics. A publication can stand out for its writing style, its heroes, its features, its special beats, its witty commentary, its peculiar hobby horses, its imagined audiences, its imaginary friends, or the unusual things that interest its writers. All of those things should easily make a market for at least two dozen recognizable "national" outlets in the United States, by virtue of our enormous size alone.
Justice Department wants a judge to break up Google
The department wants Google to be forced to spin off the Chrome browser and stop giving preference to its own search engine within the Android operating system
Boeing layoffs are a bad economic signal
The company is planning a 10% cut to its workforce -- a large number on its own, but also clearly worth wider attention: Aircraft sales make up a lot of the US export market.
November 19, 2024
What was the point of taking Hong Kong?
The lead sentence from the BBC says in a flat tone, "A Hong Kong court has sentenced key pro-democracy leaders to years in jail for subversion". But the real story should be said something like this: "A Chinese court has used a 2019 law imposed by the central government to send 45 pro-democracy leaders from Hong Kong to prison for 4 to 10 years each". ■ The way the Communist Party treats Hong Kong, it is a wonder that it ever fought to take the territory in the first place. Promises of "One country, two systems" have been viciously jettisoned (in a way that ought to be particularly alarming to anyone who fears an involuntary annexation of Taiwan).
Threads drops a huge early lead
Despite starting with the backing of Facebook (and its enormous reach to potential members), Threads has been overtaken by Bluesky in the number of active daily users in the United States. And it's happened thanks to Bluesky basically tripling its active user base in three weeks. It's never enough just to have a head start.
Sabotaged cables in the Baltic Sea
Germany's defense minister says two telecommunications cables were cut in the Baltic Sea -- one between Germany and Finland, and one between Lithuania and Sweden. And he says it wasn't an accident. This is a story that tests how much attention the world is capable of paying to hybrid or gray-zone hostilities: Activity that doesn't quite meet the standard to be called warfare, but far more belligerent than not. ■ Finland, officially, is "not jumping to conclusions yet", but the reality is that two like incidents of such a scale happening in close succession hardly looks like the mere impact of chance. And it isn't hard to guess which country with a presence in the Baltic region might be interested in harassing the neighbors. ■ There's a fundamental asymmetry to this kind of behavior: It's almost always vastly cheaper to cause damage than to repair it. And for the malicious actor who manages to cause the problems while remaining just barely cloaked enough to avoid outright attribution, it can be an efficient way to introduce a little bit of mayhem to its rivals. Not enough to merit a full-blown counter-response, but enough to cause something between nuisance and real pain: Death by a thousand papercuts. ■ Fundamentally, that's how reasonable people can recognize which side is closer to right in any kind of rivalry: The side that behaves more constructively, working towards commonly-agreed rules and norms, aiding more than it tears down, is probably the one on the side of right. But that doesn't preclude showing firmness in addition to being right. Someone caused the damage in the Baltic Sea, and consequences ought to follow. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, "Pardoning the bad, is injuring the good."
Fraud comes hard for older Americans
The Federal Trade Commission has released a report estimating that older Americans may have been scammed for as much as $61 billion in 2023, including 4,600 who were taken for $100,00 or more.
November 18, 2024
Scholarly research points to a contagion effect that goes along with incivility in the workplace. While social virality seems to explain some things, and certain social conditions may be raising some tempers, it also seems increasingly evident that lots of people were raised with a bunch of negative rules against which they feel like rebelling as adults, rather than being raised with positive or aspirational rules that give them guides for growth. ■ Negative rules, like "Don't talk back", are quick and easy for an adult to dispense. See the undesirable behavior, then issue an edict against it. Not much thought required. ■ Affirmative rules, like "Speak to others like you want them to speak to you", are usually a little harder to concoct. Usually not much more than the time required to take a single deep breath, but often more than frazzled adults want to take. ■ While negative rules are sometimes necessary, especially in a pinch ("Don't touch that hot stove!"), they're harder to follow. They are literally more challenging to process cognitively. They set up constraints, and it's hard for even adult minds to know where all of those different boundaries lie: In the words of Warren Buffett, "If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you're going to get a ticket." ■ Aspirational or affirmative rules are harder for the rule-maker to concoct, but much easier to follow because they offer a pathway for the curious young mind. "Don't make a mess" puts the burden on the child to know what qualifies as a mess and what to do about it. The affirmative alternative is simply, "Clean up after yourself", which gives them a behavior to adopt rather than a punishment to avoid. Affirmative rule-making helps to structure a growth mindset in the developing young brain: One can strive towards greater compliance with a positive goal, while a negative boundary can only be violated. ■ Too many people act as though defiance is their dominant personality characteristic. As they get older and have more resources and power at their disposal, the damage their defiance can do increases as well. It's an anti-social feedback loop, the seeds of which were often sown decades before.
November 17, 2024
A change to the terms of service on the platform formerly known as Twitter has taken effect, granting the company permission (in its words) to "analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models", a permission not explicitly discussed in the previous edition of the terms. ■ That change is roughly coincidental with the results of a Presidential election in which X/Twitter's owner has played a prominent and possibly manipulative role, and the unpopularity of the recent activity has triggered a significant exodus from X/Twitter to competing platform Bluesky. It's unlikely that anyone will successfully tease out how much of the exodus is due to the behavior and how much is due to the policy change, but both are certainly contributory. ■ Content-scraping of any platform in order to train artificial intelligence is sketchy behavior at best. It's already been done by lots of rivals in the artificial intelligence marketplace -- X/Twitter is merely one among several. But it does have a captive data set, which makes the AI training seem particularly targeted at the incumbent users. ■ We've never grappled before with what happens when the whole world has equal access to the same publishing platforms. There was a time not long ago when everyone knew who had published copyright-protected content and who had not: If you didn't have a book on the shelf of a library or a published article in a newspaper or a magazine, then your thoughts hadn't really reached a domain that ever would have been accessible to use for training. ■ The instinct to object to having one's content used to train someone else's computer model is understandable. But there's an uncomfortable inversion to the problem: If all people of goodwill withdraw their ideas from the data sets, then what's left behind will only be a concentrated collection of the bad. What would a library be if John Stuart Mill was omitted while Karl Marx remained? ■ It's a terrible Catch-22. Opting in (to allowing one's content to be used for AI training) means implicitly rewarding bad behavior. Opting out means that what's left behind has a higher concentration of the bad. And it's become evident that artificial intelligence tools are here to stay. ■ Thus what we have is like an inverted tragedy of the commons: What matters to artificial intelligence is not how much of it is "consumed" (since the whole point is that it is an effectively inexhaustible source of output), but how much it can draw from raw inputs that are, on balance, good for society. That those inputs are intermediated by actors who may themselves be of dubious character makes the whole matter even more complicated. It is a complex dynamic without an easy solution.
November 16, 2024
Trade policy commentator Simon Lester offers the observation, "As economic competition with China heats up, it's worth remembering that in the late 1980s/early 1990s, people were writing books with titles like 'Trading Places: How we are giving our future to Japan and how to reclaim it'". That seems like a text from an era long ago and far away, but the copyright date is only 1989 -- making the text younger than the median American. ■ Japan was on a hot streak in the 1980s, but it never overtook the United States. That doesn't mean it didn't still end up quite rich: Japan has the world's fifth-largest economy today and a wealthy per-capita GDP. But it also still feels the effects of an interventionist industrial policy based upon the government imposing a scarcity mentality on the private sector. ■ In other words, Japan was on the rise, but it wasn't on an inevitable path to overtaking the United States. And a major contributing factor was (and remains) that the United States benefits from being an unplanned economy. We don't win because brilliant people are in charge; we win because nobody is in charge. Despite the way people wildly overestimate the power of the President to "manage the economy", often at the encouragement of those very Presidents who want to take credit for work they didn't really do, the lack of any real centralized control is both the secret ingredient and the secret recipe. It is both the "what" and the "why". ■ The United States is clearly in an economic rivalry with China, as well as a rivalry for other forms of power and influence. Nothing is certain about the outcomes, but there is a very safe way to forecast the future: Always bet on the side in a competition that is most genuinely open to new ideas, new people, and new partnerships. The freedom to fail (or to simply be wrong without catastrophic consequences) pays huge dividends. ■ On that basis, the people of the United States need to know what's best for ourselves: The maximum possible freedom of movement for goods, people, money, and ideas. On that same account, China's government is actively choosing to hobble itself: Consider the stealth required merely for people to discuss academic ideas freely. ■ Ideas don't move freely across a Great Firewall. Nor are people free to move about when arbitrary and capricious punishment looms over anyone trying to do business inside their borders. Just moving goods isn't enough. ■ The only way for America to lose our place in such a competition is to surrender the advantages that ought to come most easily to us. Let people make choices, leave them free, welcome new arrivals, think liberally (like John Stuart Mill), and make lots of room for failure. That's how to win.
November 15, 2024
A Chicago man, who long felt conflicted about the family in which he was raised, was able to uncover that he had been adopted as a child. And upon some genetic investigation, he discovered that his birth mother not only lived nearby -- she was the proprietor of a small bakery he frequented often enough that the owner (his birth mother) already knew him by name. Reunited with her now, the son is taking over the bakery's operations from his mother as she commences her retirement. ■ It's hard to imagine a story that could better distill the human urge to belong: Vamarr Hunter only went looking for his birth mother after succumbing to a feeling that he didn't rightly belong to the family he had known for his first 35 years. Then, upon discovering his genetic connection to someone with whom he already had a friendship, he changed his entire career path to fit in. ■ There's a reason that rituals like school homecomings and family reunions and retirement parties are so durable: They confirm that urge to belong and reinforce the binding ties among our different tribes. ■ With the exception of some extremely rare types who truly are confirmed loners, most people want to belong so instinctively and so strongly that we pick multiple identities -- around our schools, our workplaces, our faith traditions, our families, our citizenship, our interests, and even our entertainment choices. Swifties and Deadheads alike are not to be dismissed. ■ Smart people seeking to triumph over the challenges that confront humanity ought to take belonging into account, in many cases much more seriously than has often been the case in the past. It can rarely be forced artificially (see the common resentment of any number of "team-building" exercises in the workplace), but to be durable it has to grow out of something more than just a cult of personality. Personalities retire, fade away, and ultimately die. Belonging is an act that begins among people -- as few as just a mother and child. But there are few forces more powerful than the urge to be one of those who belong.
November 14, 2024
When in doubt, consult Silent Cal
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence ... The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." - Calvin Coolidge
November 13, 2024
The naming of a new slate of Cabinet secretaries is one of the strangest of all league draft events: There's only one team on the field, and the players can be chosen for reasons ranging from proven past performance to growth potential to naked patronage. The team has precious little time to prepare before hitting the field of play, and each of those main players must immediately turn around and recruit their own team of assistants and deputies. ■ America has endured some pretty awful picks: Ulysses S Grant had a notoriously corrupt Cabinet, and Warren Harding's administration contained some downright filthy characters. At least one person rose to Vice President while flirting with outright Communist sympathies and Richard Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was forced to resign over tax and other charges. And let us not overlook the villainy of VP Aaron Burr. ■ All of which is to say that the biggest mistake when assessing an incoming Cabinet is to assume that the nation has never seen anything like them before. History begs to be our guide -- both for Presidents as they make their choices, Senators as they pass judgment on qualifications through advice and consent, and the loyal opposition as they seek to impose accountability. ■ Calvin Coolidge, who assumed the Presidency upon Harding's death and had to disentangle some of the mess behind, wrote in his autobiography, "When a man has invested his personal interest and reputation in the conduct of a public office, if he goes wrong it will not be because of former relations, but because he is a bad man [...] What we need in appointive positions is men of knowledge and experience who have sufficient character to resist temptations." Whoever finds their way into office, whether of good character or not, it only makes sense for us to bear Coolidge's advice in mind. Very few human behaviors are ever as new as we imagine them; the specific conditions may vary, but human nature is almost never new.
November 12, 2024
The demographic shadow looming over colleges
The good news for Iowa's three state universities is that enrollment has held mainly steady in the face of some meaningful headwinds. But the bad news for them is that total in-state enrollment is down from a decade ago, and the broader demographic trends indicate that high schools are going to graduate fewer prospective college freshmen for a while to come. ■ Iowa has three state schools: A land-grant university (Iowa State), a public research school (Iowa), and a comprehensive university (Northern Iowa). It's a compact arrangement by comparison with some states that have far more institutions. But it's still hard to keep the budgets balanced without attracting out-of-state tuition dollars. ■ What makes a university system worth subsidizing is the return on the public's investment -- though never strictly in terms of dollars. A university can (and should) generate real cultural, civic, and economic returns to the community that funds it. And even though those can be difficult to measure well (if even at all), there has to be a relentless pursuit of both incremental improvement and substantial innovation in everything the institution does. ■ That's a lot to ask, but it's also a fair expectation, considering that a majority of American adults do not hold four-year degrees, yet their taxes subsidize the effort. That investment has to come back in more than just some athletic rivalries. It's imperative that college leaders recognize those needs sooner rather than later; if the demographic drop-off turns out to be as real as expected (and as the population pyramid makes real in black and white), they won't want to be caught flat-footed trying to explain why they need continued support as enrollment drops.
Nebraska homeowner dies with 40 bombs in the basement
They were not live munitions any longer, but they were WWII-era bombs that required a state patrol bomb squad and the National Guard's explosive-ordnanace team to check out. Folks, if you're going to indulge in some kind of weird collecting obsession, maybe tell the people you love some of the details about it before you die, OK?
(Video) A public service announcement telling Irish voters how to make sure they're registered to vote comes across so friendly, it might as well be a tourism video
November 11, 2024
A misleading figure is often circulated on Veterans Day: The estimate that American military veterans take their own lives at a rate of 22 per day. While that figure has had a mobilizing effect on certain resources, it may also be misleading in its apparent precision. ■ Regardless of the actual number, society certainly has a common interest in reducing it to as few as possible. And the particular way in which we furnish health care for servicemembers and veterans alike presents an opportunity. ■ There is an obvious intersection between mental health care and suicide prevention. But even though we have population-level care for things like infectious-disease prevention, we have only made limited progress has ever been made in supplying population-level care for mental wellness. ■ That presents an opportunity, were we to grasp it: The Department of Veterans Affairs has a unique level of reach through which to address mental wellness care at a population-level scale. ■ To do that well, though, we need policy-makers to commit resources towards that kind of research not as an effort to "solve" a particular problem affecting veterans, but rather as a way to address mental wellness as part of a holistic approach to human health generally. The veteran population doesn't look exactly like the public at large, but it's coming closer in several significant ways. ■ As it does so, we have the opportunity to make progress on those population-level efforts not by treating veterans as an intrinsically "broken" population needing to be "fixed", but as an increasingly representative fraction of the general population needing (and deserving) mental-wellness care in much the same way as the population at large. Just as it improved society for the military to lead the vanguard of racial integration (imperfectly, but significantly), so too would it improve society for the same population to help lead a more holistic approach to treating the brain as an essential part of the body.
November 10, 2024
People in at least six states received racist text messages following the election, suggesting that they were being taken to "plantations". The stunt is not funny, nor clever, nor even remotely tolerable. ■ But it's also probably not domestic, either. The language of the text messages sounds like the kind of thing a person with a 19th-Century understanding of the United States might write if they hadn't ever been to the country. Even the stupidest American knows there aren't any working plantations. ■ It also appears to have been conducted at scale, meaning that the messages had to have been sent at a cost of some resources. Bulk text messages aren't really that expensive, but they aren't free, either. ■ Moreover, it seems evident that the messages were racially targeted, which suggests that the perpetrators used a database that contained profiles containing names, telephone numbers, and racial identity information. This is the kind of information exposed during large-scale data breaches. ■ The messages have been traced to a VPN operation in Poland, which could make it difficult if not impossible to hunt down the original perpetrators. It fits a pattern of general mayhem and discord that is consistent with what a malicious foreign government might try to do. If that is the case, this incident is probably a pretty nasty harbinger of what more is to come.
Until January 19, 2025, Joe Biden still has the option to turn Kamala Harris into the first female President. Food for thought.
November 9, 2024
"Neutral" isn't synonymous with "good"
"Neutrality" is a word often loaded with positive connotations. It conjures up the image of Switzerland, whose deliberate policy of neutrality makes it appear to be above the lowly act of "choosing sides". ■ This is, of course, an incomplete view of things -- "neutrality" made Switzerland and its banks a hotbed of money laundering for evil during World War II. It may be to Switzerland's defensive advantage to take no sides in war, but it corrupts the soul to believe that neutrality in the face of evil is a moral good. ■ Vladimir Putin has adopted an even more sinister definition of neutrality which he wishes to apply to Ukraine, saying, "If there is no neutrality, it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good-neighborly relations between Russia and Ukraine". ■ The world shouldn't be even remotely fooled: In this context, he plainly means "neutrality" to mean "involuntary neutralization". Submission to the will of an aggressor. Incapacity to act defensively. Not just harmless, but helpless. ■ No one should expect Ukraine to submit to a policy like that. It is a throwback to the Soviet-era notion of spheres of influence, when big powers used their neighbors as buffers, as though the world were a giant board game of Risk. ■ Ukraine deserves to choose its own future, its own alliances, and its own way of life. The Ukrainian people will have no more peace if they have been involuntarily neutralized by a violent neighbor than if they were to remain openly at war. "Neutral" isn't a synonym for "good".
Despite what fatuous and gullible talking heads tell themselves, John Adams was never a party leader in the Senate. Actual history is almost invariably more interesting than the fairy tales and fever dreams people tell themselves, but it's really easy for the ignorant to convince themselves that fiction is fact.
November 8, 2024
The case of the female Iranian university student who defied both policy and policing by walking around in public in her underwear should draw the world's attention for at least two reasons. ■ The first is the case itself and what it says directly about the appalling condition of women's rights in Iran (though certainly elsewhere, too). That dress codes can lead to de facto death penalties anywhere should be an outrage. But in a country of nearly 90 million people, it represents malignant repression on a vast scale. "Woman, Life, Freedom" hasn't gotten its due hearing yet. ■ The second reason is how it serves as a vivid reminder that there is nothing magically truthful about "official" statements. Officially, the protester -- named in some reports as Ahoo Daryaei -- was taken to a "medical center" for treatment of "severe stress". Nobody should take that official statement at face value. ■ Taken too far, skepticism risks stumbling into cynicism or even nihilism. Those are dangers to be avoided. But failing to apply certain tests of reasonable doubt to the official pronouncements of any government leaves the audience open to manipulation. ■ No one should accept the claim at face value that Iran's government cares about the welfare of this individual student, neither in light of current law nor of the government's past behavior. Official channels can be abused, in governments both free and anti-free, especially because the ability to define truth is itself a valuable power. We should take care to witness what happens to the protester herself for her well-being, but we should also take care for our own sakes to remember that "official" and "true" should never be assumed to be synonyms.
The Ukrainian embassy to the United States asks for "Strengthened air defense, the ability to destroy Russian military aircraft & permission for Ukraine to carry out long-range strikes against legitimate military targets in Russia"
November 5, 2024
Vote like your great-great-grandma is watching
You don't have to vote like her -- she might have had some pretty bad opinions. But vote like she's watching over your shoulder, and in a way that ought to make her proud. A great-great-grandmother is sufficiently far removed from the present generation that most of us never knew our own. But it's also close enough that she probably loved someone who loved you. There are exceptions, of course, but few things are more generally true than that it is hard to exceed the love of a mother for her child. It's also true that a matrilineal chain is the one genetic bond that can't be faked: A mother knows with absolute certainty whether she gave birth to her own child. So your (matrilineal) great-great-grandmother almost assuredly cared at least a little bit about the world you would occupy, even if she never knew you.
November 4, 2024
The allegation that the Kremlin attempted to sabotage airplanes traveling between Europe and the United States is morally shocking. Yet it can scarcely be called "surprising", considering the barbaric way it has made war on Ukraine and the lengths to which it has gone to use asymmetrical means to achieve its ends, in part by threatening Ukraine's friends and allies. ■ By any rational assessment, Russia should have long ago become a productive and peaceful member of the fraternity of nations. It has enormous natural wealth and a historical reputation of scientific achievement, both of which ought to have positioned it well to benefit from trade and peaceful cooperation. ■ But instead, its government has acted not just with beligerence but with reckless, callous hostility to human welfare. And yet there are dupes, tools, and willing agents of that evil who applaud what they choose to see and defend what they should not. ■ There is nothing laudable or admirable about a government that relentlessly terrorizes its neighbors. There is nothing defensible about a regime that literally tries to set fire to global trade. There is nothing friendly or agreeable about a nation that tries to stoke violence to undermine democracy. It's evil. And anyone who seeks power by promising to give in to those tactics should be kept far away from authority in any country that wants to remain free.
Democracy's pump-up theme song
(Video) "Right Here, Right Now", by Jesus Jones. It's the right choice.
November 3, 2024
Who's got the plan to shoot down evil drones?
One of the things that should land near the top of any list of problems that should keep thoughtful public leaders awake at night is the risk that someone is going to weaponize a remotely-piloted aircraft and use it to cause harm to a large gathering of people. Hampering efforts in this regard appears to be a dreadfully murky legal framework that doesn't appear to shed any of the much-needed light on who bears responsibility or authority to do anything about it. ■ The vast majority of drone applications are harmless or even helpful. But the lack of a framework for deciding how to do things like protecting large gatherings with some kind of anti-aerial defense is an unconscionable omission. A thing that is 99.999% good but that happens a million times still needs some kind of framework for addressing the bad. ■ This is one of the problems that emerges from letting our political debates be driven by individuals who are chronically dishonest, self-absorbed, and prone to fabulism. The more we let crazy talk set the agenda and crowd out real policy discussions, the more we hobble ourselves from preparing for the problems of the future. ■ Our problems don't get easier to solve just because we ignore them, nor because crazy talk gains more click traffic than sober debates. Making politics into a form of entertainment is an act of civic self-harm. ■ We have lunatics reviving long-debunked conspiracy theories about fluoride in drinking water instead of serious proposals to keep people safe from a threat like drone attack -- a threat that is obviously already serious (see how Russia has been using them to assault Ukraine) and utterly certain to become even more hazardous with time. There is a real cost to letting carelessness and unseriousness prevail in politics -- unfortunately, it's not always obvious what that cost is until it's too late.
China swaps crews at its space station
As part of its pursuit of a Moon base -- and probably quite a few other ambitions in space -- China has launched three astronauts into orbit to staff the country's space station. The launch was an impressive sight -- witness the reflexive grin on the face of the correspondent from The Australian in his video report from the launch. The noise, heat, and chest-rattling rumble of a large rocket launch are an incomparable sensation. But beyond any one launch, the direction of any national space program tells a lot about the country's ambitions.
Nigeria's death penalty threatens kids
CNN reports that 29 children, ages 14 to 17, could face the country's death penalty for participating in a protest over economic hardship. Nigeria should get more attention than it already does from America's news media, if for no other reason than that it is a country of 236 million people, making it the 6th largest in the world. When a country that large is experiencing a 30% inflation rate, it's a situation of increasing hardship on a very large scale. To put children in the potential peril of a death sentence over political protest is both newsworthy and morally unconscionable. AAnd while the treatment of those particular minors is a matter for serious legal protection, the conditions that lead to a per-capita GDP of $1,600 a year merit tough scrutiny from those who know anything about economics. That kind of poverty on that kind of scale is injurious to so much human welfare that fixing it ought to be both a national and an international priority.
A 550' tall building in Manhattan has no windows except for some glass panels at its entrance. This architectural curiosity began as an AT&T switching center, and has evolved into a role in other telecommunications-related duties since then. While it stands out for its height, the alert observer will note that there are windowless buildings in almost all cities of any size -- generally on the periphery of the downtown core. That's what the land-line phone system once required (and to some extent still does). In mid-major cities like Omaha, they're usually as close as possible to downtown without being close to any high-rent features like the local waterfront. In small towns like Stuart, they're usually a block or two away from the town square or Main Street. For those who travel to new places with some regularity, finding the old telephone building can be a fun puzzle to solve, since they're usually found near the most interesting parts of a town anyway.
November 2, 2024
In 1922, Ireland was in the midst of liberating itself from British colonial rule. The Irish Free State had established independence from the UK on paper, but a civil war was still to take a year and hundreds of lives before a true state could be recognized. ■ One of the harshest aspects to the civil war was that it pitted two groups who effectively wanted the same thing (a free Irish republic) against one another -- because some thought an incomplete freedom from the UK was the most that could be achieved at the time, while others opposed the treaty on the grounds of its incompleteness. The resulting violence didn't hasten Ireland's freedom, but it did scar the nation. ■ Of those instigating the violence, the youthful general and political leader Michael Collins wrote, "Worst of all, their action has been a crime against the nation in this -- that the anarchy and ruin they were bringing about was undermining the confidence of the nation in itself. So far as it succeeded it was proving that our enemies were right, that we were incapable of self-government. When left to ourselves in freedom we could show nothing of the native civilization we had claimed as our own." ■ Collins himself would be assassinated in the fighting, his life cut far short. Born in 1890, Collins easily should have lived to see the Republic of Ireland Act enter full force in 1949. ■ But that is what interior political violence does: It deprives some individuals from seeing the fruits of their struggles, while, in Collins's words, "undermining the confidence of the nation". A war for independence or to overthrow an autocrat is one matter; sometimes, the only thing an oppressive regime will recognize is violence. Among a people, though, differences have to be settled -- always imperfectly -- through votes, debates, lawmaking, and consent.
Imagine a common EU nuclear deterrent: Think of the academic papers! "Ambiguous Ambiguity: The Strategic Posture of an Unconstrained Monte Carlo Simulation"
November 1, 2024
Whether it takes place on Halloween proper, on the Saturday before Halloween, or on Beggars' Night, the annual practice of children's trick-or-treating is one of our best secular rituals. Neighbors share treats with young people and children get to spread a little joy. It's all quite wholesome and a good reminder just before Election Day that we all have to live within our communities no matter who wins office. ■ Even though the ritual looks a little like a sugar-welfare program (except in special places like Des Moines, where children are expected to earn their candy with bad joke-telling), it can actually be a wonderful lesson in capitalism. ■ On the first round of trick-or-treating, kids don't have a lot of say in what they get: It's simply whatever the neighbors choose to give away. But the economics lesson comes when the bags and buckets are overturned and kids start to compare what they hauled home. Then the great bartering period begins, as one child trades whatever they can in exchange for more chocolate, while another trades to maximize fruity candies. One might be willing to give away their Almond Joy bars, while another might treat Reese's Peanut Butter Cups like gold. ■ Subtly, the Halloween candy exchange teaches kids that different people place different values on the same things. Not only that, they learn that trading with others (when there's no coercion involved) leaves everyone better off than when they started. They might even pick up the clues that things work even more smoothly when people start to put prices on things they want -- three miniature Snickers bars for one bag of Skittles, perhaps? ■ Nobody has to be hit over the head with a lesson in market economics while they're enjoying a momentary sugar rush. But the exchanges often linger for a few days after the treats have been collected, as kids go to school and soccer practice and Cub Scout meetings where they continue to trade loot with one another. And it can't hurt for parents to gently help their little ghosts and goblins recognize the virtue in a little bit of free trade, even if it's only spilled across the kitchen table.
October 31, 2024
Few things are both awful enough and plausible enough that they should keep anyone up at night. But the non-trivial probability that someone will terrorize a large gathering of Americans using weaponized drone aircraft should be very, very high on that list.
October 30, 2024
While other newspapers have abstained from offering endorsements in the Presidential election, one local newspaper has gone on record with a fiery editorial: El Nuevo Dia, widely regarded as the newspaper of record in Puerto Rico. ■ Puerto Rico occupies a complicated place in American consciousness: Its residents are citizens, but the territory has no vote in Congress, and consequently, no vote in the Electoral College. As a territory, claimed along with Guam at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, it is held awkwardly at arm's length: Spanish-speaking but legally American, taxed but unable to leave or upgrade to statehood without the blessing of Congress, well-represented in the US Armed Forces but entitled to its own Olympic team. ■ Citizenship means that Puerto Ricans are just as free to move about the country as Kansans, Californians, or Kentuckians. That, in turn, means that El Nuevo Dia's fury at a repugnant joke at a political rally echoes and amplifies a sentiment that is likely being felt in other places. New York City, for instance, is home to 574,000 Puerto Ricans -- effectively the same as the entire population of Wyoming. ■ With a non-binding referendum on Puerto Rico's status on the ballot there, the territory could make more news than usual for the rest of the country on Election Night. Considering the lingering consequences of Hurricane Maria on the island and the evident ways in which its legal status appears to hold the island back, it should come as no surprise if the people there decide to assert their status and demand full respect as Americans in a vigorous way.
October 29, 2024
The three models of news editorials
USA Today has joined the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post in announcing it will not publish an editorial endorsement for President in 2024. This has caused controversy, but what does the decision not to endorse actually mean? It depends on what the audience expects a newspaper editorial to represent. ■ In one model, the editorial reflects the reasoned opinion of a publication's editors on current newsworthy events, enlightened by the facts (presumably) reported in the same publication. In this model, the editorial is shaped by some basic underlying values of the publication, but the conclusion is rarely ever foregone -- if it were, an explanation of the editors' judgment would not be necessary and the editorial writing would only be a waste of space. ■ In a different model, the publication itself is institutionally committed to advancing a cause, and the form and shape of both the news content and the opinion content serve the cause. The conclusion of any piece of editorial writing can be reliably predicted in advance, because the nature of the cause is preordained. ■ Contemporary audiences seem to be increasingly fond of the latter model, preferring the comforts of their own confirmation bias to the frequent discomforts of being presented with novel arguments and subjects that require some new effort to understand. ■ There is a third model, though, emerging prominently in the 2024 general election. It is one that says "We will take no position on newsworthy events, either out of fear or aversion to accusations of bias. Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, has signed his name to an opinion piece saying just that: "What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it's the right one." ■ Bezos, in effect, says that he fears that publications have become institutionally unwell by subscribing to the second model. There is probably some truth to that diagnosis. But the cure is not to run into the arms of the third model, avoiding claims to an opinion altogether. ■ News coverage is always affected by constraints, and thus it always reflects some kind of editorial judgment: What news to cover, how to report it, what priority to give the coverage, when to break the news, even which journalists to assign the story. Ideally, an editor should want to optimize the quality and quantity of information available to make an informed judgment. ■ After all, news is anything that materially changes our understanding of the status quo. If the status quo has been disrupted, then good self-governing citizens need to think about the consequences, and news publications ought to be informing them well enough to make some kind of informed judgment. ■ A good test of whether they are doing so is to go back to the first model -- the one under which the conclusion isn't foregone -- and ask the editors to produce a reasoned opinion on the subject. If they cannot, either they haven't covered the news thoroughly enough, or they may lack the integrity to admit their motivations.
An almost perfect entry from "Art But Make It Sports"
There's no experience truly comparable to the launch of a large space rocket. The noise, the heat, and the rumble of thunder in the chest combine for an overwhelming sensation -- one that almost inescapably causes the witness to react reflexively.
October 28, 2024
Expect less from your government
Epistemological modesty needs voters, too. Don't expect, ask, or want a government that does too much. Demand one that can't cause too much damage when it gets things wrong, because it will get things wrong. Humans are imperfect, and imperfect humans wielding great power can do a lot of harm.
Lightning: It's not just a bolt from the blue
A lovely illustration from NOAA illustrating the many different forms of lightning and related "transient luminous events"
October 27, 2024
Scientists document an invasive Burmese python in Florida eating a 77-lb. deer.
October 26, 2024
TSMC, the enormous Taiwanese manufacturer of computer chips, has cut off its shipments to a Chinese company that appears to have been funneling chips to Huawei. Huawei is the Chinese electronics manufacturer of dubious ownership: It claims to be employee-owned, but the State Department and other observers say it's controlled by the Communist Party. ■ TSMC operates in a fascinating domain: It might well be Taiwan's most important asset. But it's also expanding in Europe and the United States in a huge way. Their new plant in Arizona is reportedly even more productive than the mature plants in Taiwan.
The administrator of NASA wants someone to investigate Elon Musk and why he has been in personal contact with Vladimir Putin. Musk owns at least a plurality of shares in SpaceX and is thought to have overwhelming voting control of the company. ■ NASA has an obvious interest in the conduct and management of the company. If the controlling partner in the operation is having secret gab-fests with the president of a very large and frequently hostile country, that's something quite different from a pipefitter in Brooklyn calling his grandma in Irkutsk. And the Wall Street Journal reports that it's a matter of "regular contact" between the two since 2022. ■ Starlink, for instance, is a SpaceX subsidiary, and the availability of (and access to) Starlink is playing an important role in Ukraine's war to repel Russian invasion. ■ Americans have broad rights to engage in international business and to hold opinions on global matters. But US Code imposes serious penalties on those who insert themselves into foreign policy to the detriment of the country. Musk occupies such an extraordinary place in economic and technological life that it would be dereliction not to probe more fully what's going on.
Apple is about to update its software to permit certain versions of AirPods to act as over-the-counter hearing aids. The FDA started allowing over-the-counter sales of hearing aids two years ago, and this is the first time they've approved a non-dedicated device to act as a hearing aid using software. ■ We shouldn't underestimate just how useful steps like this can turn out to be. For example, the history of education for children who are deaf or hard of hearing is chock-full of very big struggles to obtain seemingly small accommodations. But today nothing would seem out of place about a teenager wearing AirPods -- and if this development makes the difference to some high-school freshman who might otherwise not be able to afford prescription hearing aids, or who might be self-conscious about wearing them, then it all accrues to the good. ■ All too often, the public perceives accommodations as things we do "for the handicapped". But the reality is that almost all accommodations end up helping some "normal" people all of the time, and almost all of the public some of the time. The same ramp that makes it easier for a paraplegic to get in and out of a building also helps the former marathoner with worn-out knees, as well as the kid who twisted her ankle playing soccer. ■ Likewise, closed captioning, which wasn't even introduced for live programming until 1982, was originally "for the hearing-impaired". But now it would seem out of place to see a TV without captioning activated in a crowded bar or another public place -- locations where even people with abnormally good hearing benefit from the accommodation. And captioning can help many children learn to read. ■ The arrival of hybrid earbuds and hearing aids may not seem like much, but it's exactly the sort of modest, incremental progress that ends up looking much more significant in the rear-view mirror than it looks in advance.
The US Navy is currently operating with two "strategic ends" on the books: "1) Readiness for the possibility of war with the People's Republic of China by 2027, and 2) Enhancing long-term advantage". It's not a secret plan: That's the published policy. And they've chosen 2027 as a target because that's what the Communist Party of China says is its target for surpassing us in war. ■ Here, though, is the deeply unsettling takeaway from the Navy's "Navigation Plan": "The PRC's defense industrial base is on a wartime footing, including the world's largest shipbuilding capacity now at the hands of the PLAN" [People's Liberation Army Navy]. ■ The United States, by contrast, has almost negligible active shipbuilding capacity and has turned away from shipbuilding as a strategic priority. We can change course, but that will require considerable investments in workforce development and production processes. ■ It would also require budgetary commitments from Congress. Big ones. For many years to come. At a time when preparatory investments aren't especially popular and huge deficits are already the norm ($1.8 trillion this fiscal year!). ■ This is a problem that some observers have seen coming for quite a while. And unless we take it seriously now, the amount of future catching-up to be required will only compound. ■ The world is very big and the oceans cover most of it. Spin the globe on Google Earth sometime and see how much of it can only be criss-crossed by long-distance aircraft or patrolled by a blue-water navy. In the absence of guaranteed world peace, stability, and liberalization for a century to come, America needs to maintain, preserve, and enhance the world's biggest navy. Circumstances don't offer us a viable alternative choice.
Would Greek food sell better in America if we knew how to pronounce "gyro"?
It's hard to say it without sounding like either a moron or a pretentious jerk. It might also matter that it's more fun to say "pizza" than "souvlaki".
October 25, 2024
What made "The Americans" such compelling television (aside, of course, from strong writing and skilled acting) was the premise that, even during the height of the Cold War, you could have been living next door to a Soviet secret agent without even knowing it. Even the FBI counter-intelligence officer living across the street could be fooled. ■ It's a premise locked in time. The Cold War was a unique era in history, and the technological limitations of the day played a noteworthy supporting role in the show. The Soviet Union couldn't exactly take over one of the big three television networks, so the reach of their propaganda was limited and much of the spy technology was dedicated instead to sneaking intelligence across the border. ■ Today, everyone is potentially "next door" to Russian influence and disinformation operations every time we venture online. In a non-trivial joint statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and CISA, the American public has been warned that "Russian actors manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania [...] part of Moscow's broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans". ■ The problem now, when compared with the Cold War of the Reagan era, is that Russia's government today can devote its resources to doubling down on confirmation bias -- it doesn't have to convince anyone to become a Communist anymore. It serves the Kremlin's interests merely to have Americans fighting stupidly among ourselves, assuming the worst about our perceived opponents. And they can do it without even leaving home. ■ It matters quite a lot indeed whether we can disagree without being disagreeable, open ourselves to persuasion in light of new facts without falling for disinformation, and adhere strictly to the sanctity of the political process even if we dislike the ultimate outcomes. If all that matters to our geopolitical foes is that we remain contentious and in disarray, then it's far easier for them to stir trouble now than when they had to dispatch highly-trained spies from Moscow. ■ What matters now is how many real Americans are willing to believe the worst of their fellow Americans when impersonated by people hostile to America. Any number greater than zero is probably too many.
October 22, 2024
Never before has more time been afforded for the contemplation of a rich inner life than what is available now to the mainstream American. ■ Compared with previous generations, we spend less time sick, less time doing oppressive chores, more time at leisure, more time educated and informed, and simply more time alive than at any time in history. It isn't even a close contest. ■ All of this should leave the average individual better-poised to appreciate the majesty and wonder of existence itself, better than anyone at least since the philosophers of ancient Greece. ■ Of course, that the time is available does not mean that all are interested in the pursuit. That is a part of freedom. Nobody is forced to examine life like Socrates. ■ But there is certain danger in ceding power, whether in the form of time or money or political influence, to anyone who declines to engage in that sort of contemplation. And there are many, who either wield power or who want to get it, for whom there is nothing important except that power in the here and now. ■ Just as the person conducting a meeting owes it to the other attendees to spend time and effort optimizing the quality of the time spent in the meeting, so too does anyone with power owe it to their subordinates to put real energy and consideration into questions of meaning and purpose. ■ This applies in the workplace, the clubhouse, the church, and the halls of elected power. If you aspire to make decisions for others, then you owe it to them to at least have some due consideration for what makes those decisions right or wrong. ■ A person without a well-considered inner life is still a person, of course, and entitled to all of the dignity that entails. But if it's obvious that a person never invests any time or effort into really struggling with big questions, then that person is unsuited to telling others where to go and what to do.
The high temperature in Iowa for the week of October 14th through 20th was 85°. The low was 17°.
(Video) KABC-TV in Los Angeles takes viewers on a walk from Dodger Stadium to the nearest subway station. It's a nearly half-hour hike, and the first-person camera view makes it perfectly clear that long stretches of the walk would violate a basic toddler test -- a reasonable person wouldn't feel safe walking side-by-side while holding hands with a well-behaved toddler. In many places, it can't even be physically done. That's a design choice, and it's a very bad one.
October 20, 2024
Every civilization defines itself at least somewhat through the customs and rules by which the people abide. Early on in the formation of the American culture as a unique identity, Benjamin Franklin offered this advice: "It is ill-manners to silence a fool, and cruelty to let him go on." ■ The tension between freedom of expression and the need to control for quality isn't an easy one. Internet culture in particular dictates that we often have no choice but to let any given fool go on. ■ A friend might pull the fool aside and tell them to shut up; on social media it is all too often the angry reply that keeps some people going. "Poasters", "reply guys", and common loudmouths who used to just spout off from the corner of a bar take advantage of the deeply addictive nature of our interactive tools to stoke reactions from the wise and foolish alike. ■ That all would be bad enough on its own, but it is worse when we are under relentless attack by agitation propagandists: People using the unmediated attention people pay to the zeitgeist in order to get them angry about all the wrong things in service of sinister ends. ■ It's become a cornerstone of malignant foreign influence campaigns targeting the United States, and there are plenty of domestic voices who behave badly for their own self-interest. Contrary to what Elon Musk thinks, silence is sometimes golden. ■ We might be inclined to think that the most American thing to do is to consider all free speech equally good -- not as a matter of law, but as a matter of culture. But if Ben Franklin is right, it's even more American to use the non-coercive tools at our disposal (influence, attention, and the "mute" buttons, for starters) to silence fools before they go on.
Twitter users are being made to train AI by default
Anyone who's ever had to submit to an institutional review for performing any test involving human subjects has got to look at this kind of behavior in some measure of disbelief.
Tropical weather is all about energy transfer
Three cheers for analysis that frames tropical cyclones in terms of "energy", since that's the root of what really matters. 2024 had a very mild peak-season Atlantic hurricane season, but a very energetic off-peak season.
A colorful conclusion to the growing season
Purple aster, goldenrod, and other plants native to Iowa can supply some color into the end of fall
October 19, 2024
There was a time when a car that reached 100,000 miles was a thing to be celebrated. But at least for some manufacturers, 400,000 miles might be the new 100,000. And that's something pretty remarkable. ■ The average American driver averages about 13,500 miles a year. So 100,000 miles represents seven and a half years of average driving, but 400,000 miles equates to more than a quarter-century. And while it's doubtful that most people who have high-mileage cars are also low-mileage individual drivers, the point remains: Getting a lot of service out of the same car means a lot of time driving the same model. ■ Cars and trucks on American roads are now almost teenaged, on average. While we're likely to be turning over many of our consumer goods much more frequently than that -- smartphones and televisions, especially -- we're sticking with our cars longer than we're sticking with our homes. ■ Automakers would like more consumer churn, because sales volume is what drives revenues and, ultimately, earnings. But considering the enormous resource demands that go with automaking, long-lasting, reliable vehicles represent an under-appreciated victory for green thinking.
October 16, 2024
The Department of Justice is considering a breakup of Google, or so it appears from a filing related to antitrust action being pursued against the company. There's no escaping notice of Google's considerable influence within some Internet-related markets, like search engines, video delivery, and smartphone applications. And intervention may be called for, depending upon what uses the company may have made of its market power to inhibit the growth of competitors. ■ Corporate disassembly, though, should be very much a last resort. It is one thing to prevent the bolting-together of a monopolist; if all of Google's components were independent and equally powerful without combination, then putting them together after the fact would certainly deserve to raise scrutiny. ■ But if organic growth is largely the cause of Google's success, then breakup may actually prolong the behaviors that the Justice Department finds undesirable. For one thing, obvious rival buyers with pockets deep enough to buy the spun-off companies may be unwilling to risk facing antitrust suits of their own, rendering them artificially less willing to promote competition. ■ For another, the risk of breakup could entice Google/Alphabet as it exists now to maximize its profitability before time runs out. After all, so doing might be in the best short-term and mid-term interests of its shareholders, regardless of what the long term might bring. ■ Moreover, if the constituent companies within today's Google/Alphabet are broken apart, they may be incentivized to engage in increased risk-taking as standalone entities -- which could in turn lead to even more aggressive sales practices than any in which they might be engaged now. ■ Categorical changes often overtake monopolistic behaviors anyway. AI could supersede search. Google could already be breaking its own search quality by contaminating the results with AI input, and the mass production of junk content could poison search engines altogether. Even better ad services could deplete the market for Internet advertising, just as Internet advertising mortally disrupted newspaper classified advertising. ■ Modesty should be the guiding principle for would-be regulators and trust-busters. Many if not most of yesterday's behemoth names in business are shadows of their former selves -- General Motors, General Electric, AT&T, and Sears are all vastly different than what they once were. Google is almost certain to experience the same, and market and technological changes will do more for the cause than anything that the government is likely to achieve.
October 15, 2024
It has long been easy to pay lip service to the notion of non-violent resistance to injustice; nobody gets into trouble for praising figures like Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet it seems easy to overlook that the moral force of nonviolence depends upon an upstream condition: A sense of honor. ■ The honor of the resisters isn't what matters, but the honor of the audience -- the public at large. Gandhi and King both depended upon the expectation that the public would respond with revulsion to the sight of their protesters being punished, physically and brutally, for behaving blamelessly. ■ They assumed that even people who might have subscribed to a sense of racial superiority of their own would have subscribed even more to seeing themselves as being more decent than the brutality put on display by the authorities -- ostensibly in their name. For its political ends, the entire concept depends upon a common sense of respectability. ■ Respectability starts small. It doesn't emerge out of the ether in adulthood; it has to be inculcated in children in little ways (share, play fair, treat others how you want to be treated) and then reinforced all throughout a person's lifetime. Something is fundamentally broken among those who reject the importance of respectability. Every member of the public who recognizes what good came from the nonviolent resistance movements needs to recognize that an essential way to honor its past victories is to reject disreputable behavior by those who wish to be leaders in the present.
October 14, 2024
Big Ten football teams -- of which there are now considerably more than ten -- are having a rough time with the sheer expanse of the conference. They are now 3-10 when traveling across at least two time zones away for games. ■ In aviation, it's called crew resource management (CRM): The study of how human factors affect conditions within and among the team flying the airplane. CRM was originally just an innovation within the cockpit, opening up a pathway for junior officers to question their superiors. It has since evolved to include the full crew, which means flight attendants have a say in safety as well. ■ Human factors surely apply outside of aviation, too. It's not just about permitting subordinates to challenge the senior members of a team, it's also about recognizing that not everything can be boiled down to equipment or practice. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of whether the people involved are physically, emotionally, and psychologically up to a task. ■ On paper, a conference stretching from sea to shining sea may look impressive. It certainly has a monster of a reach on TV. But if the student-athletes are so wiped out by marathon travel schedules that away games start to look like give-away games, then maybe it will be time to take a cue from the teams flying the planes.
(Video) A flaming fuel tank rolls right past as a witness films an explosion at a Russian fuel depot
October 11, 2024
Awful people keep attacking the Internet Archive
Change your passwords; the bad guys are doing bad things
The people behind product development should always have some exposure to how their work actually performs in the real world. It is extremely hard, and perhaps impossible altogether, to build a great end product without first-hand exposure to how it is used in the field. ■ This observation can, of course, be taken too far: Plenty of firms have only ever put engineers and product developers on the fast track to management. That's not always the right decision; a well-integrated firm can make use of talent from many different departments. And management itself is a discipline, so even those who cross over from other disciplines need to learn how to be good managers if they want to thrive. ■ But it's also a huge mistake to divorce production from the customer experience. Google has filled a virtual graveyard with abandoned products, and the ruthlessness of its killing undoubtedly has some effect on whether customers trust them with future products. Salt water apparently can turn Teslas into fire-starters and Facebook's "metaverse" ambitions were kneecapped because people found Mark Zuckerberg's virtual avatar unsettling. ■ It's not for nothing that "We eat our own cooking" is a phrase intended to cultivate customer trust. Those who experience their own consequences may not be better-equipped to imagine great new possibilities than those for whom a product is more of an abstraction, but they are much better-positioned to experience the pain of their own errors and oversights and to be motivated to fix them.
The National Weather Service office in Des Moines uses high-resolution, real-time satellite imagery to pick out wildfires in their warning area. It's a stellar use of satellite imaging technology, and a great example of what can happen when science and technology open new doors to let curious human beings exercise their problem-solving instincts. ■ Obviously, nobody developed the GOES-16 satellite (or its siblings) for the direct purpose of looking for wildfires. It's first and foremost for looking at clouds. ■ But along the way, someone deduced that looking for fires was a possibility, and now we have a tool that can potentially help detect un-reported fires at least a little sooner. That, in turn, increases the odds that firefighters can be mobilized in time to keep field fires from growing out of control. ■ Fire detection from space is the kind of incremental technological improvement that is all too easy to take for granted. It doesn't affect most people, most of the time. But it's vastly improved over the grainy, low-resolution imagery that passed for weather satellite coverage in living memory. And when it's able to perform at its best, it can make a big difference for people on the ground.
In a real sign of the times, a media outlet tested the use of artificial intelligence to apply for jobs and found that modern job searching is conducive to that sort of automation. ■ One of the celebrated tools customizes cover letters to go along with the applications and resumes. It says something pretty dreadful if an applicant chooses to automate their cover letter, which is precisely the aspect of a job application that is supposed to put some personality and color into an otherwise highly routinized process. Automating the task of cover-letter writing achieves precisely the most perverse result. ■ Job applicants can be forgiven for trying to level the playing field against a job market that's already known to use AI technology to screen job applicants and even to conduct preliminary interviews. ■ But everyone involved must admit that there's something wrong with this picture. Human capital remains human above all, and although people are prone to many forms of lamentable bias, anything created by people -- whether intentionally programmed or "learned" artificially -- is likewise going to contain artifacts of that same bias. We're only kidding ourselves if we think we'll achieve better results for human beings by stripping all remaining elements of humanity from the process.
Good advice for re-framing problems
Dr. Mark Lewis, an oncologist from Utah with a sizeable social-media following, offers some tips for re-framing problems that have been helpful for him -- like disconnecting outcomes from self-worth and staying true to an internal yardstick of success rather than comparisons with others. They are well worth considering, particularly in the spirit of World Mental Health Day. They might well be the devices someone needs to hear today. ■ Different strategies work for different people. We are far from knowing the working of the mind well enough, categorically, to be able to treat people's mental wellness with the precision of, say, a prescription for eyeglasses. Improving on that frontier ought to be a high priority for society. ■ For many people, it would be a fair start to discern where they reside on a spectrum from "internal processor" to "external processor". It's often confused with introversion versus extroversion, but the two are not the same. An introvert may need to talk through problems, and an extrovert might feel compelled to think quietly in a space full of people. ■ Knowing which processing style prevails can help individuals work through those methods for framing problems with the best chance of success. An external processor, for example, might benefit from periodically writing out a list of stressors in order to take those problems out of the abstract mind and put them in a concrete, external place where they can be manipulated and contended with. ■ It may be easier for external processors to discern which problems call for a plan and which can be simply "let go", simply by putting them on a physical page. That technique might be utterly useless for an internal processor, who might find such a list jarring or aggravating as it intrudes on their interior thinking. ■ Contrasts like these tend to make a lot of pop psychology look ridiculous to at least half the audience at any given time. The "Plus-Minus-Interesting chart" may seem like a godsend to some and a total boat anchor to others, which is why anyone's list of hot tips has to come with either an implicit or (preferably) explicit list of contingent factors. Otherwise, a fair number of people may encounter that advice and come away either disappointed or frustrated. ■ There is no single path -- and certainly no shortcut -- to mental wellness and balance. But the path for each person needs to be constructed with some guidance towards self-awareness from the outset. Until we can diagnose a person's psychological makeup as reliably as we can test their cholesterol, there will remain a great deal of important work to do.
October 10, 2024
When a candidate promises "Whatever tariffs are required: 100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent" on imported vehicles, it should be evident that the word "tariff" has taken on a purely tokenistic meaning. The effect is no longer about the actual effect of the taxes being imposed, but about the effort to use large-sounding numbers as an otherwise meaningless signal. ■ The European Union has slapped tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, and both the United States and Canada have already imposed 100% tariffs on those imports just this fall. ■ All parties involved seem intent on spinning the tariffs as moves to "protect" or "level the playing field for" their own domestic auto workers. But that's where tariffs run out of gas: We should always pivot to calling them "import taxes", because that's what they are. And as with any tax, the burden falls in some portion on both the buyer and the seller. ■ "Tariff" sounds like something that someone else pays, but the reality is that regardless of where the tax is actually collected, cutting the check isn't the same as paying the price. Honesty would require describing this motivation clearly: The countries imposing import taxes want their own domestic consumers to pay higher prices in the nominal interest of subsidizing work for their fellow citizens...assuming that the intended effect actually plays out. ■ That's a big assumption, of course. "Protection" from competition often does little more than leave a domestic industry soft and sluggish. See, for example, the weakness of the US auto industry in the 1970s, when names like Honda and Toyota started to come on the scene. Both of those Japanese companies are now enormous US domestic automakers, because they kept on improving and Americans kept demanding more. ■ There may be a very serious case to be made for blocking the importation of vehicles from China over security concerns; it has been widely noted that electric vehicle manufacturing is now as much about computers as it is about wheels. ■ But if Chinese-made electric vehicles are riddled with security risks (as well they might be), then import taxes are unlikely to be the solution -- especially if they're only meant to "protect" domestic industry. Trade policies motivated by security concerns should have clear security effects. Otherwise, it just looks like a reward for a small segment of workers getting preferential treatment at their fellow citizens' expense.
October 6, 2024
There is no obvious way to make it profitable to a private-sector firm, but among the most valuable investments society could make in light of the artificial intelligence boom (and the perils, both known and unknown, that go with it) is to commit to a Manhattan Project-like effort to advance the science of psychology. Much of AI is purportedly built on the concepts of neural networks patterned on the human brain, yet we hardly know enough about the function of the brain to know how even to describe how neural networking even works. ■ Most arts and sciences seem to go through a similar series of development phases. It starts with the initial establishment of the discipline, usually under a founding theoretician or school (think Florence Nightingale and the modern practice of nursing). Then comes a juvenile stage, defined by the prominence of individual authors, often endorsing competitive theories (see, for instance, the economic rivalry between the schools of Hayek and Keynes). Then comes an adolescence, in which the second or third generation of experts starts to harmonize or unify the proven aspects of those early theories as new supplementary ideas blossom. Ultimately, most sciences arrive at a stage of maturity in which a fairly broad consensus prevails on the fundamentals and disagreements persist over the frontiers of the science. ■ Meteorology? A mature science. Economics? Probably somewhere in adolescence. AI? Still just a baby -- in which not only are most of the founders still alive, some (like Elon Musk and Sam Altman) are still actively feuding with each other. ■ Psychology still seems like it's in that juvenile phase -- there are still Jungians and Freudians and logotherapists and many other fragmented schools of thought. That fragmentation is on display in fields like business and education, which depend heavily on psychology, but still don't often confidently know what to do with it. ■ The real hazard for us could well become evident if AI science (which is well-funded and full of ambitious researchers with loads of incentives) matures faster than psychology. We have magnificent brains that are the products of millions of years of evolution, but computer processing is such that every human second is like years or even decades to a neural network. If we don't really know ourselves, how will we know where we stand in contrast with computers? ■ There's lots of talk about an AI "kill switch", as well there ought to be. But the ultimate kill switch is for us to know ourselves better than our tools know us. There's less monetary incentive driving toward that goal, and certainly less energy. It would do us well to rectify that gap.
October 5, 2024
Liberate the language of money
Within a free-market economy, one tier of secular sainthood is reserved for those who liberate the language of money away from the financial and economic priesthood. Money itself isn't divine, but what it measures and the activity it facilitates makes all the difference between living in a modern, safe, and productive world -- or living in caves, feeling hungry, cold, and sick. ■ The problem we often face is that discussions of money -- even when it's a central point of public policy and decision-making -- are cloaked in the two things almost guaranteed to make ordinary people allergic: Jargon and math. ■ It doesn't really have to be this way; economic activity is as natural to any of us as rewarding a dog with a treat for performing a trick (a simple illustration of incentives) or watering a seedling and watching it grow (a fair metaphor for compounding interest). Most of what really matters could be conveyed to children in the form of bedtime stories -- and it probably should. ■ Waiting for adulthood doesn't help. People don't like learning anything that feels like a chore, and the money priesthood (that is, anyone who understands it well enough to obfuscate it for others and get paid to "figure it out") counts on that reluctance for its survival. ■ But the incentives create a feedback loop: The more the priesthood can complicate matters, the more intimidating it looks, and nobody has much incentive to de-complicate matters. What money is to be made in that? ■ Nor is this only the case for market economies. It applies to mixed and command economies, too -- perhaps even more so. The people of North Korea starve on average incomes of less than $2,000 a year, but the people who "command" their economy ride in limousines and look well-fed while their compatriots go hungry. ■ Ignorance concentrates power into the hands of those who know more than others. Sometimes they know better because they've learned more, and other times, they benefit from secrets. Dismantling mass-market ignorance of money would help to wrest power away from an undeserving priesthood.
October 3, 2024
A columnist for the University of Iowa's student newspaper laments that his campus remains peppered with buildings in the Brutalist architectural style. Cole Walker pleads, "Brutalist-style buildings should be torn down or renovated to enhance campus facilities and engage students in nontraditional ways, ensuring that curiosity and creativity flourish through a focus on design and culture." ■ He's entirely not wrong; some of the concrete monoliths of Iowa City are drab and uninspiring -- though others have modestly more curb appeal than they might be given credit for having. But it's a stretch to imagine that a public university will simply tear down big, heavy buildings just for the purpose of replacing them with structures that "engage students in nontraditional ways". That would require a whole lot of money for a terribly ambiguous purpose. ■ But what the student's plea does underscore is a lesson that ought to ring in every architect's ears: Buildings should be designed for the people inside them. ■ Most buildings are scarcely "designed" at all; nobody's really putting much thought into a strip mall. But those buildings that are favored enough to get true architectural treatment should generally obey Louis Sullivan's maxim that form follows function. The modern spin on that maxim ought to be that "Form first follows the function of serving the people inside". ■ How many buildings are constructed with little or no regard for even the basic features of permitting sunlight when it is wanted or filtering it naturally when it is not? Or of encouraging generous natural airflow to enhance mechanical HVAC? Or of creating interior spaces that thoughtfully center on the human experience? ■ Much can be done to add ornamentation or change a facade later on in the design phase -- or even be conducted during a long-overdue renovation. But surface features that matter only to people on the outside should come far behind the priority to make the building the best it can be for the needs of the people performing the functions inside of it -- not for the sake of the functions, but for the sake of the occupants. If that's done right, everything else should follow.
October 2, 2024
History to guard the present and future
In a time of big events -- a catastrophic hurricane in the southeast, a significant Presidential election just weeks away, wars underway involving both allies and foes -- it's easy to find commentary that leans heavily upon the notion that everything in view is unprecedented. This temperament is egged on by a media environment (both social and mass media) that rewards nothing more than it rewards engagement, whether it is of quality or not. ■ This leads some people to make outlandish claims in pursuit of that engagement. Some even do it in the public square, like the union boss who wants to inflict pain on everyone so that he can hold his industry in stasis rather than seeing it conform with the times. Dreams of past glories (like a certain hazy fondness for an industrialized past) are easy to romanticize. ■ Historical literacy is an indispensable guardian of future welfare. It's vital to recognize the fullness of history -- where we and our predecessors went wrong and where they went right. What mistakes were made and what was hidden from scrutiny. What developments were fruitful and which ones set us back. ■ That historical literacy takes work. It takes educators who know their stuff and have ideas for making the past relevant to students who might not be ready to care of their own volition. It takes public figures who can incorporate historical references honorably into what they say about the present. It takes a public willing to check the facts once in a while. It takes resources like Our World In Data that can serve as clearinghouses for what we need to see in perspective. ■ None of this is necessarily easy, and it's certainly not free. But the costs of historical illiteracy are huge. Human nature changes very little over time, and in many aspects it never changes at all. Thus, while the particular details may change, history truly does often rhyme. But unless we know how it went the first time around, we leave ourselves dreadfully vulnerable to the hazards of making bad judgments over and over again.
September 30, 2024
Self-organization and reinsurance pools
Americans are a notoriously self-organizing people. We can point to a heritage celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 or reported with pride by Benjamin Franklin in 1790 for evidence of its long lineage. ■ But there are times when voluntarism can only do so much, and the catastrophic damage left behind after Hurricane Helene -- especially in western North Carolina -- gives an unfortunate example of the limits. North Carolina's state Department of Transportation has said, "Unless it's an emergency, all roads in Western NC should be considered closed". Local media depict complete devastation of the local transportation infrastructure. ■ Individual states within the United States already have a considerable supply of what we call "state capacity": The ability to get things done. Most states are comparable in population to independent countries around the world, and almost all have state-level gross domestic products that punch even further above their weight for population. ■ It ought to be well within our capacity at the national level to have a sort of backup level of service that can be rushed to the scene of similar disasters -- in much the same way that insurance companies have reinsurance companies to help backstop their own risk. More than anything, the national level of government should be able to supply a rapid-reaction effort to fill in for ordinary transportation and logistics networks until those networks can be brought back into operation. ■ We lean heavily on the National Guard to do that work, but considering the volatility of the geopolitical situation, it might be time for us as a nation to decide that the risk burden is large enough and widespread enough to justify a commonwealth investment in building the capacity to make the fastest repairs possible to stand in when everything else falls apart.
It isn't uncommon for someone to look at a weed growing in an inhospitable location like a parking-lot crack and have a fleeting thought of respect for the cleverness of the weed. Of course, it's a mistake to anthropomorphize a weed. The weed is no smarter than evolution has selected into its genes. ■ Yet we should recognize that nature does have a characteristic that we would recognize as intelligence, even if it isn't truly sentient. Sometimes intelligence shows up simply in adaptation to circumstances and the development of responses to those circumstances. A conditioning effect, as it were. ■ There are plenty of human beings who demonstrate the same kind of quasi-intelligence, and we often struggle to depict it correctly. Sometimes it's called "cunning" or "guile". Other times, it's even begrudgingly described as an "animal intelligence". ■ These people adapt their behaviors around circumstances or respond to stimuli in a way that almost looks like intelligent thought -- but most people of goodwill struggle to call it that, because it isn't a sense of deliberate, enlightened self-improvement. That's what we usually like to describe as "intelligence": It can start as a gift, but it takes form when the holder decides to make something better of themselves with it. ■ Enlightened self-improvement comes from a choice. There lots of people who show that kind of enlightened self-improvement, even when they are not innately "smart". That's what makes it laudable: Enlightened self-improvement can be undertaken by almost anyone. What we shouldn't do is applaud people who simply adapt, weed-like, around circumstances for selfish gain. ■ Words matter. Often, the lack of good words to describe things matters quite a lot, too. That we don't have an evident turn of phrase for this "weed intelligence" is a misfortune for us all, especially because those who exhibit it are often the ones of whom we ought to be most wary.
September 27, 2024
While under investigation for bribery and other criminal charges, New York City mayor Eric Adams claimed to the FBI that he forgot the passcode to his phone and thus couldn't unlock the phone to permit investigators to dig in. It is a claim that is at once both plausible and unbelievable. ■ It is plausible because passwords are a mess. What might have been good for security purposes in 1990 is wholly inadequate today. Every phone, for instance, should have a lock screen -- but anyone with children in the home knows that even a toddler can learn to "shoulder surf" and break those codes with only the slightest amount of attention. ■ Real passwords, meanwhile, like the ones we use on everything from high-risk activity like online banking to low-risk activity like ordering take-out, are an utter goulash of inconsistent rules and requirements. Consequently, most people either duplicate their passwords in highly predictable fashion across all kinds of services, or they get into the habit of writing or saving the passwords in places that are easily cracked. One site may require a minimum of 12 characters, while another may impose a 12-character maximum. "Special characters" are often required -- but sometimes, only a select few are allowed. And then there are the services that require password updates every 3 or 6 months, only contributing to the confusion. ■ None of these are believable excuses in Adams's case, of course. He has overwhelming reason to try to hide his tracks, and offering a phone that can't be unlocked seems consistent with such a pattern of behavior. If there's one password or code someone had be dead certain to remember, it's the one to get into a personal phone. ■ Phones are the holy grail of two-factor authentication: If you are smart enough to require more than just a password to login to any site or service, then you almost certainly need your phone to receive the second "factor" -- usually a challenge code sent either to an authenticator app or a one-time code that arrives via text or email. ■ If the mayor of America's largest city is too dumb to manage his personal phone security well enough to remember a 6-digit screen lock code, then everyone on his personal staff, executive protection unit, and cybersecurity team (especially) ought to be fired for gross dereliction of duty. Your phone can tell people where you are, it can spy on your conversations, and it is the virtually unobstructed expressway straight to your brain. Any VIP needs to have ten times the phone savvy of an ordinary person, and it's up to staffers to be sure they have it. ■ At the very least, though, Adams's folly ought to be a good news hook to get everyone talking: Everyone needs good passwords, everyone needs good screen lock codes, and nobody should trust either of those things exclusively.
September 26, 2024
An article published at Inside Higher Ed suggests that college undergraduate students aren't reading much of what is being assigned to them by their professors, and adopts a tone suggesting that summaries generated by artificial intelligence and video-based subject primers are displacing the act of reading. It is entirely possible that "kids these days" are too often choosing shortcuts around the learning process, to give off the superficial appearance of having engaged with the material rather than doing the actual engagement. ■ It would be hazardous, though, to assume that every undesirable-looking change is attributable to laziness. For one thing, academic writing is often notoriously bad. That's nothing new: Theodore Roosevelt lamented in 1912, "Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of readableness in a book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a few learned people seem to feel that the fact that a book is interesting is proof that it is shallow." ■ Moreover, academic writing is often wordy for its own sake. Ben Sasse, who has twice served as a college president, has noted, "I think lots of 300-page books could (and should) have been 30-page articles, but neither magazines nor book publishers have much of a market for 30 pages." It hearkens to an old joke that goes, "My book was 400 pages long because I didn't have time to write it in 200 pages." It takes real dedication to say things both briefly and well. ■ And there is one other matter that can't be overlooked: By the time students are in college, the burden has begun to shift. Whereas the high-school student is required to attend (less they be counted truant), a college student is generally free to attend a lecture or not, and to read the material or not. Consequences might follow, but that depends on the instructor's expectations and assessment structure -- far more than is the case in a high school, where standardized testing often prevails. ■ An adept instructor of college-aged learners (or adults beyond) ought to put real thought into what is being taught, why it matters, and how it can best be assessed. If the knowledge being imparted by lectures and textbooks can be delivered well enough by a YouTube video that the students can pass the test, then either the video is good enough (at least for some learners) or the test isn't very good at all. The burden of assessing these things falls on the instructor, not the students. ■ In many subject areas, reading remains (on average) the fastest, most reliable mode of transmitting information. But that isn't always the case, and it also may vary from one student to the next. Sometimes the writing just isn't very good! ■ That's where pedagogy comes into play: A subject-matter expert isn't always the best teacher -- nor is a great teacher necessarily always a subject-matter expert. Recognizing that instructional design matters -- and that it is just as valid a field of expertise as any other -- is probably more important now than ever before. Those who fail to adapt do so (or, rather, don't) at their own peril.
September 25, 2024
Warren Buffett is credited with saying, "Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." With Helene bearing down on America's Gulf Coast today, we ought to acknowledge a different flavor of Buffett's sentiment: Somebody evacuated safely from the path of a dangerous hurricane today because someone started collecting data and building a model a long time ago. ■ We should be astonished by the quality of the forecast models developed by teams at the National Weather Service and other meteorological organizations around the world, like Europe's ECMWF. They're able to foresee the genesis of a potentially catastrophic hurricane days in advance, when it looks like nothing but a small batch of clouds in the western Caribbean. ■ Meteorologists should be proud of themselves for having made such developments, and society should be thankful to our predecessors and our past selves for investing in a system of scientific development that has made so much progress. The advancements that sometimes look only incremental have compounding effects, and they don't happen by accident -- they happen through intentional efforts to get better in the name of saving lives and protecting property. ■ Other sciences ought to look to the example of meteorology for an example of how to drive a science toward ever-increasing maturity. The public should look to the field as an examplar for generating a responsible return on public investment. ■ We don't have the technology (at least not yet) to keep adverse weather from happening, and there's little reason to believe we ever will. But improving the quality of the science involved and communicating it well to mass audiences are two things our experts have shown their dedication to doing well.
September 24, 2024
A former BBC editor, reminiscing about working on the organization's "Ceefax" teletext service, says this of the transition to delivering news content on the Internet in a hybrid model with teletext: "Because we now had to service audiences for both Ceefax and the website, the top four paragraphs of a web story still had to be totally self-contained. In other words, all the relevant facts -- with balance -- had to be in there, just as they always had been. Writers then had to write a fifth paragraph of context before expanding the story on the website." ■ As trivial as that may sound, it speaks to the way that constraints cause us to create memorable things. When an artist selects a medium or a style -- pointillism, or a capella singing, or black-and-white photography, or haiku -- the constraint enforces discipline, which in turn often instigates deeper creativity than saying "anything goes". ■ That's one of the characteristics so often lost when people turn to digital media today: There's no inherent limit to the length of your podcast series, your Substack newsletter, or your YouTube channel. Unbound by artificial constraints, people feel like they have to go on and on. The constraints are what generate real artistic flair. ■ Without those constraints, people tend to optimize around low-input, high-output formulas, like the tiresome "I'm a ___, here's why ___" structure of news headlines seen everywhere. Those headlines used to be constrained by physical space on the printed page and thus had to convey lots of information in the equivalent of a few bytes; now, they're written as long as needed in order to tick the boxes that boost their search-engine performance. ■ It can be hard to appreciate the power of limitations in a time when most of the talk is about the blue-sky potential of technologies like artificial intelligence, but human intelligence is geared towards problem-solving. We're often at our best not when faced with a blank canvas, but rather with a puzzle to figure out. Constraints (like the character count enforced by a tool like teletext) lead to more colorful work.
September 23, 2024
The promise of a new app called "SocialAI" is that users will be able to turn to an environment that feels like a social network, permitting them to plumb the responses of "millions of AI followers" to their comments. The app developer says, "SocialAI does not have real users. All 'followers' are simulated fictional characters. All generated user posts are private and not shared anywhere." ■ The most charitable perspective on the service is that it will provide users with the ability to express feelings and thoughts to a "crowd" without suffering the consequences of putting an ill-considered Facebook post or Tweet out into the world for actual human consumption. ■ In that sense, it is perhaps best viewed as a harm-mitigation tool, rather like getting a cigarette smoker to switch to vaping instead. Not perfect, but probably less harmful than the original behavior. For some people known to have poor impulse control, that might be the trick -- especially if they are naturally inclined to process their thoughts externally. ■ An uncharitable perspective on the concept of the app would warn that it appears dangerously constituted to keep people from engaging with their own internal dialogue. Part of the danger of having literally unlimited sources of content at our disposal at all times is that people can become addicted to consuming inputs without reserving adequate time for processing. ■ The app claims it is a feature to "Feel the boost of always being surrounded by your AI community". One doesn't have to be Henry David Thoreau to recognize that sometimes what we need least is more external input. ■ Computerized tools can offer lots of useful ways to supplement the work of human beings, and from time to time, feedback that feels like it's coming from a human (when it is expressly not) might be a useful adjunct to some. But self-restraint is rarely the characteristic app developers seek to encourage, so prospective users ought to beware.
September 20, 2024
Poland and Czechia are experiencing catastrophic flooding -- enough to cause disruptions in Czech elections and leave billions of dollars in damages behind. It's an event so widespread and significant that it's engaged an EU-wide response. ■ Neighbors being neighborly, Germany has offered the assistance of some of its military units. Poland's president, Donald Tusk, announced the help with some deadpan commentary: "If you see German soldiers, please do not panic. They are here to help." ■ It's a funny line that speaks to a much more serious issue: We should never assume that the conditions that prevail today are going to continue in a straight line projection into the future. Germany, projected on a straight line out of 1939, would have been irredeemable. It needed to be stopped by a stronger power with greater moral bearings, and it was. ■ The evil within Germany had to be defeated -- crushed, even. The worst perpetrators deserved punishment as exactly the war criminals they chose to be. ■ But Germany as a concept? As a nation of people, representing a culture? As a historical continuity? It went wrong and it needed correction, including an occupation and reconstruction. ■ The world demanded that Germany become better, that it redeem itself and stay redeemed. Now, a human lifespan removed from Germany's deepest evils, the world remembers -- Donald Tusk's teasing proves that. ■ Yet the world also expected Germany to live up to a better standard, and after lots of work, we are all better off for it. It's a lesson worth applying to the conditions in any number of places around the world that look unsalvageable to us today. Straight line projections don't apply.
September 19, 2024
In the course of critiquing the behavior of certain newsmakers, economist Daron Acemoglu offers an interesting two-fold analysis of behavior at the extremes, noting: "[S]tatus is largely zero-sum. More status for somebody means less for another. A steeper status hierarchy makes some people happy, and others unhappy and dissatisfied. Investment in zero-sum activities is often inefficient and excessive, as compared to investment in non-zero-sum activities." ■ It's an observation worth applying to the world where ordinary people live, too. At the extremes, some people try to gain status over others by buying expensive things and showing them off. This is the classic folly of "conspicuous consumption". ■ But who hasn't heard the argument that it's better to buy experiences rather than goods? And is there anyone for whom is it not generally true? ■ Acemoglu's follow-up to that material/immaterial divide is important, too: "Compare, for example, the social value of spending money on pure gold multi-million-dollar Rolex watches versus spending time to learn some new skills [...] The second type of investment, on the other hand, increases your human capital [and] also contributes to society." ■ Goods, though, are easier to mass-produce than experiences -- especially ones that "increase human capital" (by developing new skills). Perhaps one of those people with lots of resources could chase some of that zero-sum status by investing in the creation of the kinds of tools and institutions that make it easier for others to access new human capital. Carnegie's libraries did something just like that a century ago. The innovation ought to continue.
September 18, 2024
Elon Musk has taken to his place on the platform formerly known as Twitter to amplify a false rumor about a bomb threat at a political rally. As one of the wealthiest and most widely-known people on the planet, he has considerably more ability to amplify a claim than, for example, the police department saying the bomb story is false. ■ Musk probably doesn't consider himself an "elder", but at the age of 53, he is 14 years older than the median American and thus certainly qualifies, at least in the chronological sense. In some cultural contexts, age may play a part in defining an elder; in others, a person might be an "elder" as young as age 18. Thomas Jefferson was merely 33 years old when he acted as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. ■ Many cultural institutions observe an implied covenant between "elders" and the rest of the community: We, the community, listen gracefully, while you, the elders, seek to provide real wisdom born of reflection, consideration, and judgment. Those elders who choose to break the covenant don't deserve continued respect. ■ Lots of people who ought to know better misuse their influence for selfish ends. It is telling just how disconnected so many people who are (at least) chronological elders seem to be from the wisdom of their own ancestors and elders. This choice to divorce themselves from the custody of some kind of continuum seems to make them less likely to recognize their own responsibility to act as a link in a chain, transmitting "elder" wisdom on to their juniors and improving upon it with each retelling and each new generation. ■ The instinct to seek guidance from elders remains as strong as it has ever been, but if people held in high esteem -- whether on a global scale or merely at the family level -- cleave off their sense of duty to first learn and discern before spouting off whatever has most recently tickled their fancy, then we are headed for trouble. Eldership is a mutual responsibility.
September 17, 2024
From time to time, an American might be asked to observe a dress code at a public event, or a student may be asked to reverse a t-shirt with a provocative slogan. It's fairly uncommon; we tend to be free-speech zealots in this country, and the occasional invocation of restrictions on time, manner, or place tend to stand out as the exceptions that prove the rule. By and large, words are welcome to do combat so that fists do not. ■ Such is not the case everywhere. In Hong Kong, a 27-year-old man has just pleaded guilty to a charge of sedition merely for wearing a t-shirt in public. The words "Liberate Hong Kong" were just too much for the Chinese Communist Party (and its local quasi-apparatchiks) to bear. Hong Kong, of course, has been in a free-speech freefall since the imposition of a draconian law restricting speech in 2020. ■ Americans would be merely interested onlookers -- hopefully, sympathetic to the cause of freedom -- if it weren't for the growing projection of the Chinese regime's anti-speech attitude far beyond the country's own borders. They've threatened American movie studios, created human blockades in Australia, and opened secret-police bureaus in free countries to monitor and intimidate dissidents (or perhaps worse). ■ These offenses make Chinese laws on speech into significant global issues, rather than mere domestic ones. The dismantling of the "second" system which Hong Kong had been promised is a reminder to the world that if there's one thing an authoritarian regime cannot stand, it is the liberty of individual thought. Today, it's a personal crisis for one dissident. But in a world where pressure against activists and political figures can take on an instant global footprint, there's no need to wait until tomorrow to take it seriously.
September 16, 2024
A philosophical current that has gained some traction and influence in recent years has adopted the peculiar label of "postliberalism". Within this tent, there are some objectively intelligent and often persuasive thinkers who try to make the case that the "common good" must be made to prevail over individual freedom. ■ If we understand the word "liberalism" not in the odd sense that the American left/right scheme misuses it, but instead in the way it makes sense in a universal way, then we recognize it as a philosophy that values individual liberty as the most important value for a government to preserve, protect, and defend. ■ That isn't to say that individual freedoms are the most important of all values a society can uphold -- only that the purpose of forming a government, which can do lots of things to the individual (like imprisonment, conscription, or even execution), is to protect those liberties. ■ Other things have to go along with freedoms in order for a system to work, but those things have to be chosen. Humans know we're meant to be free. We have to be taught how to be responsible. The institutions that teach concepts like duty have to be flexible, because what's needed from dutiful people changes over time. ■ And thus, the problem with people who say they want more things like responsibility and duty, but who call themselves "postliberals": There is no post-liberalism. There is either liberalism or illberalism. ■ There is no logical consistency to thinking that there is something "after" personal liberties, free inquiry, and the intrinsic worth of the individual. There are complementary virtues (like duty and responsibility) that go along with liberty, but governments can only be good if they are constrained. Specifically, they must be constrained from harming personal liberties. That is the soul of humanity's liberal experiment. ■ Anyone who insists that they can solve complex (some would say impossible) problems like maximizing the "common good" by telling people how to live isn't choosing something "after" liberalism; they're choosing something before or other than liberty.
September 14, 2024
Yesterday's city mouse; today's country mouse
Tales that trumpet the moral high ground of the "country mouse" over that of the vice-beholden "city mouse" are at least as old as one of Aesop's fables -- recorded more than 2,500 years ago. So, on one hand, it is no surprise that the spirit of the tale remains around even today, when some people turn to spinning tales about where to find "Real America". Invariably, they find it off the beaten path. ■ On the other hand, the longevity of the supposed contrast should be all the proof anyone needs to dismiss it as absurd. The biggest city Aesop could have possibly meant in his allegorical tale would have been Athens, which might have contained 200,000 people at most. Not a village, of course, but probably a little bit smaller than the metropolitan populations of Monroe, Louisiana, or Johnson City, Tennessee, today -- places that almost certainly fit the stereotype to be called rural, "real" America. ■ Some people are "country mice" by nature, preferring an unhurried pace and lots of space to themselves. Others are natural "city mice", favoring crowds and noise and speed. But it's all relative: The biggest Greek city of Aesop's day would be only the eighth-largest in Louisiana today. ■ We shouldn't confuse some preferences for others. There's nothing wrong with preferring a country-mouse pace, nor with a city-mouse pace, either. Neither confers any elevated moral stature -- nor any depravity, either. ■ It's not even valid to think that they reflect adjacent preferences about things like introversion or extroversion. There are plenty of extroverts who like the country life, and plenty of introverts who want to be close to the center of action (even if they don't want to talk to anyone when they get there). "City" versus "country" is often a proxy for other assumptions, and quite often we're not at all clear with one another about which of those assumptions we're making. ■ What really matters is whether people have the maximum freedom to choose what fits them personally, allowing them to optimize their own lifestyle choices in the limited time any one of us has on Earth. The freedom to move about -- even to literally take an entire home with you on the road -- is the thing that actually makes America great. All of its places are real.
September 13, 2024
A recurring theme in national news coverage about education is the well-worn "contest" between the classic college education and the trades. Headlines like "Want job security? Trade school could help" almost invariably lead stories that pitch technical or blue-collar skills as rivals to the liberal arts and white-collar career training. ■ It is, as it always has been, a false dichotomy. The technical trades, crafts, and occupations don't have to be rivalrous with a liberal education; likewise, those who go on to earn bachelors' degrees and onward should probably include some kind of vocational skill development as part of a well-rounded education. The two fields should be harmonized and complementarized: Plumbers who read the classics? Accountants who know how to wire low-voltage panels? Why not both? Why not a pathway from alternative rocker to Ph.D. molecular biologist? ■ What America could really use is some innovation around a 2+2 model of post-secondary education: One that makes room for both trade skills and liberal arts, ensuring that most everyone who wants it can enter adulthood with marketable skills. Many paths would fit naturally together; a wiring trade might fork naturally into computer science or electrical engineering. Bookkeeping might wind its way later on to a CPA or an MBA. A digital marketing certificate may end up pointing towards application development or system administration later. ■ Most important is that we seek to lower the barriers to human-capital formation. People shouldn't find themselves irrevocably locked into choices they made at age 18. For some, college ends up as an expensive false start towards a bachelor's degree. For others, the long path to a degree in law or medicine ends up at an unfulfilling destination -- but between student loans and foregone opportunities, they may see no way out. ■ For everyone across the spectrum of possibilities, more stackable credentials (individual achievements that can accrue towards larger goals) and more pathways are probably the answers. ■ Especially as technological and economic progress ensure that almost every job becomes more complex with time, an increasing number of people would benefit from a liberation from inflexible educational and career paths that treat ages 18 and 22 as magical "on" and "off" ramps, never to be revisited. The more we see education and training as parallels with work rather than things we must do in series, the better.
September 11, 2024
The annual recitation of the names of those killed in the September 11th attacks remains a solemn event; it is a litany lasting nearly four hours. It is small counterweight to the way history encroaches on living memory. The median American living today was about 15 years old at the time of the dreadful events of that day; it won't be long before more people know it only as an abstraction from textbooks rather than a remembered trauma. ■ Reading a name alone isn't all that much in the way of tribute. By comparison, even the sparse half-dozen or so words that can be added to a veteran's headstone seem like they convey volumes about the decedent's time on Earth. Yet it would be difficult to add even that much to a roll call of those who perished on 9/11 without making the annual memorials altogether too long. ■ Yet a great deal of merit is done by reciting those names, rather than merely recounting the dead as a single whole number: 2,977. It wasn't their tragedy all together; it was a sinister deed resulting in 2,977 unique and individual calamities. ■ The importance of remembering and saying the names of the dead is of shared significance across many cultures and religious traditions. It's an important act for the living because it serves as a reminder that no matter how many we are in number, whatever our circumstances may be, each person affects the world around them individually. What we do in large groups matters, too, but seldom if ever does it matter as much as to those who would recognize a name.
September 10, 2024
ABC News will host a Presidential debate tonight under unprecedented circumstances; never before in the television era has a Presidential campaign begun with two presumptive party nominees debating one another, only for one of those presumptive nominees to be replaced before Election Day. It is in the self-interest of ABC News to make as much hype of the event as possible. ■ A serious Presidential debate would ask several questions. The seriousness of this debate will be reflected, in part, by how close any of the questions come to issues like these, which are (a) of significant national interest, (b) closely under the umbrella of the President's Article II duties under the Constitution, and (c) likely to have at least some meaningful effect on the next four years, especially if not dealt with assertively. ■ Question 1: "What tools of the Executive Branch would you use to encourage the development of new tools to combat the effects of antibiotic resistance?" Health care has been a major part of the national menu of issues for decades, but we have generally avoided addressing significant growing threats like antibiotic resistance. We saw the consequences of long-term underinvestment in pandemic preparedness in 2020, and the unfathomable costs of that underinvestment. The market incentives to develop new antibiotics are no longer working adequately, so what can or will the next President do about it before it's too late? ■ Question 2: "What do you propose as the appropriate size for a modern US Navy? If you propose one larger than we have now, how would your proposal deal with shortages of both shipbuilding capacity and willing sailors?" America's naval power remains enormous, but our shipbuilding has stalled at a time when China is taking an adversarial posture in the Pacific Ocean. As a matter of national defense, this issue matters enormously to the next Commander-in-Chief. ■ Question 3: "Ukraine has demonstrated novel uses for drones in wartime. Now that the cat is out of the bag, what priorities would you set for the Defense Department around both drone deployment and our own domestic defensive vulnerabilities?" Ukraine has just projected its response to the Russian invasion straight into Moscow with a drone attack. What is learned on the battlefield in this war will only spread globally. We need to know that the next President understands that Russia's unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine has just sped up the timetable for new strategies and tactics that will affect us in the next war. ■ Question 4: "Local water utilities have expressed grave concerns over the costs of removing the PFAS 'forever chemicals' from water, as Federal regulations appear to expect them to do. How would you address the tension between these competing regulatory interests?" It's already widely-known that the United States has badly under-invested in infrastructure for a long time. New regulatory postures are likely to require much more sophisticated and expensive treatment far beyond the existing standards, in which investment was already lax. These are competing interests largely imposed by the Federal government, so what will that government do about it? ■ If we don't hear anything like any of these questions during the Presidential Debate, then we should cease the practice of televised debates immediately and instead subject the candidates to timed essay exams. (They could even be televised, with hushed, golf-like commentary!) But if the practice of "debate" is nothing more than performance art, it's hard to see how any of it advances the public interest.
September 9, 2024
If Americans can be rightly accused of having a national personality characteristic, a thoughtful analyst might say that we have a predisposition in favor of action. "Shoot first and ask questions later", if you will. Alexis de Tocqueville said of it: "In Europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire of riches, and an excessive love of independence, as propensities very formidable to society. Yet these are the very elements which ensure a long and peaceful duration to the republics of America." ■ Yet on the other hand, we are known to be painfully slow to act on large and dreadful threats. The apocryphal quote from Winston Churchill goes, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities." He probably didn't say it, exactly, but it has survived in lore because it contains at least a kernel of truth. ■ So are we hot-tempered or blissfully untroubled? Perhaps it's a hybrid of the two: We are prone to liking quick decisions, but we're also habituated to realize that those decisions often need to be revisited not too much later. ■ Thus we have the world's longest-serving written Constitution -- but one that was amended immediately out of the gate. We have an often hot-headed House of Representatives with zippy two-year terms, but also a Senate that acts like a tenured university faculty. We are prone to a lot of "Yeehaw!" but also a substantial amount of second-guessing. ■ Now is a time to make sure we are second-guessing wisely: On any number of fronts, looming issues that haven't gotten thorough consideration are starting to show themselves once again to the forefront. Many of them are deeply complex, from the reach of artificial intelligence to the ambitions of rival powers to the costs of a Federal budget that we seem obligated to keep expanding. ■ Impulsive figures of both left and right once put into power might need to be benched until we have a steadier view of a turbulent future. There's nothing wrong with reconsidering past judgments: That just might be the American Way.
September 6, 2024
The contemporary ease of content creation has stripped away some of the obstacles that used to stand in the way of producing material for its own sake. On one hand, that frees some worthwhile voices to get exposure that would otherwise have never broken through in the more heavily-mediated past, when editors and publishers and producers decided what got made and disseminated. ■ On the other hand, it sets up incentives that reward people merely for being "influencers" -- no matter what malignant nonsense they project into the universe. And that's ultimately why the US Justice Department has "charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, in a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging". ■ The plot made a handful of people very rich in exchange for their dignity. They effectively, whether wittingly or unwittingly, acted as tools of an adversarial foreign government. They may face criminal penalties, too. ■ But they made lots of money, and to people for whom civic duty is no object, then the remuneration is all that matters. The results, of course, tell any honest onlooker that something beyond remuneration must matter -- that civic responsibility really is a meaningful thing. ■ That modern tools have made it easier for people to profit by selling their souls is a fact we can't escape. Teaching the next generation that intangibles like duty still matter is the counterweight.
At some time in the future, probably not that long from now, people will look back on the present as a time of excruciatingly low information density. We are living through a conspicuous explosion of content creation -- YouTube alone claims that more than 500 hours of video content are being uploaded every minute. That's the equivalent of 3.4 years of new content per hour. And then there's TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and on and on. ■ Some of this content is astonishingly good. Much of it is middling. No small portion of it is garbage. The well-known historian Niall Ferguson examines the world of pop history delivered via podcasts and declares, "They are mostly drowning it [history] in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious." ■ There is another side to the coin, of course, which is asserted in the words of another historian, David H. Montgomery: "There are awful history podcasts -- and also great ones, with excellent research. (This statement also happens to be true of books.)" It is not the medium itself that determines the quality of the content: Someone keeps paying Bill O'Reilly to put his name on books. That doesn't make the printing press the problem. ■ But thanks to the ease of production and dissemination, so much content is being poured out at such low information density that the pendulum almost certainly must swing somewhat back in the other direction, if from nothing else than audience exhaustion. There are only so many swipes a person can give to a litany of mediocre Facebook Reels before they may begin to regret not simply picking up one of the 100 books everyone should read. ■ The immediacy of electronic media can be utterly seductive, but if that seduction isn't followed by a fulfilling experience, then people will ultimately grow weary. And wasn't weary boredom what the Internet promised to eradicate?
September 5, 2024
Speak the tongue, remember the decisions
A project is underway to revive the Dakota language of the Santee Sioux by teaching it to volunteer adult learners. It is a story we hear periodically about someone working earnestly to teach people a rare language before it goes extinct, one that usually begins as a bittersweet tale about someone's labor of love to honor a parent or a grandparent. ■ Languages matter as a vital form of cultural expression. There's no doubt that the survival of a language is vital to preserving cultural history -- not just a code to translate it, but real, live speakers who recognize things like idioms and nuances, and who are able to translate, knowing the difference between poetry and prose. Lots of languages are known only by speakers numbering in the dozens or hundreds, and they are vulnerable to withering away altogether. ■ Some of the information carried in languages is self-rewarding; that is, the speaker or reader gains something directly from the original that cannot be obtained from a translation. Prayers and hymns can be a great example. But, generally, those artifacts will either be preserved or lost on the basis of their relevance to the people within the culture, and little can be done to prod their protection from the outside. Many religions have gone extinct. ■ But if learning a language can be hard (especially if the speaker has no particular emotional compulsion to learn it), then something else may need to be done to preserve and disseminate some of the other cultural information that defines cultures whose populations may be in decline. ■ People generally learn best when they can recognize an element of self-interest to what they are learning. (You can't blame our genes for rewarding the learning processes that raise the odds of them jumping to the next generation.) So how do you make that cultural transmission process more friendly to individual self-interest? ■ The answer likely lies in recognizing that the real blueprint for a culture is found in how it reaches decisions: At the individual, family, and social levels. In essence, anthropologists and historians could do a great deal of good for extinct and endangered cultures by recording and publishing their decision-making processes. ■ While it may seem casual or even superficial, the world would likely see a lot more transmission about these cultures if thoughtful people would write books like "The ___ Approach to Leadership" or "The ___ Way of Making Choices" than by packing academic libraries with dry, unread journal articles and graduate theses. In return, perhaps some of the many "stateless nations" of the world might at least stand a chance of being remembered, even as much of the world converges on globally-shared cultures.
September 4, 2024
Don't mine sympathy for clicks
A fair number of news outlets that once were owned mainly by small ownership groups but now belong to sprawling national media "groups" have sought to bump their online traffic figures by posting clickbait in the form of articles drawn from their "sister" stations. These stories are often gut-wrenching stories about calamitous events taking the lives of sympathetic characters like children or fire fighters or police officers -- stories that have always made it hard to look away. ■ And that's the point, of course. Posted along with a snapshot of an attractive adult in their prime or of a cherubic little person, sometimes the social-media editors involved add nothing more than a comment like "Tragic." or "Rest in peace.", with no further context. ■ This is misleading, of course, because a "local" news outlet is intuitively expected to be focused on local events. We humans only have so much attention we can pay to tragedies, and it's inescapable that we take more interest in those that happen close to home (where it is at least somewhat possible that we might know, or be within a few degrees of separation of, the victim) than in those happening far away. ■ There is something especially ghoulish about profiting off stories of distant tragedies in this way -- it's misleading, if not outright deceptive, for those stories to be mined for local attention when they are not actually local. It's a form of mining human sympathy for clicks. ■ It's a particularly despicable practice when the story doesn't actually advance anything new worth knowing. Sometimes there actually are new and real dangers that demand widespread attention. But those instances are few and far between; more often, the clickbait is merely there to report on a freak incident -- one-in-a-million events that, statistically, are unavoidable in a country of 330 million people. ■ The practice should be discouraged, if not widely disclaimed altogether. It's not journalistically novel nor productive, and it probably depletes the reservoirs of attention that people can afford to expend on tragic stories without having to tune out altogether. That can be a real danger when there are very big and very troubling problems that also demand attention, especially because they are matters that human beings can and should try to change. Times are tough for local media, to be sure. But they shouldn't undermine public expectations of context, balance, and local newsworthiness along the way.
September 2, 2024
Given the history of Labor Day, the holiday engenders no shortage of acknowledgments for organized labor unions, particularly as politicians looking toward November seek to drum up both donations and volunteer support. Companies post messages (sometimes platitudes) thanking their employees, and individuals pen thoughts on the evolving nature of work. ■ But what usually goes missing is a broader discussion of how "labor" isn't always an adversary to "capital" within a market economy. There certainly can be confrontation between the two, and sometimes even hostility. But with union membership down to 10% of the US workforce (half of what that rate was in 1983), seeing things through old prisms may no longer be valid. ■ Labor Day would be a very good day to celebrate co-ops, mutual firms, and credit unions alike, not to mention employee-owned companies like ESOPs and solopreneurs. There are lots of ways in which competitive firms can be started and sustained under a free-market framework, and it's short-sighted to pay attention only to the ones that are publicly traded or have an obvious individual "owner". ■ It's good for an economy to have a mix of firm structures, including those that are owned either by member/customers or by the employees themselves. That kind of diversity helps to bring about innovation in the way products and services are developed, to be sure, but perhaps more importantly, they stimulate new developments in areas like operations and management, not to mention finance and R&D. Company governance is undoubtedly different for, say, a large co-op than for a company with a single controlling shareholder. ■ Like technological tools, company structures are neither inherently good nor bad. They depend upon the contexts in which they are put to work, and the character of the people using them. It doesn't have to stop there, but Labor Day should be a jumping-off point to discuss the many ways in which a bigger vision for how ownership can work may pay dividends more broadly.
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