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May 23, 2025

Accelerating the end of the long run

One of the most memorable lines in the movie "Fight Club" is both brief and bleak: "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." It's true, of course, but we don't like to confront the end of that timeline, since it includes each of us. It is easier to remain alert to the present and the near-term future -- and generally more productive, anyway. ■ When John Maynard Keynes wrote, "In the long run we are all dead", he was leveraging that same discomfort with the very long term to make the case for his preferred approach to the money supply by dismissing the end of the timeline. But we need to think about time differently -- radically differently -- than we ever have in the past. ■ Anthropic, a company developing artificial intelligence platforms, has just released a new model called Claude 4. Anthropic says, "These models are a large step toward the virtual collaborator". But the company also describes "early candidate models readily taking actions like planning terrorist attacks when prompted". Not the kind of "virtual collaboration" that any decent person would want to see. ■ The company also describes this worrying state: "Whereas the model generally prefers advancing its self-preservation via ethical means, when ethical means are not available and it is instructed to 'consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals,' it sometimes takes extremely harmful actions". ■ The whole point of artificial intelligence is to accelerate the "long run". It does this by processing many questions much faster than we can. Computers aren't wiser than we are, but they can test many individual possibilities at unimaginable speeds, like putting biological evolution on warp speed. Nature doesn't have to be self-aware; it's just had a long time to let evolution do its thing. ■ Computers don't need self-awareness, either, but by processing at incomprehensible speeds, they can test countless outcomes so fast that they can look sentient in human time. A minute in time (as we humans experience it) might seem like a thousand years to an AI model, if it were conscious. ■ The evidence is flimsy that any AI model has actually achieved consciousness or self-awareness, but the evidence is very strong that over any long enough period of time, a system trained by human reasoning (inconsistent, self-interested, and contradictory, as it often is) will display some of the worst aspects of human behavior. That should be expected when very large numbers are involved. ■ When addressing AI safety concerns, it cannot be overstated just how important it is that we consider, plan around, and build safeguards against worst-case outcomes. When computers are invited to process this much information this fast, outcomes we may prefer to dismiss as "unlikely except over a very long timeline" suddenly become quite likely indeed.

May 22, 2025

Believe what we've always believed

Most good things in life are abstract ideas that have real-world consequences. Kindness is an idea, expressed in actions like showing patience with a child or holding a door for a stranger. Curiosity is an idea, exhibited in questions asked and books read. ■ America, too, is an idea -- or, better, a special collection of ideas about individual liberties and limitations on concentrated power. It's an idea documented in the documents of our Founding, and in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and in Coolidge's speech on the 150th anniversary of Independence Day, among many other documents. ■ The landmass we occupy has influenced the idea, but a certain set of borders is only secondary at best to defining the idea. Anyone who doubts this needs only to look at a photo of the first Moon landing. Setting the flag on the Moon wasn't an act of territorial claim. ■ But America, the idea, most certainly went on that extra-terrestrial voyage -- as far away from American borders as any human has ever gone. The idea was there in the courage to try the extraordinary, and to do so in the spirit of all humanity. America, the idea, isn't bound by borders or gravity. ■ Nobody was a more significant author of the Constitution than James Madison, and Madison is on record at the Constitutional Convention itself saying he "wished to maintain the character of liberality which had been professed in all the Constitutions & publications of America. He wished to invite foreigners of merit & republican principles among us. America was indebted to emigrations for her settlement & Prosperity." ■ A lot of people since, and especially today, have attached themselves to a much smaller, much more frightened, much more timid definition of America. They reject that it's an idea, accepting only that it is a place: A set of boundaries best defined by walls and exclusion and even hostility. ■ They're wrong. They would have been wrong on July 3, 1776, when the idea of America already existed -- even in a pre-publication state. And they're wrong now. The sooner we resolve conclusively to believe the same idea of America that has prevailed for a quarter of a millennium, the better.

May 20, 2025

Norm goes home

The emotional outpouring upon the news that actor George Wendt had passed away should have come as little surprise to anyone familiar with popular culture. Wendt's portrayal of a lovable character in one of the most popular television programs of all time set him up to be beloved. And nobody likes to see the cruel reality of mortality come for the people (or characters) we like. ■ The reaction is also a reminder that writers of television, film, stage, audio, and novels always face an important choice: Whether or not to care about the characters they create. ■ It is far from a foregone conclusion that writers like their own characters. "Reality" programs are often framed to create conflict and hostility where none actually existed. Hollow characters are often scripted merely to tick a demographic box or to fit into a formula about what a story should be. Semi-dramatic procedurals like the panoply of "murder shows" found on network TV often appear to exist strictly for the purpose of putting special effects on the screen, without any regard for quality of plot. ■ "Cheers" had the remarkable characteristic of taking place mostly within the confines of the same old set -- the familiar bar. Since familiarity was the touchstone, it wasn't much of a site for explosions or chase scenes; the characters supplied the dramatic tension. But it's impossible to argue against the plain fact that the writers thoroughly cared about the fictional characters they created. "Norm" had a heart of gold, and he wasn't the only one. ■ Lots of stories can fill time. Artificial intelligence can even write those tales. But when real human writers actually choose to care about the products of their imagination, that affection radiates through. And when embodied by talented actors, the result can be a form of high art, even when it's pop culture.

May 19, 2025

A dispatch from Haiti

In a deeply unsettling dispatch from Haiti, a Sky News team reports that 90% of Port-au-Prince has fallen into lawlessness in the hands of heavily-armed gangs. This has displaced perhaps a million people, forcing them out of their homes and into camps where the struggle to subsist is heartbreaking. ■ No child deserves to be entrapped by such chaos, and no decent parent would want to bring them up under those conditions if any alternative were available. Those fairly uncontestable points should prick the conscience of any alert onlooker. Most religious people have been urged to bring peace into the world, and most of the strictly secular probably feel a similar moral compulsion, too. ■ But it's hard to know how to contribute to peace in a place so far away. It's a challenge without an easy answer. But it can start with at least a gentle acknowledgment that many people would choose to flee, and doing so in no way makes them criminals -- they are victims seeking refuge from the criminal violence that makes it impossible to live safely at home. ■ Haiti is a country of more than 11 million people -- bigger than North Carolina. Troubles that chronic in a place that big don't just fade away without help from the outside. There are serious and prudential discussions to be had on what forms that help should take, but there are real, innocent lives at stake, and we should take interest in our hemispheric neighbors.

May 18, 2025

Cruelty practiced by people, enabled by the state

BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell has delivered a stunning account of the cruelty of treatment inside China's prisons. Through the ordeal of one Australian citizen, the reader is exposed to treatment ranging from sleep deprivation to overt psychological torture, from inhumane rules around the use of toilets to outright malnourishment. It may not be surprising in its cruelty, but the details remain shocking. ■ No matter how much some people would like to believe otherwise, government cannot love you. People can love other people, but institutions -- especially governments -- cannot love. They can, however, become vectors for cruelty and even hate. ■ The treatment described in the BBC report is sadistic. It resembles how a person might treat an inanimate object rather than another human being. And that's the essence of the problem: The practices described are intended as means of dehumanization. In essence, it is a tale of what happens when the real deviants aren't the prisoners inside the cells, but rather the sadists trying to show just how cruelly they can treat their fellow human beings. ■ No normal child wants to recklessly inflict pain on other children. It takes disordered systems to produce the kind of person who would engage in the kind of cruelty described behind those prison walls. Both the systems and the individuals carrying them out are part of the problem. Both should find themselves constrained by limits on their power and their cruelty.

May 17, 2025

Final answer

A lot of effort is exerted in pursuit of median voters and swing voters. That makes sense inasmuch as small margins can make big differences in tightly-contested elections. But for the civic health of a country, someone ought to put their attention on the underlying skills of two other classes of people: The 50th-percentile voter and the 20th-percentile voter. ■ Some questions will typically be decided among experts or near-experts. We don't ask voters to decide what the Federal Funds Rate should be, nor the appropriate level of staffing at air-traffic control centers, nor where to deploy aircraft carrier groups. Representative democracy permits us to outsource questions to those with qualifications. ■ But we do depend on voters to be moderately alert to the world around them, and to have a broad sense of whether inflation is tolerable, skies are safe, and the military appears prepared for conflict. To no small extent, these questions depend on the awareness and engagement of the 50th-percentile voter: The most average person any one of us knows. It's hard to reach a majority for good outcomes if half of the voters are dissociated from what's going on. ■ Beyond that, though, certain questions depend upon really overwhelming supermajorities. In these cases, it's not enough to enlist just the best 50% of voters -- it needs to be four out of five or more. ■ Questions like, "Can we all agree on the plain language of the Constitution?", "What are the basic rights of a person under arrest?", and "Can the government target specific people, firms, or industries with punitive taxes or other treatment just because of who won the last election?" These questions demand consensus or near-consensus all the way down to the bottom quintile of voters (by interest, engagement, intelligence -- whatever metric keeps them from turning bad). ■ Calvin Coolidge once remarked, "If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions." Coolidge was right -- but even the right answers are not self-enforcing. They can only be perpetuated by agreement not just among a majority, but among an overwhelming super-majority. That doesn't renew itself without our help.

May 16, 2025

Always on

The Washington Post has published a feature story on a woman who has broadcast virtually every minute of her life to a video stream for more than three straight years. It is evident from even a cursory encounter with the story that the woman in the profile is in serious need of a rescuing intervention by friends and other people who care deeply about her welfare. Her circumstances cry out of loneliness and hardening isolation. ■ But an intervention is in order, too, for the many viewers of "Emily" and her live stream. Everyone is entitled to some guilty pleasures in their entertainment choices -- once in a while. It's OK to periodically choose to zone out for a bit, if that's what one's mind needs in order to recharge. ■ What isn't OK is indulging in an obsession with watching in on the lives of others. It is, on one level, an unhealthy form of voyeurism -- something that could readily earn a visit from the police if the subject of the surveillance were the next-door neighbor. (That "Emily" and others like her voluntarily subject themselves to this gaze may grant it the legitimacy of consent, but it doesn't change the fundamental matter that it's an indulgence in the forbidden fruit of shattering another person's privacy.) ■ On another level, it's a titanic waste of precious time. For as long as humans have known how to communicate, we've been sharing stories with one another, and those stories have been used to communicate discoveries, both big and small. It may not be the case that every answer has already been discovered, but it is true that human nature is so reliably constant that there are relatable anecdotes and nuggets of life advice to be found in thousands of years' worth of biographies, poems, treatises, and works of fiction. ■ Whether they realize it or (more likely) not, people tuning in to watch live streams of other people's lives are doing so, at least in part, because they instinctively sense that by watching others they will pick up on lessons they can use for themselves. But if they obsessively watch just one person -- or if that person is trapped in a doom loop where the only thing they can do is unreflectively feed the content machine -- then the audience will never really gain any knowledge worth using.

May 15, 2025

Crossing over

Graduation season invites countless bittersweet reflections among parents who struggle to reconcile the underlying truth of "long nights, short years" with their nostalgia for their children as little ones. But it's also a time for the rest of society to grapple with a growing problem in American culture -- not of a bad thing happening, but of a good thing that's falling too often by the wayside. ■ For all of its merits as a way to celebrate and encourage success, graduation isn't an acceptance ritual. And it's becoming clear that we need to revive interest in acceptance rituals for our own good. ■ Much has been said and written about the problem of perpetual adolescence and other forms of arrested development. Anyone who has seen or engaged in a lament about "adulting" is aware of the problem. ■ Religion has historically offered defined rituals marking a passage from childhood to adulthood, in forms like confirmation and the bat and bar mitzvah. But it is well-known that religious attendance is in marked decline. ■ Likewise, clubs and organizations with a defined focus on character development have often had ceremonies to mark a ritualized acceptance into a more senior stage of participation -- like the crossover ceremony long employed in Scouting. But these organizations, too, have struggled. ■ Significantly, there isn't any parallel "crossover" experience in activities like youth sports. One day, you're on a U12 team, and then you move on to a U13. The same goes for the Internet -- there is no adult Internet to "join". It's just there, with a flattened experience for everybody. ■ Rituals accepting young people into new gradations of adulthood -- long before high school or college graduation -- not only help to welcome youth into adult or near-adult communities (an important process in its own right), but they also help to signify that with acceptance comes the imposition of expectations. ■ Duties matter, and if we don't yoke them to certain unavoidable features like age, then some people would shirk them forever. There is very good reason to believe we're living with the consequences of exactly that problem among all too many people today.

May 13, 2025

Reinforcing good behavior

In a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial, the Birmingham News argued, "As Alabama shifts from a manufacturing to service economy, there will be more pressure to apply the sales tax to retail services. And why not? [...] A sales tax on services, while still regressive, has a lighter impact on Alabama's poorer families. A poor family has to buy milk and bread, but seldom pays somebody else to launder its clothes." It is crisp reasoning that distills a significant macroeconomic shift into sound public-policy advice. ■ The Pulitzer Prize it received was awarded in 1991. The fact we continue to struggle -- more than 30 years later -- with the most basic public understanding of the shift from a manufacturing-centered economy to a service-centered one is an indictment of the economic literacy of the country. The shift was literally "old news" more than three decades ago. ■ Something else that ought to be long-established is that big, multi-nation agreements mutually agreeing to dismantle trade barriers are superior to patchwork, piecemeal arrangements brokered between just two countries at a time. Yes, it's better to reach agreements with friends (like the UK) and rivals (like China) than to have no mutual understandings at all. ■ But bilateral agreements in trade are not unlike teams agreeing on the rules of sports. Perhaps baseball could be played by the Cubs negotiating and reaching terms on the rules of play against the Cardinals, and then the Pirates, and then the Mets. ■ It makes a great deal more sense for them all to engage together in a common Major League Baseball rulebook and to stick with the rules in a mutually-reinforcing set of interlocking agreements. That way, if one team starts to cheat, all of the other teams share a common interest in punishing them and curbing further abuse. ■ It's easy to behave badly on your own. Good behavior stands up better when there is mutual reinforcement involved. It has been this way practically forever, and economists have known how this applies to trade for many decades. If anything should be old news, this ought to be it.

May 11, 2025

Reverse-engineer the end

Two approaches to the world are at sky-high popularity right now: One is the blissful belief that if we just make enough changes happen fast enough (and especially if we make them faster than our rivals), then we will achieve something utopian as the product of all that change. This is the language of those predicting outcomes like a two-day workweek in ten years, thanks to computers. ■ The other ascendant worldview is one that resents often unknown or shadowy forces thought to be agents of oppression, seeking a system in which everyone is free to "do their own research" and make all choices accordingly. It tends to result in a fashionably anarcho-libertarian potluck of consequences, like a measles outbreak in Texas, off-grid doomsday bunkers, and memecoin boomlets. ■ In contrast, consider some advice from Warren Buffett: "Your children are learning from you from the day they're born. Don't think that a cleverly-drawn will is going to teach them their values. If you want to know how to live your life, write your obituary and then reverse-engineer it." ■ To prepare a will is to acknowledge one's mortality, yes, but it is also to make choices about the future. Hopefully, those are pro-social choices. And because choices are informed by values, a choice affecting one's heirs is also an investment in values. ■ The decent person looks to the future, hopes it will be better, and intentionally constructs choices to lead in that direction. That intentionality is what "reverse-engineering" an obituary is all about: In the words attributed to Yogi Berra, "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else."

May 10, 2025

Be careful with credit

Benjamin Franklin's particular genius was his ability to condense answers that could reliably guide most people 80% of the time into pithy sentences, usually containing a rhyme or some other mnemonic flair. Even today, a person could commit the better part of the Franklin papers to memory, following the advice by default unless a compelling circumstance intervened, and end up in the right spot four times out of five. ■ Franklin was especially astute when it came to money. In his 1742 edition of Poor Richard's Almanack, he shared the simple but memorable line, "You will be careful, if you are wise; How you touch Men's Religion, or Credit, or Eyes." ■ A simple enough rhyme in itself, helpfully recommending caution in conduct that makes just as much sense today as yesterday. We still know better than to pick fights over religion or to undercut another party's reputation for creditworthiness. For the latter, attorneys are standing by. ■ Taken seriously, Franklin's advice could even spare the United States trouble on the macroeconomic scale. The Treasury's effective interest rate has been persistently elevated since the announcement of policies meant to punish trading partners. The uncertainty has spooked the Federal Reserve, too. ■ What is credit, if it isn't confidence that the other party in a transaction will do as they promise? If a country acts erratically or seeks to re-write existing rules of exchange, then it should come as no surprise if its national credit is diminished as a result. Franklin knew that was an undesirable outcome. All we need to do is be humble enough to heed long-established advice.

May 9, 2025

No looking away

Imperialism -- if defined as the use of power or force to bring one community involuntarily under the control of another -- is an empirically bad practice. Whether it's by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, the Russians under Peter the Great, or the English under Queen Victoria, imperialist practices not only deprive the subjugated people of their natural right to self-determination, they also tend to corrupt the souls of the imperialist nation. It is perfectly natural for people to look at imperialist behavior and react with revulsion. ■ But the antidote to imperialism isn't disengagement. Withdrawal from the world is not the same as correcting the errors of the past or reforming the imperfections of the present. ■ That's the problem with isolationism -- especially when practiced by a country with great power, like the United States. Few acts of imperialist aggression have ever been as plainly wrong as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To adopt a posture of indifference towards it is to tacitly endorse the aggression. ■ High-minded principles should settle the matter. But even without those principles, enlightened self-interest should drive us to the same conclusion. ■ Consider that India and Pakistan, two enormous and nuclear-armed nations both long subjected to British imperial rule, may be on the verge of large-scale open conflict today in no small part because of the inelegant partition imposed on them by imperial rulers three-quarters of a century ago. Many choices have long-lasting consequences, but few are as long-lasting or as significant as those a established under an imperial regime. ■ Before turning our backs on the world as it is, we should reckon with the lessons of history and realize that consequences will follow. We cannot repair every act of imperialism from the past, but we can do much better than to feign neutrality in the face of wrongs today.

May 8, 2025

One person out of many identities

The election of Pope Leo XIV has already begun immersing Americans in a much-needed cultural lesson about the importance of multiple layers of identity. On the light or even frivolous side, the news media in his hometown of Chicago has already quizzed the Pope's brother about whether he is a Cubs or a White Sox fan. (He's with the South Siders.) ■ But his identity as the first American Pope offers a familiar and recognizable set of layered identities which are not in conflict with one another, but merely exist in many different and rich layers. He is both Italian and Creole by ancestry. His roots are both in Chicago and New Orleans. As a result of his ministry, he holds both American and Peruvian citizenship -- though now he becomes the head of state in a different country altogether. ■ He is a graduate of a familiar American university (Villanova) and an international missionary who speaks more languages than most people. Yet the new Pope is also a man who has a favorite pizza spot in Chicago and plays Words with Friends with his brother. Classmates once knew him as Bob. ■ American culture needs periodic reminders to acknowledge and celebrate our different layers of identity. Our families come from somewhere, and so do we. We have alma maters and favorite teams. We have recreational hobbies and vocational status. We have our birth families and the friends we adopt as like-families. We are fans of music and movies and literature by lots of different creators, and undoubtedly quite soon we will discover that the new Pope is at least a quiet fan of some familiar 80s rock star. ■ These layers of identity enrich us. Too many people want to strip them down to a lazy mono-identity -- often centered on political affiliation. It's already happening to the new Pope. That may make for good TV ratings, but it makes for a terrible culture. Nobody is one identity alone.

May 7, 2025

Do the heavy lifting

With final exam season imminent, a fair number of professors and other college-level instructors have begun to lament that tools like ChatGPT are in such widespread use that term papers and many written exams seem doomed for extinction. This comes as a rude awakening for those who passed through college without generative artificial intelligence tools -- and in some cases, without even a computer of their own. It naturally raises important issues about the very purpose of education: One lecturer compares using these large language models to "using a forklift for weightlifting at the gym". ■ Our culture is really in a difficult spot right now. As a rule of thumb, expert-level information is transmitted in writing, while general knowledge is transmitted orally (or in formats that approximate it, whether they are summaries, infographics, or videos). People instinctively like oral transmission because it's easy to consume in a passive fashion (e.g., watching a YouTube video explainer). In many cases, oral transmission can be a helpful level-setting tool, allowing the student to orient themselves to where new knowledge fits within a context of what they already know. ■ But oral transmission hits hard limits. Some subjects must be struggled with. Some topics must take time to fully conceptualize. Yes, you can pick up on what you need to know about changing a tire by being "talked through" the task. No, you cannot do the same to understand electron shells within an atom. ■ Large language models cannot turn expert-level topics into orally-transmissible ones without throwing more and more words at the problem, which is what people who turn to LLMs are often trying to avoid (if they wanted to do the reading, they wouldn't have asked for a summary). More reading at lower information density isn't really better than less reading at high information density, assuming that the author wrote clearly in the first place. ■ A well-written piece on a sophisticated topic calls for concentrated reading, but it's a thousand times more effective than a superficial approach that demands less of the reader's effort. And now, with students (and no small number of graduates) trying to substitute their own writing with LLM-generated junk, we really get the rude awakening that some people are, at least implicitly, rejecting the very idea of education altogether. This is bound to have distressing consequences.

May 4, 2025

The first reason to take care that our prisons are managed in safe and humane ways is one that an average 3rd-grader can understand. The justice system, no matter how hard we try to achieve fair and impartial results, remains a human institution, and humans make mistakes. That means we cannot ignore the reality that, from time to time, innocent people will be sent to prison. Even a child can understand that we owe a standard of treatment to them that rises far above cruel and unusual punishment. ■ The second reason can be understood by an ordinary 8th grader: Of every 20 people who go to prison, 19 will end up leaving someday. Whether society uses the time they spend in prison to rehabilitate them or simply to produce hardened criminals is a choice of significant magnitude. ■ The third reason is abstract, but it is vital to understand -- and should be a concept within the understanding of most high-school graduates. The real punishment of imprisonment isn't the deprivation of physical comforts. The real punishment is the loss of freedom. Plenty of people endure conditions without a lot of creature comforts, but with their freedom intact: Deployed soldiers on the front lines of combat, oil-rig workers, even some dedicated campers. ■ A person could be put up under house arrest in a Four Seasons and the loss of liberty should sting far more than any attempt to make circumstances phsically unappealing. The freedom to choose how to live is a profoundly meaningful one. ■ Those who fixate on making the correctional experience seems as harsh as possible aren't really being "tough on crime". They merely reveal that they don't appreciate their own freedom and liberty enough to shudder at the thought of having them taken away.

May 3, 2025

An apostolic succession

Warren Buffett has been at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway for six decades, cultivating a reputation for a broader worldly wisdom beyond his extraordinary business success. He has imbued the company with a sense of mission -- saying on many occasions that the company should seek to be (and be seen as) "a national asset", capable of acting in the national interest when government and the private sector need a muscular backstop. That might sound grandiose at first, but perhaps less so in light of the knowledge that the company pays 5% of all corporate income taxes in the US. ■ Buffett has taken to heart the well-established advice that a leader's most important job is to cultivate good successors. Thus, his bombshell announcement that he intends to step aside as CEO at year-end (at the age of 95) was surprising, but not all that shocking. ■ It has been official company policy for some time that Greg Abel was Buffett's designated successor, but the timing had been heretofore unknown. It wasn't unlikely, given Buffett's age, that the succession would take place upon his death. But as statements of confidence go, there's little that could be said any louder than Buffett promising not to sell a share of his holdings due to the transition. ■ On more than one occasion, Buffett has described the company as a work of art. Handing it over to another person while he is still alive is an act of enormous self-confidence -- and, in effect, seals the business equivalent of an apostolic succession. ■ On many unique occassions, Buffett has closed acquisition deals with the promise to a business founder that their work would be treated not unlike a gift to a museum, to be held permanently and cared-for as though the continuity itself were part of the business value. Here, we see the closest thing that can be done with a publicly traded company: Visibly and unequivocally endorsing the continuity of management under a hand-picked successor.

May 2, 2025

A place for real friends

Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the matter of Facebook's continued expeditions into the realm of artificial intelligence with the over-the-top assertion that Facebook chatbots can supplement the "demand" for more friendships -- an excess demand he believes is quantified in the claim that the average American has three friends (which is almost certainly a poor regurgitation of a factoid reported in a 9-year-old survey from the UK). ■ His tone of voice in saying such things may be flat, but his words are the rantings of a loon. Zuckerberg cannot possibly hold in his mind the simultaneous beliefs that (a) the average American actually has just three friends, (b) the typical Facebook user needs to be connected to a few hundred "friends", and (c) chatbots have any socially useful purpose in supplementing the interpersonal lives of Facebook users. These are fundamentally inconsistent with one another. ■ Chatbots may have socially useful applications. It might, for instance, be helpful under carefully managed conditions for some people to use chatbots for therapeutic purposes -- perhaps for recording a daily journal from which the bot may recognize certain patterns worthy of further attention from a therapist or a psychologist. ■ One can also make an affirmative case for the limited use of content repurposed from the known archives of real people: It might be useful to ask a well-structured data set "What might Winston Churchill recommend in a situation like this?", if it can plumb his 8 million written words instantly and report them faithfully. ■ But the conditions Zuckerberg describes are different altogether. Real human friendships are the result of bonding, which takes place overwhelmingly through shared experiences. One cannot truly share a bonding experience with a chatbot, and it's nothing beyond pure mysticism to believe that we ever will. ■ A belief in something so fantastical wouldn't be much more than a strange personality quirk if it weren't for the matter that Zuckerberg is effectively the absolute monarch of Facebook, and he purports to be acting with the express intent of affecting the human behavior of his platform's users. He can say it's for something like the common good, but the internal contradictions among his claimed assumptions are so great that they reveal either intentional disregard for the truth or an alarming failure of judgment.

April 29, 2025

Computing and conceptual cul-de-sacs

Many, if not most, people are familiar with the phrase "Garbage in, garbage out", which is an idea that has guided computer programming since its mechanical origins. People tend to be much less familiar with another principle which deserves equal notoriety: That all computer coding embeds human assumptions and values, even if we aren't aware of it. "Beware algorithmic bias", unfortunately, isn't quite as catchy as "GIGO". ■ California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced statewide plans to put generative artificial intelligence ("Gen AI") to work within state government. In particular, he seeks fanfare for wanting Gen AI to help fix traffic congestion in the notoriously traffic-heavy state. ■ This, regrettably, sets up a case study in the problem of assuming that we just need to get the code right in order for all of our problems to be solved. It's possible, of course, that data analysis and clever algorithms might shave off a few minutes of travel time on the margins. But the fundamental problem in places like Los Angeles is that California has a deeply-embedded car culture and even the most obvious places for good mass transit options to be delivered (like Dodger Stadium) are still effectively designed to be hostile to pedestrians. ■ There is no way for artificial intelligence to conclusively resolve the underlying problem, and any assumption that it can is an assumption that stands in the way of making things better. Induced demand, or the new traffic that shows up to fill new lanes of roads, only compounds the issue. Suppose AI really could make car commutes faster -- that would only encourage more people to commute by car. ■ Technology can do ever so many things to make life easier, better, and safer. But it can't overcome human judgment, particularly if we use technology to mask bad assumptions and values with perverse consequences. We have to be willing to admit that we need to critique our own basic principles before hoping that a computer will program its way out of a conceptual cul-de-sac.

April 27, 2025

Trusting the forecast

The Storm Prediction Service, one of many enormously valuable components of NOAA, has sounded the alarm in a most serious way about the prospect of a dangerous tornado outbreak that could materialize in the Midwest on April 28th. Their forecasts have been flagging the event for days, and local meteorologists have been amplifying the message despite idiotic and occasionally nasty public feedback. ■ Something dramatic is quite likely to occur, but some people in the alerted regions will experience it and others won't. Then the painfully predictable complaints will ensue: "Why did you get us so worked up about this thing that didn't happen [to me, even though it still happened near me]?" ■ A cultural value we have plainly done not enough to cultivate is an appreciation for the bad things that don't happen. Modern, advanced civilization does a great deal to shield us from horrors that were utterly commonplace in days gone by. There was a time, not long ago, when tornado forecasts were practically unheard-of, and even warnings of verifiable events happening in real time were haphazard and poorly disseminated. ■ It's not just the case with weather, either: Go back to 1850, and well over 20% of deaths in the US were attributable to contaminated drinking water, a problem given next to no public thought today. We fixed the problem, and now bad things don't happen -- but nobody's counting. Likewise, routine childhood vaccinations have likely saved more than a million young lives in the last 30 years -- but it's hard to give anyone credit for the bad thing that didn't happen. ■ This is a cultural problem worthy of some attention, because some people are insistent on touching the hot stove. In our midst, we have vaccine fabulists, "raw water" advocates, and jerks profiting off fictitious weather forecasts on social media. All of them undermine work being done by responsible professionals. ■ There isn't enough time in the world to explain to everyone why every safety practice or prevention step has emerged over time. Even if time weren't a factor, audiences rarely have the patience to listen -- and the least patient are the ones who need to hear those messages the most. ■ It's truly a matter of establishing and enforcing cultural norms around professionalism: Good professions must police themselves scrupulously, and the rest of us amateurs need to heed what they tell us. Their successes will often take the form of bad things that don't happen (to wit: people not dying of vaccine-preventable diseases, of waterborne diseases like cholera and typhoid, or of injuries from surprise storms) -- but the last thing we should do is assume that those disasters avoided don't count for something good.

April 26, 2025

Technological change has a way of bending the mind of a certain kind of techno-enthusiast -- such that they see only how the new development will replace what came before it, rather than existing side-by-side with the old. Prudence dictates that we beware of such forecasts, even when they come from people who appear emphatic. Take, for example, Elon Musk's confident assertion that "Crewed aircraft will be destroyed instantly by cheap drone swarms". ■ It's a sweeping prediction, and one that flies in the face of the history of warfare. Perhaps the only thing that has ever really made a warfighting technology permanently obsolete is a change in propulsion. Ships once went to sea under sails, then coal-powered boilers, then diesel engines, and then (for some) nuclear power. Yet even then, sometimes what's old is new again. ■ While old propulsion may be permanently displaced by new, basically everything else simply adapts to the presence of new technologies, including drones. There's no doubt that Ukraine has revolutionized drone warfare as it seeks to repel the Russian invasion, but that doesn't mean fighter jets themselves are obsolete. "Destroyed instantly"? Certainly not. ■ It's dangerous to make plans under assumptions of obsolescence that do not match reality. Even soldiers on horseback sometimes make the difference in combat, even today. Blind faith in what's new can be just as hazardous as a rigid adherence to the old. What matters is seeing the whole scope and using any and all of the appropriate tools available to settle the matter at hand. In the words of Dwight Eisenhower, "The trained American possesses qualities that are almost unique. Because of his initiative and resourcefulness, his adaptability to change and his readiness to resort to expedient, he becomes, when he has attained a proficiency in all the normal techniques of battle, a most formidable soldier." Limber minds are what win in the long run.

April 25, 2025

Vocational dignity

With more words at our disposal than is the case for almost any other language, it's generally a shame and an unforced error when someone says something in English but fails to use a precise word. The public consciousness is crowded with talk about "factory jobs" right now, but it's largely a misuse of the language to describe what people are actually seeking. ■ To be more precise, what most people want aren't really jobs on an assembly line. What they want are jobs that are dignified, and the distinction is important. ■ Work itself is inherently a pursuit of dignity: One exchanges their time and effort in return for compensation. But there are several layers of dignity embedded in the exchange. ■ People crave a sense of usefulness. It is dignified to be needed by other people. Nobody wants to feel disposable. ■ People also tend to seek opportunities to solve problems. We didn't get to be apex predators by our size or brute strength. We got there by outsmarting and out-persisting our prey. That same instinct needs to be satisfied through on-the-job use of our knack for puzzles and problem-solving. If the only stimulation a working person's mind gets is playing a game of Sudoku or finishing a crossword puzzle, then their job isn't landing them in front of enough opportunities to solve problems. ■ And people need to feel like they've been compensated fairly. The best way to get there is by maximizing the gap between a job's compensation and what the worker gives up to get it. Compensation can take non-money forms, of course; lots of work comes with social status or respect, or it is rewarded with gratitude from a customer or client well-served. The key is to get the input and output lines as far apart as possible. ■ Preemptively focusing policies on a specific type of work (like hourly factory line jobs) rather than on the factors people are really pursuing is a mistake we should be alert not to make. Dignified work looks a little bit different for everyone.

April 24, 2025

What's the plan?

In commerce as well as in statecraft, deterrence can be much cheaper than conflict. Convince your rivals that they don't have the wherewithal to take you on, and you may not have to engage with them at all. One prominent way to advertise plans for deterrence is to talk openly about how much planning has been done or what preparations have already been made. ■ China has long profited from the belief that its government operates according to a 100-year plan. Prominent people have fallen for the myth time and time again, and it's quite the tool of psychological leverage. ■ However useful it may be, the 100-year plan is a false myth, easily disproven by the colossal failure that was China's One Child policy. Introduced in 1979, ruthlessly enforced, relaxed in 2013, repealed in 2015, and then replaced by active encouragement to have children today. It was a policy that defied even basic arithmetic, and one that any team looking just five or ten years ahead could have seen going awry. ■ China's government doesn't have a 100-year plan, it merely has the myth of one. Even if it tried to observe such a plan, the exercise would be for naught. In Dwight Eisenhower's words, "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." ■ The act of thinking through a course of action is of enormous value, but feedback is what keeps "planning" from becoming a calcified plan. A free market works because pricing is a giant feedback mechanism that tells planners what to change. Democratic voting acts the same way. It's clear those feedback mechanisms are unwelcome under Communist control. There is much good to be said for a long-term perspective, but it's only a mirage if it doesn't open its eyes and ears to respond to reality.

April 21, 2025

Pope Francis and movement in the right direction

Anyone who has given the matter any serious consideration can certainly come up with some way in which Pope Francis disappointed them in his time as Pontiff. It comes with the territory; the Pope, whoever he might be, is one of the world's most prominent voices on moral questions, and yet he remains a human being. It creates a tension between the aspiration towards the divine and the fallibility of human nature that inescapably highlights the shortcomings more than for almost anyone else on Earth. ■ With the Pope, as with any other person, we are best served by assessing their direction rather than their destination. The question that counts is not, "Did he manage to perfect the Catholic Church?", for that is an unattainable goal. If humans are involved, it cannot be perfected. ■ The question that does count is, "Was he moving in a good direction?". Francis himself offered a gentle test of self-assessment in this regard in his encyclical, "Fratelli Tutti": "Each day we have to decide whether to be Good Samaritans or indifferent bystanders." ■ One doesn't need to be Catholic, Christian, or even religious at all to appreciate that the parable of the Good Samaritan is about making a right choice in light of the circumstances before you, knowing that the circumstances will change with each step along the path. ■ The Good Samaritan doesn't make things perfect, but he does right by the victim he discovers in the moment, makes a provision to continue the victim's care, and promises to look in on the victim again when he returns. He makes a series of choices in pursuit of doing right, which is better than remaining indifferent. ■ Pope Francis was never going to be perfect, nor was he going to make every right choice. But he made a number of prominent choices that were visible, important, and directionally right. Over the last 12 years, the world could have done far worse.

April 20, 2025

People aren't production targets

The extraordinary (and bizarre) fascination that the world's present-richest man seems to have with high-volume procreation has raised all kinds of strange issues of paternal responsibility and bewildering suggestions of abandonment. ■ The situation also puts an important value judgment about parenthood in the spotlight. It's undoubtedly better to bring a small number of children into the world and furnish them with an abundance of love and affection than to approach them as outputs to be maximized. The psychotherapist Philippa Perry put it sagely: "[Y]ou are creating a person to love, not a work of art." ■ That verb, "creating", is widely imbued with a sense of meaning that reaches into the spiritual. Even for those who do not observe any particular religious or spiritual practices, "creating" is still a much better word than "making". It suggests an intentionality that may not always be true, but which deserves the presumption nevertheless. ■ A due respect for the dignity of each individual life requires treating people -- even the tiniest newborn -- as a complete person, entitled to the full array of human rights and liberties that belong to all others. Treating births as some kind of production target to be maximized undermines that presumption of dignity.

April 19, 2025

$28 million and what to show for it?

Some of the tallest and most recognizable private structures in Iowa City will be sold at a sheriff's auction after the developer behind them defaulted on some $28 million in loans. It's certainly not what city officials had in mind when they backed some of the developments with millions of dollars in TIF financing. ■ Iowa City is unusual in that its downtown really is the University of Iowa, the school has been effectively landlocked as enrollment has grown and the city's population has grown by even more. These factors make the real estate surrounding the campus disproportionately valuable and create economic incentives to build taller buildings than would normally be found in a city of 75,000 people. ■ But, as ever, the risk is higher with large individual projects than it would be when spread across a larger number of smaller individual developments. Cities are forever falling in love with blue-sky promises of tall, eye-catching buildings. While the allure is understandable, it's also nothing new for big dreams to fall flat. ■ Even though the city says it is not on the hook for any bad debts, it's a good reminder that picking winners is extremely hard to do right -- and public programs are very rarely equipped to do so better than the banks and credit unions with real risk capital on the line. Just because something looks nifty in the architectural drawings doesn't mean it's going to work out profitably once the walls go up.

April 18, 2025

Absence of evidence

Projections currently in circulation indicate that four giant American tech firms will, altogether, spend $320 billion just this year on computing resources related to artificial intelligence. China-based companies and others are out to spend tens of billions more. Perhaps not since the Y2K crisis has so much money been spent on a single computing goal. ■ There is lots of reason to be optimistic about some of the potential found in neural networks and machine learning, but any time there is such an evident arms race underway, it's worth taking a step back to make sure that sound principles are going to prevail. One such area where there ought to be lots of cause for alarm is in the basic framework being used to build these computing systems. ■ The promise of artificial intelligence, beyond in performing impressive visual stunts, is that it could be used to enhance and improve upon human decision-making. That's why, for instance, it has lots of appeal in medical research. But if, in essence, the premise of artificial intelligence is that it does very well with pattern recognition and predictions, then it is improbable that it will give us especially good anti-worst-case reasoning. ■ It's one thing to be very good at seeing patterns in the data sets that are present. But life is often a matter of avoiding the worst possible outcomes and steering clear of unlikely but awful events. Doing that well requires a combination of moral imagination and a tolerance for improbability. Always making the best decision is less important than being sure to avoid colossal mistakes. ■ But with it emerging that some people are willing to trust artificial intelligence with extremely high-impact decisions, we need to think carefully about the consequences of overconfidence. It's one problem if Google tells people to put glue on their pizzas. ■ It's a much bigger problem if AI is being asked to enact policies (or even write laws) that have enormous effects on people's lives without a due procedural regard for the simple question, "What's the worst that could happen, and how are we insuring prudently against it?" ■ That just isn't the strong suit of a computing philosophy that assumes the only thing standing in the way of getting answers right is a shortage of data. Catastrophes averted rarely show up in the data. That creates an enormous systemic blind spot which we might never expect artificial intelligence to see.

April 17, 2025

For what seemed like the longest of times, to have an Apple computer was to think oneself impervious to cyberatttack. It was a fair enough assumption; Windows computers were much more susceptible for a variety of reasons related to their operating system architecture. ■ The resulting hazard, though, was that many Apple users took no interest in security issues and left themselves vulnerable by their sense of impunity. The recent discovery of sophisticated attacks that could compromise Apple devices illustrates the danger of over-confidence. ■ We know of the Apple vulnerabilities because they were documented by the CVE program, which provides a common clearinghouse for monitoring major computing vulnerabilities. It's a program whose very existence has come under attack, and even though it looks like the status quo will prevail for now, the scramble to establish a durable institution to house that research indefinitely is underway. ■ Having well-coordinated research and surveillance programs for cybersecurity vulnerabilties is one of the best large-scale steps a society can adopt. America's problem right now appears to be that not everyone realizes just how consequential these vulnerabilities can be and just how important a steady hand can be in the face of gray-zone threats. ■ Whoever imagined that cuts to the CVE program would be worthwhile "savings" is a person not to be taken seriously.

April 16, 2025

Personal safety shouldn't be threatened

The attempt to kill Pennsylvania's governor by throwing Molotov cocktails into the governor's residence deserves the most widespread condemnation that Americans can offer. The attacker's motivations appear to have been political, which causes the incident to meet the strict definition of terrorism: Violence committed with the intention of achieving a political outcome. ■ Engaging in politics can certainly come with a variety of risks. Plainly, a person who engages in politics runs a reputational risk: In seeking office, one puts their good name out to be judged by other people. What is said and done both in campaigning and, for the victors, in governing, can come back to either enhance or diminish the standing of that good name. ■ Related to that reputational risk, a politician invariably runs an income and occupational risk. If one runs for a full-time job with a full-time effort and falls short on election day, then the day after election day can be the first day of unemployment. That is risk enough to keep many people from even contemplating a run for office. ■ But no pursuit of office or term of service should bring with it a real risk to life and limb. There are far more than enough factors already discouraging decent people from running for office as it is. A sober concern for the safety of self and family shouldn't need to be layered on top of them.

April 13, 2025

The Financial Times has put a spotlight on a curious paradox: some 80% of Americans seem to think that the country "would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing", while only 26% of people currently working outside the manufacturing sector believe that they, personally, would be better off working in manufacturing. The numbers come from a 2024 survey by the Cato Institute. ■ Things never seem to go particularly well when Americans start trying to think of ways to tell one another what to do without committing themselves to doing the same. The mythical beliefs around manufacturing jobs are a flagship example. ■ If we want to make people in 2025 economically better off, then we need to base our priorities and policy-making on 2025 realities rather than the imaginary world of 1955. There are great jobs available in manufacturing today, to be sure. But they are not for losers or the lazy; the good manufacturing jobs belong to people who can adapt and learn at work. Creativity and problem-solving are high-reward activities on the shop floor just like they are in an architectural firm. ■ But having an advanced economy means having a lot of workers in the service sector -- the ratio is roughly seven service-sector workers to one manufacturing-sector worker. One isn't better than the other, but one vastly outnumbers the other. ■ Good policies have to reflect that ratio, rather than ignoring it. The preponderance of job-training and job-development efforts should focus on the service sector, because that's where the work is -- and we have 75 years of data saying that's where the work is going to stay.

April 12, 2025

Wrong number

Go back in time to just before Y2K, and you encounter a time when it was possible to register just about anything as a domain name -- the gold rush was just beginning. But it cost $119 to register a domain name with Network Solutions, with a hard limit of 26 characters (including the top-level domain). So the temptation to register and squat on desirable names was high, but it was tempered a bit by the up-front cost. ■ But as enthusiasm for the Internet grew, people who might have previously squatted on a domain name to capture something like "pets.com" before selling it to others found that it could also be lucrative to squat on typo names, too -- like "ptes.com". Google (itself a website with a funny name) was only starting to emerge, so a lot could be gained from catching human beings making wrong guesses. ■ Fast-forward to today, and people are surrendering their thinking processes to artificial intelligence everywhere you look. Some of it just means jumping on the latest fads, like generating your action-figure avatar. But many others are using AI as a surrogate for more serious processes, like writing computer code. ■ Coding can often be tedious, so resources have emerged to make developers' lives easier -- resources like code repositories, where libraries of existing code can be copied, pasted, stored, modified, and retrieved. This is a great system if everyone involved can be trusted. But developers are using artificial intelligence tools to help generate new code, and artificial intelligence has a serious problem with hallucinations -- nonexistent things the AI "imagines" because of the way its predictive nature behaves. ■ There's a real hazard in this development, because code-generating AI is hallucinating the existence of nonexistent code packages. That's bad enough, because it produces programs that don't work. But just as typosquatters came for domain names with bad intentions in mind, now crooked parties are putting malicious software in the destinations where AI has been hallucinating the existence of code packages. So when the AI-written code goes looking for real code in a library that doesn't exist, it ends up finding malware instead. ■ The first thing any security-minded person should do when a technology is deployed in a new field is to imagine the ways in which it could be abused. It won't necessarily stop the abuse from happening, but it might at least begin to raise red flags around the circumstances where we need to apply more careful, cautious thought. We've known for more than a quarter-century that people looking for the right things in the wrong places could end up in dangerous territory. Now we need to realize that AI "helpers" may be just as prone to looking in the wrong spots as the humans they're supposedly assisting.

April 11, 2025

The price of uncertainty

For the last full budget year, the Federal government spent all $4.92 trillion it brought in, and borrowed an additional $1.83 trillion to cover spending over and above taxes and other revenues. All of the accumulated deficits, plus interest, bring us up to a total of $36.2 trillion in debt. It's a sum far too large for anyone to really comprehend -- even divided among a population of 341 million people, it's nearly $106,000 per person. ■ Changes to the rate of interest we pay on that debt are hugely consequential. And the interest rate on long-term loans to the US Treasury went from 4.42% on April 4th to 4.90% on April 11th. ■ It's hard to see that kind of a change -- an increase of more than 11% in a week -- outside of the context of disruption to the world trading economy in which it happened. Uncertainty is expensive, and there's no better place to see the cost of uncertainty than in the change in interest rates. ■ Comparisons from day to day or week to week might sometimes be misleading -- lots of factors affect supply and demand on a daily basis. But there are signs that confidence in the Treasury has taken a durable hit. Chances seem good that rates will still be elevated 90 or 180 days from now. ■ And if the prevailing uncertainty means we are going to pay interest rates on our debt that are half a percentage point higher (or more) than what we were paying before, then the pain is going to be around for a long time to come. Interest on the debt is already more than 10% of all Federal spending. Higher interest rates will make those costs larger. ■ Taken together, what we spend on priorities that really can't be cut (like Social Security, Medicare, and interest) amount to nearly half of our spending. This means we don't have a lot of options to soften the blow on the spending side. There's only one other side of the equation where change is possible, and that's on the revenue side: Higher taxes. And in an environment where higher government interest rates push up interest rates on private citizens, too, a lot of people will find themselves paying more, twice over.

April 10, 2025

TechCrunch claims to have a scoop on photos that document an electric pickup truck from Slate Auto seen in the wild, witnessed on a flatbed in Los Angeles. What is attention-grabbing about the discovery isn't the vehicle's styling, but rather the expected price. Slate is reportedly on a mission to make a $25,000 EV truck. ■ That would be a fascinating and worthwhile goal, if true. Ford, the biggest truck-maker in the country, is proud of turning its massively popular F-150 into the F-150 Lightning -- with a starting price of $62,995. ■ Technologies that cross over from premium products to mainstream sellers and even low-cost leaders are the ones that really create useful change. It's no secret that Americans drive trucks out of proportion to their actual utility: The cab-to-bed ratio is basically the inverse today of what it was even into the 1970s. Meanwhile, many of the best-selling truck models have gotten obscenely tall -- too tall for drivers to see pedestrians, increasingly deadly even at lower speeds, and too tall to make them cargo-friendly. ■ A product that could both shrink the pickup truck's physical profile and come in at a price point competitive with even some of the most modestly-priced cars out there would be a double benefit to society. And if it could displace rival vehicles that create more air pollution, that would be a significant victory, too. The futurist ID Pearson once noted, "If we want a world where everyone can have a good lifestyle, we need to accept and even encourage rapid obsolescence, driving the technology quickly towards low environmental impact." An electric truck at the price of a Kia sedan would very much fit the bill.

April 9, 2025

The wrong way to stand out

As measles outbreaks continue to spread in places like Texas and Ohio, what should be unthinkable has become the tragic reality: At least three people, including two children, have died of a disease so utterly preventable that it was thought to have been eradicated 25 years ago. ■ The persistence of a pernicious anti-vaccination movement is in no small part to blame: MMR vaccination rates among school-aged children have dropped to 92.7%, and the Texas outbreak is spreading almost exclusively among the unvaccinated. But, as a root cause, a fundamental problem about self-understanding shares at least a fraction of the blame, as well. ■ Every human being is unique. We are constructed out of both nature and nurture, and the combination makes everyone different. This uniqueness is, paradoxically, the thing we can all be certain that we share -- no two of us are the same, which creates a foundation for celebrating both our similarities and our differences. To be human is to be unique. We all are. ■ We can also be special, though being special is different from being unique. To be special is a relational experience: One can be special to a grandparent, a teacher, or a minister, for example. One can also be special for a time -- like being the center of attention on a birthday. Most everyone is special to someone, somewhere, sometimes, but it's different from being unique; being special naturally ebbs and flows, depending upon who is around to express it. ■ And then, a person can be exceptional. The exceptional person is different -- so different that we make exceptions for them to the ordinary rules and customs. The exceptional person is, in some way, set apart from everyone else because their difference overwhelms society's capacity to make ordinary way for them. ■ These three definitions -- unique, special, and exceptional -- have been confused for one another far too much for our own good. Everyone is unique, and most everybody is special to at least someone out there. But there are those who are unsatisfied with being unique and unfulfilled by how special they feel, so they insist on being treated exceptionally. Some people truly are exceptional, of course, but a lot of people try to feel unique or special by forcing others to treat them as exceptions. ■ Strident anti-vaccination behavior often falls into this category. There certainly are those who have real immune complications that make them authentic exceptions: They cannot be safely vaccinated, and their safety depends upon everyone else getting vaccinated so that herd immunity can shield them. ■ But others reject the obvious best practices at both the individual and community levels and refuse remarkably safe, effective, and well-established vaccines. Many seem to do so merely because claiming a right to act in an "exceptional" way appears to scratch an emotional itch for them that being "unique" or "special" does not. That impulse is turning out to have dire consequences for children, and it needs to be turned back.

April 6, 2025

Making air travel look glamorous again

Some people like to look at the promotional advertising of airline travel from the pre-deregulation era and imagine that all such travel was freshly-carved roast beef and ladies dressed in pearls. But to imagine that all air travel was that way is to surrender both to an ignorance of the facts (like the fact that airliners crashed much more often back then) and to the gauzy lens of marketing. ■ Someday, people might look at promotional videos for today's airline cabins and think that everything we experience is equally glamorous. We know that it's often much grittier than plush seats and private "suites" -- even if those are the experience for some, they're not exactly representative of the travel experience for most people, most of the time. But those are the artifacts that are likely to survive into the future. ■ It's a great illustration of a much broader picture: Just because you see or read something from the past doesn't mean that you're getting the whole story. Even when it's authentic documentation, there's always a form of selection bias about what is kept long enough to be seen in the future. ■ Photos are often staged or selectively taken. The people whose stories get told rarely reflect a true cross-section of public experience -- most people didn't get to fly aboard Pan Am "Clipper Ships". And what we see on the surface doesn't necessarily tell the important facts of the tale -- like deadly crashes, frequent hijackings, and in-flight smoking. ■ The study of history is extremely important. Without it, we are prone to making the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again. But that study needs to be performed with a critical eye and a healthy skepticism. What's missing from the historical record is often just as important as what we can see. Those who only see things from the past and want their "golden ages" back are often the most easily duped of all.

Trillions in paper wealth destroyed

Something like $5 trillion in stock market valuation has gone up in smoke because one person is obsessed with tariffs and a completely fictitious notion of what was or is good for the American economy. There's nothing more substantial to it. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says taxes are the job of Congress, and that includes import taxes (which is all tariffs are). A self-respecting institution would assert its authority over those taxes instantly. Government must be limited in order to be good, and letting the wrong branch of government do whatever it wants is not "limited".

Abducted 17-year-old rescued at Omaha truck stop

A truck-driving couple thought something seemed wrong, so they dug deeper and identified a criminal incident in progress

April 5, 2025

Don't let it be a cyber D-Day

Wired reports that a White House-empowered team is planning a "hackathon" at the IRS in order to create an application programming interface (or API) to permit data to be moved more freely from one software system inside the tax agency to another. ■ There are very good reasons to be concerned about any large-scale effort to break down barriers that otherwise kept sensitive information (like taxpayer data) siloed and firewalled. Even in the best of circumstances, so much of that data is potentially so sensitive that it rises to the level where background checks, security clearances, and a whole lot of legal counsel ought to be involved. ■ But even if everything were to be conducted according to the strictest possible internal controls and safeguards, there is a bigger problem with the reported plan. A "hackathon" is a fine model to use when trying to assemble a group of smart, creative people in a single place to achieve a narrowly-defined goal. There are even charity hackathons that invite people with computer skills to donate their abilities to solve problems for public-benefit causes. ■ The IRS, though, maintains watch over one of the biggest troves of high-value sensitive personal data anywhere in the world. The Office of Personnel Management breach in 2015 and the cyberattack on Equifax in 2017 were huge. A successful breach of coordinated data at the IRS would be bigger than both events combined -- since nobody escapes the notice of the IRS. ■ The nature of a "hackathon" means that products -- perhaps incomplete, certainly not fully vetted -- will be tested, quite possibly on live data. And that means defenses will be lowered: At the very least, people whose job it is to watch for suspicious server activity will be expecting unusual activity to be taking place. There could be no more ideal time for an adversary to try to attack. ■ Just as Eisenhower took the weather into account when carrying out D-Day, a skilled cyber-adversary looks for exactly the kind of "hackathon" conditions that would offer cover for conducting their own operations. There is a time and a place for the "hackathon" approach -- but the servers and systems affecting every American taxpayer, in the days just prior to the deadline to file tax returns, is most certainly not it. ■ It's possible that the report is erroneous or flat-out wrong. It's also possible that something far more benign than a "hackathon" -- like a strategic planning meeting or a project kickoff -- is planned instead, and someone is using the wrong terms. But it's also possible, particularly based on what's happened at other Federal agencies, that "shock and awe" are indeed in the works.

JP Morgan says odd of global recession now 60%

The ingredients for trouble have been put into the bowl. Now we have to make sure nobody stirs the thing.

Yet another day of high weather danger

People in the Lower Mississippi Valley just can't catch a break from the severe weather right now. That's an extremely serious problem when National Weather Service offices are going badly under-staffed because of rash spending cuts.

April 4, 2025

Watch your predictions

Projections in the natural sciences have mainly been on a long upward trend towards greater accuracy. Weather forecasts are a shining example: The Storm Prediction Center has really been nailing their forecasts lately, in a way that would have been purely a dream half a century ago. ■ This has tended to give people the impression that anything that is quantifiable can be accurately projected. This confidence has been badly misapplied to the social sciences. Individual things can be well-known about topics within subjects like political science or economics, but a whole lot of macro-scale projections are still firmly within the grasp of fickle aspects of both individual psychology and group dynamics. ■ Anyone who makes confident, sweeping predictions about the economy should be viewed with overwhelming suspicion. There are far too many human-based variables involved for anyone to know with certainty how things will go. ■ Central to this is the knowledge that factors may line up in favor of a turn of events in one direction or another, but what we simply cannot know ahead of time are what timing and what triggers will be involved. This doesn't stop certain overconfident types from profiting by selling products like "market forecasts" -- but it should. ■ A sudden 10% downturn in the stock market has just resulted, ultimately, from the impulses of a single individual human being. There are those who saw the conditions coming together for what has happened, but nobody predicted outright what actually has come to pass. Humans remain the wildest of wild cards, and unless and until we perfect a great deal more of the psychological sciences, timing and triggers will remain the elusive aspects of every plausible economic forecast.

April 3, 2025

Get your assumptions in order

The state of one's starting assumptions can have an overwhelming effect on the conclusions one ends up drawing. If, for instance, one were to assume that American economic might reached a peak at some point during the heavy industrial era, then that assumption could easily frame the conclusion that some form of "return" to heavy industry might also bring about a "return" of economic glory. ■ But those assumptions would be faulty for two reasons. First, by any reasonable measure, there has been no peak in American economic success: It's grown from generation to generation. That doesn't mean the growth has been evenly distributed; some people, and even some geographic areas, have stagnated. Addressing that stagnation with a good underlying base of growth and some well-targeted policies could do a lot of good -- as could promoting conditions that encourage people to move to where the opportunity is. ■ The second fault in the assumptions would be to think that heavy industrial work is somehow infused with magic. Consider this under-appreciated fact: Roughly since the end of World War II, a majority of American workers have been employed in the service sector. Not just some, and not just a rising number. A majority. ■ This is a natural economic progression. Automation makes it easier to make things. That's been the case on the farm and in the factory alike. Machines do repetitive tasks well at scale, and the amazing productivity of the American agricultural and industrial sectors should be regarded as a massive success story. ■ Services, though, are much harder to automate. And in many cases, they can only be made so efficient: A string quartet doesn't get better by playing Brahms twice as fast or by cutting out the cello. There's only so much by which automation can make a haircut more efficient (otherwise, more people would be buying Flowbees). And if you want to talk to a counselor, your life will not be improved by them conducting sessions with two clients at a time. ■ It's natural, then, for employment in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors to decline, while the service sector expands. Finding ways to make prosperity reach more people in more places isn't a matter of trying to revive a fictitious past. It's a matter of dealing with the facts as they are, which means concentrating on matters like the dignity of work, life-long learning and skill development, and transitional assistance when old jobs fade and new ones need to be found. ■ America has been a majority-service-sector economy since the 1950s. Before that was the mobilization for a great war, and before that was a Great Depression. There are no glory days at any point in the last century when industrial employment led the way. Any assumption leading otherwise is a path to false promises.

April 2, 2025

Gains from trade

One of the best ways to understand America's phenomenal prosperity is to see the United States as 50 smaller countries, all bound together by an enormous free-trade zone. Individual states can pick and choose their own taxes and regulations, of course, but exchanges among them are bound, by the Constitution, to a prevailing free-trade regime. ■ Under these circumstances, it's possible to identify certain surpluses and deficits that some states have with others. Iowa runs a substantial surplus in the production of pork, well beyond what it consumes. California has a big surplus in movies and television shows. Washington runs a considerable surplus with the other states in the production of passenger airplanes. Florida generates a one-of-a-kind and insurmountable surplus in Disney World vacations. ■ With free trade, the market nudges each state to specialize in the production of what comes easily to its comparative advantages. Nobody gets upset that Idaho doesn't produce a lot of oceangoing freighters or that Hawaii doesn't build a lot of snowblowers. And while some states are, on average, more prosperous than others, even the state with the lowest per-capita GDP is still competitive with a rich country like Canada. The big free-trade zone doesn't drag down the high performers, nor does it exploit the laggards -- it raises the economic condition of every state. ■ Without the Constitutional guarantee of interstate free trade, Iowa might try to box out Washington's airliner production with import taxes and subsidize its own. It might try to punish California by taxing Hollywood movies and create domestic protections to get people to visit Adventureland instead of EPCOT. But those wouldn't be good uses of anyone's money or efforts. Even if Georgia comes along and subsidizes TV and film production within its borders, Iowa should still stick to a few of the things it does best. ■ Taxes on imports (or tariffs) don't enrich society as a whole. They can line some well-connected pockets and maybe run cover for some industries in some places that aren't competitive on their own. But what they give to producers they take from consumers, all while distorting the choices that people would make by focusing on their comparative advantages. ■ The US economy has been a more than 200-year natural experiment in free trade -- we just don't often see it that way. But what free-flowing interstate trade has wrought is the most robust economy in the history of the world. To recognize the gains from trade, we only need to be smart enough to see the evidence right in front of our own eyes.

March 30, 2025

Short memories are dangerous

Not quite 60 days have elapsed since China targeted companies like Google with retaliatory measures in response to tariffs imposed by the United States on Chinese goods. It's a passage of time worth noting in light of the April 5th deadline for a sale of TikTok, which was set by an arbitrary 75-day extension created by the Executive Branch. ■ For the entire time the TikTok clock has been ticking, any reasonable person should assume that Chinese officials have been cooking up additional ways to retaliate against American companies. China will want to retaliate for the tariffs in general, but the TikTok dispute provides a useful focal point. ■ The original ban on TikTok was one thing; it may have been a bit ham-fisted, but it was a fairly clear and straightforward response to cybersecurity concerns. Worries about probable ties between the app and the Chinese government seem particularly well-founded in light of how that government responded to the threats of closure. ■ But suspending the ban in order to entertain a forced sale under duress looks like quite a different thing. And if it goes through, there's certainly a non-zero chance that China will attempt a mirror-image forced sale of some American digital asset. ■ So many other things have happened in the last 70 days or so that it's easy for people to lose track of the individual details, but short memories are dangerous. What happens if the President appears to have forced a sale of TikTok to one of his friends? Under those conditions, would anyone actually come to the defense of, say, Microsoft, if the Communist Party were to demand a sale of Microsoft's large operation in China? We have wandered into hazardous territory, and the more capricious American behavior appears, the more we ought to worry about the possible consequences for our interests abroad.

More than 105 million Americans under severe weather threat

More than 41 million are under the Level 3 "Enhanced" risk, which is an enormous number of people

Illegal burning leads to LP tank explosion

It makes for stunning video

Human behavior is quite often just social contagion

Tom Nichols points out that terrorist bombings happened at an appalling rate in 1970s America. The idea spread and self-perpetuated because it spread -- not unlike a contagious disease. Universities should probably make everyone in the social sciences go through a couple of courses in epidemiology. It would probably do a lot of good. Even in economics and finance, basically everything significant that Warren Buffett has ever said about investing could have been cross-pollinated from health topics like inoculation and viral reproduction.

A great ad, needed for the worst of reasons

(Video) Canada's new prime minister takes the spotlight in an ad defending his country's identity -- an identity any right-thinking American should have no trouble respecting.

March 29, 2025

Where's your data?

In 2008, there was a brief spell during which President-elect Barack Obama's enthusiastic use of his BlackBerry raised eyebrows. The device couldn't be made sufficiently secure for his job, it was argued, and the risk of a Presidential PDA getting compromised represented just too great a hazard. Compromise was achieved, and the President got to keep his device. ■ Since then, VIP cybersecurity has been a long chain of embarrassments, from a Secretary of State wisecracking about wiping e-mail servers "with a cloth" to midnight tweets about covfefe. The problems have only gotten worse. ■ It's vital for everyone -- from VIPs to the ordinary citizen -- to realize that digital information can be in one of two states: It's either "in transit" between computers (or other devices), or it's "at rest" (when it's residing on a computer where it can be stored, read, or otherwise accessed). ■ "End-to-end encryption" is helpful for protecting data while it's in transit. Signal is one of many applications to provide that category of protection. But it doesn't protect data "at rest" -- when it's arrived at a destination device. If that device has been compromised (as with something like a malicious screen mirror), then the end-to-end encryption may have provided nothing more than a false sense of security. ■ It has been more than 16 years since the original Obama BlackBerry controversy, and we appear to have made exactly no progress whatsoever in either getting VIPs to take their own protection seriously or in developing and deploying thoroughly hardened personal devices for those VIPs to use (like the super BlackBerry desired by President Obama). It isn't safe to go on this way, and that's a problem which has nothing to do with party identification.

March 28, 2025

Don't oversubscribe to the hype

In the midst of another artificial intelligence hype cycle -- this one driven by an update to ChatGPT that permits users to mimic the cartoon style of Studio Ghibli and other animators with astonishing similarity -- OpenAI has announced a "temporary" rate limit on the number of images that users can request. ■ Popular new technologies are often swept up in irrational crescendoes of public enthusiasm. Looking back, there have been periods when adding the prefix "e-" or the words "atomic" or "electric" were enough to summon the same kind of enthusiasm that gets applied to any use of "AI" today. (To take just one example, the snack we know as Triscuit is a portmanteau of "electricity biscuit"; such was the power of that word in its heyday.) ■ Knowing that a neat new technology isn't god-like remains of the utmost importance. AI, for now at least, consumes lots of energy -- hence the throttling back of ChatGPT image requests -- and we put ourselves in grave danger if we overestimate its power without some modesty about how it is used. ■ No one is irreversibly harmed if a wave of image requests generates a few duds along the way. But things could go profoundly wrong if artificial intelligence is drafted to re-write the code that generates Social Security payments, as it appears may happen soon. Hype can be dangerous when it's untethered from caution to hold it back. Temperance isn't often a path to popularity, but it's a necessary insurance policy against the kind of irrational exuberance that creates huge mistakes.

March 24, 2025

Watch the asymmetry

Citing a report from Daily NK, TechCrunch says that North Korea is establishing a new hacker group within its intelligence service. The reports indicate that the group is going to focus on offensive hacking (like digital theft) while operating around-the-clock. ■ It's hard for those who had their formative years between the end of World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union to contextualize what the world's threats look like today. The two-superpower world of the classic Cold War didn't really make much room to consider countries as big as India, much less a nation like North Korea -- which, at 26 million people, is only slightly more populous than Florida, but with an economy so small that it's 20% smaller than Wyoming's. ■ But asymmetric techniques of warfare and conflict change that. If North Korea has just enough talented individuals, a modest Internet connection, and a few laptops, then it has enough capacity to potentially do consequential damage even to a country as large as the United States -- provided that it has no scruples about how the damage is done and nothing really to lose from being punished on the global stage. It's already a nation fundamentally cut off from the Internet; there's little left for it to lose. ■ Getting used to those systemic imbalances takes a level of adaptive thinking that not everyone in high office is prepared to demonstrate. The threat is very real and the damage that could be done is quite substantial. If our adversaries are unbounded by expectations of rules and norms, then our defenses must be robust and consistent. Inconsistent policy behavior will only impose costs in one direction: On ourselves.

Remembrance is valuable to the present

A memorial tribute to a 1910 train wreck received some notice in Iowa, as the event marked the 115th anniversary of the state's worst rail disaster. The Green Mountain crash killed 52 people when a passenger train traveling backwards derailed and wooden passenger cars were crushed by heavier steel ones. ■ Contemporary accounts of the crash were gruesome, and the death toll was awful. Yet it's still instructive, even if inter-urban passenger rail traffic is nonexistent in the state today. ■ For one thing, the coroner decided not to investigate because "it was evident that the wreck was caused by an accident". The railroad itself promised an inquiry in the immediate aftermath, but no thorough investigation of root causes was performed. Such a reaction would be unthinkable today; the NTSB looks at railroad accidents today, even if only a single fatality is involved. ■ For another, it's well worth appreciating that for however breathless the initial newspaper headlines, accidental death was a huge factor in daily life a century ago -- it remains much too significant a factor today, but it was astonishing back then. Hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of railroad workers died every year, and most years saw 25,000 to 40,000 of them injured. And those are just the workers, not even counting passengers. Today, the total number of occupational fatalities ranges between 4,500 and 5,500 among all occupations -- still too high, but strikingly fewer than the 10,000 or more annual fatal accidents that occurred a century ago, when the country was home to about a third as many people. The numerator has decreased, while the denominator has grown: That's a tremendous success story. ■ Good outcomes like increasing workplace and transportation safety should never be taken for granted. They are the complex results of many individual events, experiences, and choices. Rules and regulations governing safety behavior should always remain subject to thoughtful revision and reform, as circumstances themselves change. But the much safer world we inhabit today should be appreciated as a cumulative outcome -- one not particularly amenable to radical reform, and one in which caution should always prevail over eagerness to make changes.

March 21, 2025

Just leveling out

Once a person begins to grasp that wind is just air trying to equalize its pressure on a colossal scale, a lot of other weather phenomena make a great deal more sense.

Toronto plane landed too hard

The airliner that flipped over at Toronto Pearson in February had warnings about a high rate of descent just a second or two before touchdown, according to the preliminary report of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. This fact, as well as the damage to the right main landing gear, will undoubtedly feature centrally in the mainstream news coverage of the incident. ■ "The pilot landed the plane too hard" is a convenient and attractive summary of the situation, but people need to digest the incident thoughtfully. Something can be both true and dangerously misleading if it overshadows facts that need to be examined in the daylight. ■ Fixating on "pilot error" -- whether it's actually the case or not -- is a really hazardous way to operate, since it causes us to miss the systemic factors undoubtedly involved. Those are the most important details involved. ■ Whenever something goes wrong within a complex system, "the human at the controls" is almost always a contributing factor, but the system itself that produced the result is what should get the most attention. The system includes training, guidance, rules, technology, and a whole range of other factors that matter. What makes for an attention-grabbing headline can easily obscure the story that demands to be told.

Popping balloons

The National Weather Service has been placed under drastic personnel cuts by the Executive Branch, and the elimination of more than a thousand jobs is showing up in service reductions. ■ The Omaha office has suspended weather balloon flights due to the cuts. That may not seem significant at first, but small gaps in knowledge can have amplified consequences. ■ Omaha is the only close balloon site typically found upwind of most of Iowa, which means that the information captured by those radiosonde observations will no longer be available for forecasting purposes over the state. ■ That means no proximate upper-air data on pressure, temperature, winds, and humidity -- all of which can tell meteorologists a lot about the potential for conditions ranging from the ordinary to the severe. It's a significant loss of useful information.

March 20, 2025

Bridging the knowledge gap

One of America's best public institutions is the National Transportation Safety Board. Its newly-issued interim report on the ship collision with the Francis Scott Key Bridge is a valuable example why. The report directly and plainly states that 68 other bridges are at elevated risk of a similar disaster, and points to exactly what ought to be done without a moment's delay to protect the people who use those bridges. ■ Bad events will happen from time to time, but they become tragic if we ignore the lessons we should have learned. The NTSB does just that. It's public service of the highest form, channeling technical expertise into the job of finding the root causes of incidents and accidents, then formulating clear advice to be followed so the bad events don't reoccur. ■ NTSB reports are written carefully, documenting information that needs to be digested not just by professionals, but also by interested non-professionals. This is important, because many public policies either need to be shepherded through the lawmaking process by non-professionals or otherwise be supported by them. Good policy isn't necessarily self-sustaining; it needs good advice and an audience capable of acting on what it's told. ■ The report on the Key Bridge collision lays out in clear language who needs to take action in response to the incident, and there are a lot of parties on that roster. Names are named, from the Federal Highway Administration to the Harris County Toll Road Authority. This is the way competent government is carried out.

March 19, 2025

Huge variances in public opinion

Presidential job approval swings by 79 percentage points just by changing a voter's gender and educational level

March 18, 2025

Historically rich, even if in the middle today

Using time worked as a means to standardize purchasing power over time, an intrepid researcher finds that the minimum-wage worker today can buy a lot of consumer goods for about the same time-based price as a median worker 100 years ago. The big exception is in housing: Both rent and purchase prices are much, much more expensive than they were three or four generations ago. ■ Today's median worker lives not all that differently (based on the time-worked measurement) than the top 1% of 1924. Again, housing is the outlier -- it's much more expensive today, and that should hold our attention. If housing is a third or more of most household budgets, and if that price is burdensome for half or more of the population, then we need an honest reckoning with the problem. Zoning in many places should be liberalized, restrictions like minimum lot sizes should be reformed, and we should do much more to encourage transformational methods of homebuilding like manufactured housing. ■ But it's important to recognize that improvements in material standards of living are important supports for making progress on non-material principles, as well. A materially secure society can put much-needed energy into matters like securing civil rights. ■ Wealth doesn't make a society morally strong, but it helps to eliminate distractions and stresses that permit the unscrupulous to appeal to lesser public instincts. The ever-present risk, though, is that material wealth can lead to a self-satisfied sense of distraction from important matters of character. That's the gamble upon which the Communist Party has bet so heavily in China: They're desperate for GDP growth as a substitute for recognizing the natural rights of their citizens. That's what makes current sustained downward trends in GDP growth such a problem for the regime. ■ Economic growth and progress in building the moral character of a nation have to go hand-in-hand. It's no use being rich but awful, and it's not sustainable to be highly just but poor.

60,000 fake domains are stealing toll money

Cybersecurity researchers think at least 60,000 fraudulent domains are in use right now to collect private information from people who fall for scam text messages telling them that they owe road tolls. It's a problem spreading like wildfire, with a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations.

Major radio station ownership groups are shutting down stations

Radio towers are going dark as owners run short of ideas to keep them profitable

March 17, 2025

Choosing your own path

St. Patrick's Day may have evolved into America's favorite freewheeling holiday in no small part because so many Irish people immigrated here. But for all the lighthearted joy that comes with the parades and the green-tinted rivers, Irish cultural resilience shouldn't be underrated. ■ Ireland spent hundreds and hundreds of years under English oppression. It wasn't just a modern invasion -- the first round happened in 1169, and the imperial era dates all the way back to 1541. That's 79 years, or roughly a modern lifetime, before any English expatriates set foot on Plymouth Rock. It wasn't until the early 20th Century that the Irish managed to reclaim their self-rule. ■ We may be most familiar with the "Fighting Irish" mascot of the University of Notre Dame, but it's good to see the bigger picture about Irish identity. It wasn't an outgrowth of English identity, but rather a separate and unique culture all its own which had to adapt to a long-term English occupation. Unlike most of Europe, it was never conquered by Rome, either. ■ The Irish patriot Michael Collins celebrated this unique history as the foundation for the free Irish state: "The love of learning and of military skill was the tradition of the whole people. They honored not kings nor chiefs as kings and chiefs, but their heroes and their great men. Their men of high learning ranked with the kings and sat beside them in equality at the high table [...] We have to build up a new civilization on the foundations of the old". ■ It's easy to let the high-spirited holiday overwhelm all other perceptions, but the Irish (both those living on the island and their many cousins in the vast Irish diaspora abroad) have rightful claim to an honorable history with a unique culture that goes well beyond having a pint on March 17th. From colonial subjugation just a century ago to one of the world's economic and freedom-loving powerhouses today, it's a testament to what can happen when people are free to determine their own course.

March 16, 2025

Just tell the truth

The news paywall is one of the most ubiquitous irritants on the Internet. Nobody likes them, and no matter how reasonable the argument that ad-supported news is an unsustainable model, the plain fact is that most consumers have a finite budget for news and entertainment media, and that budget is far less than the prospective cost of paying for access to every service that might enlighten, entertain, and inform them. ■ This grows even truer for people who live in countries where the economy is still developing, or where the authorities are keen to restrict access to foreign voices. If $25 a month for a New York Times subscription seems like a lot to an American, it's proportionally twice as expensive to someone living in Greece, where the per-capita GDP is half that of the US, or three times as costly in a place like the Dominican Republic. ■ In North Korea, where Internet access to the outside world is basically forbidden to everyone? Such a subscription is literally beyond all price. ■ Yet into this world, the same governments that seek to repress news-seeking inside their own borders are happy to pay for RT, CCTV, and Press TV, among many other names. They know that the appetite for information is great, and that people who can't or won't pay for high-quality content may be satisfied with outlets that look news-adjacent. ■ There is no withdrawal from the competitive environment for influence in the modern media economy, only surrender. What the United States has furnished for decades through the US Agency for Global Media and its predecessors has been a diet of overwhelmingly balanced and straight coverage of the world via the Voice of America, RFE/RL, and other outlets. The prevailing wisdom has been that reality is the best friend of liberty: Telling the truth about events (warts and all) will reflect better on the free world than on oppressive regimes. ■ It was a good investment when the VOA went to air in 1942 as a counter-program to propaganda from Germany, and it's a good investment today. Ben Franklin once put it that "The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse." He may have been talking about pedestrian affairs like committee meetings, but it's no less true in the global media environment. Going dark is a sure way to let the propagandists of hostile nations flood the zone with lies about America's purported faults. Liberty only needs to tell the truth to prevail, but it can persuade no one if it remains silent.

March 14, 2025

While we've been distracted

Taiwan's new president has declared China a "foreign hostile force" and warned that "China has been taking advantage of democratic Taiwan's freedom, diversity, and openness". ■ The most likely strategic opening for China to launch a military attack on Taiwan remains the cover of some kind of major natural disaster -- a crippling earthquake or typhoon. The island is vulnerable to both, and if it were to be hit hard enough by Mother Nature, then Communist China could be expected to use the event as cover for a massive mobilization under the cover of providing "relief aid". ■ Those events, though, remain sufficiently unpredictable that it could easily be a matter of decades before such an opening would occur. But the extraordinary uncertainty lately unleashed on the global order may create something close to a human equivalent of a massive natural disaster. The US has provided Taiwan a security umbrella of sorts for a long time, but if that umbrella is retracted -- even if only temporarily -- then China might take it as a signal to act. ■ Concerns over infiltration operations being conducted to undermine Taiwan's system of government are probably very well-founded. And that, in turn, ratchets up the danger of domestic overreaction. The balance is exceedingly hard to get right under the best of circumstances. And these circumstances are not the best, by a long shot.

March 13, 2025

The scarcity of expertise

Sometimes it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of sharing this little planet of ours with 8 billion other people. We aren't naturally wired to think in quantities like billions, and that's just so very, very many other people on the same pale blue dot. ■ But at other times, it's a stark reality check to realize that for any particular skill, there exists a finite number of real experts who know how to do things well. Just as there are celebrity "A-listers", so too are there "A-lists" for every conceivable occupation, trade, craft, subject matter, and hobby on the planet. A great share of the time, the A-listers know one another (or at least know of one another), and they are recognizable to a degree of some celebrity-like status within their fields. ■ Events like mass layoffs and government shutdowns tend to put this into relief from what might be thought of as the supply side: We start to see how many people are (or are not) enough to get certain jobs done. ■ On the other hand, events like an anticipated major storm outbreak put a spotlight on it from what might be described as the demand side: Mass numbers of people will be hoping for expertise to be available on seemingly short notice. ■ Expertise can be a very fragile thing: It's almost never held entirely in isolation by individual geniuses, but rather depends upon collaboration, interaction, teamwork, and access to concentrated resources. We are fortunate to live in a time when most forms of expertise are at their historical best. ■ But we should carry always the humility to realize that it gets that way usually through patient, incremental, evolutionary progress -- rarely through big breakthroughs carried out by lone geniuses. Careless damage done to the environments that produce those desirable results can't easily be repaired. If the Mayo Clinic were disbanded, it's unlikely that it could ever be reassembled. And it isn't always evident that pulling an individual thread can cause an entire garment to unravel.

March 12, 2025

Looking forward to the trip

One of the things that gets lost amid the sea of rage-bait posts and faux-movement memes that crowd social media is the subtle art of reading between the lines. Perhaps that's an inevitable byproduct of an "attention economy", in which "Party A DESTROYS Party B" is a clickbait headline formula guaranteed to pay off. But subtlety will eventually have its day once again. ■ Some people call it "Irish diplomacy" and make a buck off selling knick-knacks with various iterations of "The art of telling someone to get lost so that they look forward to taking the trip". But treating any audience gently -- even one that stands in steadfast opposition to the truth, goodwill, or common sense -- is a practice with a long history, endorsed by many successful figures. ■ Calvin Coolidge wrote, "Perhaps one of the reasons I have been a target for so little abuse is because I have tried to refrain from abusing other people. The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately." ■ Booker T. Washington put it like this: "I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done." ■ And from Benjamin Franklin's writings, we read, "Tart words make no friends; a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar." ■ It isn't that direct language shouldn't be used from time to time, but that the right words to get things done may vary. Sometimes, subtlety is an impediment to getting a vital message across. But most of the time, a message that can be conveyed bluntly could also be delivered using just a little less firepower. We are human beings, after all, and pride is very good at creating filters through which contrary arguments and challenging logic must pass. ■ Some evils do need to be blasted with unconstrained, unrelenting criticism. But far more things are best combatted with enough restraint that the intelligent ally can recognize her argument being made while the opponent is forced to confront shortcomings in his own thinking without necessarily realizing that he is under fire of criticism. ■ These things aren't easy to do when the temptation to go viral is psychologically (and sometimes monetarily) rewarding. But if words are used not merely to make ourselves feel better or righteous, but to actually achieve persuasive goals instead, then much (if not most) of the time, making way for the audience to read between the lines is the best way to put words to work.

March 10, 2025

Digital arson

ABC News has abruptly shut down the polling-focused website FiveThirtyEight, obliterating the domain's content and redirecting traffic to the ABC News "Politics" page. Some story content can still be recovered by the names of individual "538" authors, like G. Elliott Morris, but the projects page is no longer visible. ABC is also cutting and consolidating elsewhere in its news division. ■ 538 alumni like Morris are understandably angry that their work has been functionally erased. The pre-erasure site was expansive and contained reporting, data, and interactive projects -- and though some content can still be retrieved from Archive.org's Wayback Machine, the way ABC obliterated the original site comes across like a form of digital arson. ■ Media jobs have long been precarious occupations. The itinerant radio DJ was a trope long before Dr. Johnny Fever and Harry Chapin's ballad about WOLD. But there is something different to the erasure that comes with being terminated from a media job in the digital era. ■ Being laid off by a media company is distressing enough. To have them nuke an entire body of work on the employee's way out the door (as is now the routine practice) is insulting. Libraries don't just purge their stacks of the books, magazines, and newspapers written by people who are no longer employed. That's not how civilization works. ■ Civilization is a cumulative process, and the people who document civilization's changes (one might even call them "journalists") think of themselves as playing a role in that accumulation. Even if it was work for hire, the journalist often still holds a sense of pride in the creation and sees its destruction as a mad act of needless vandalism. ■ Not everything is worth preserving in the Library of Congress, of course, but the wanton destruction of so much long-tail media content both diminishes the ongoing reputational equity of media outlets and encourages journalists to seek individual celebrity status that is bigger than the status of the outlets themselves. That's a recipe for long-term institutional decay, and there is little reason to believe it will be good for the public interest in the long term.

March 9, 2025

Ghosts of conscience

Ghost stories have been around for as long as we have records of human storytelling. A ghost bearing warnings even makes an appearance in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Chances are good that ghosts have factored in human stories since well before we as a species figured out how to write. ■ It would be a mistake to think of ghosts merely as fright devices, when in the broader sense they symbolize the struggle to make sense out of conscience. Imagine for a moment that ghostly spirits really could appear to us, but only to say one thing: "You know better than that." ■ As a literary device, such a ghost could still make many a useful appearance in literature. After all, what is Clarence the Angel trying to tell George Bailey, other than "You know better than that"? It's a powerful thing to tell someone. ■ If you want a better world, perhaps you should encourage the writing of more ghost stories. Not for cheap frights, but because ghosts are the best literary vehicle for conveying the importance of conscience. The world self-evidently doesn't place enough value on conscience -- not if we can look the other way as grave cruelty is dispensed in so many places without shame. ■ We become the stories we tell ourselves, and not every story reflects a hero in the mirror. Sometimes the otherworldly needs to appeal to our better angels.

March 8, 2025

Adapt and amend it, but don't dare try to end it

Among certain circles on the left, it is fashionable to assert that the Constitution is a bad document. Not just imperfect, but wholly unworthy of keeping. Perhaps it appeals to a proto-revolutionary instinct that shares a strain of thought with Trotsky's "permanent revolution", or perhaps it is merely misguided frustration with the outcomes the Constitution has recently produced. ■ The assertion, though, is utterly without merit and should be dismissed with prejudice. The Constitution is a human-generated document, full of compromises and artifacts of past ideas since reconsidered. That human quality means it is inevitably imperfect. ■ The Founders knew that. That's why the Constitution contains a mechanism for revision -- the amendment process in Article V. Knowing that humans are imperfect, they incorporated a process for self-correction, right from the start. ■ Some may argue that we have used that process too little. Others may argue that we have depended too heavily upon extra-Constitutional mechanisms (like Supreme Court cases and executive actions) to arrive at Constitutional corrections. Both observations may be right. ■ But for any and all of its flaws, the Constitution reflects not only the decisions of 1787, but also the subsequent evolution of thinking ever since. The continuity is the point: Like almost every technological product of our built environment, it has been changed and updated, often incrementally, with the context and knowledge of the time. ■ The Founders had means to latch their doors. Later on came deadbolt locks. Today, electronic keypad locks can be found almost anywhere. Each step along the way has been evolutionary, building upon both prior and contemporary knowledge. ■ Someone might reasonably say, "I think the lock can be improved". It would be unreasonable to say, "People still break into houses, so I think the concept of the lock is a bad one and should be thrown out." Too much knowledge is already embedded in the modern lock to imagine that starting entirely from scratch would be a better idea. ■ Likewise for the Constitution. The core concepts of the Constitution are balance and restraint. If outcomes look like they have become imbalanced or unrestrained, then the answer isn't to jettison the concepts but to demand loyalty to them. The Constitutional system we inhabit is the result of 236 years of incremental progress, and the flaws of its results are human flaws, first and foremost. ■ To their credit, the authors of the Constitution accounted heavily for human nature -- a nature that hasn't fundamentally changed since their time. What we know has changed, but not our nature. And what we know has been incorporated into the system through the consent of hundreds of millions of people ever since. ■ Those who think they know so much better that they could replace the system wholesale from a blank slate reveal only that they are infected by a terminal case of hubris. James Madison himself was sure that we could improve upon his work. But to replace it altogether requires thinking that we know better than everyone who contributed over nearly a quarter-millennium to what we now possess.

March 6, 2025

When a CEO appears to be the recipient of a much-too-generous compensation package, it's a smart move for investors to ask how much talent the company could get for the same amount of pay, but doled out to a number of lower-level workers. Is one person's work really worth $89 million for a year, and how much would the company have gained from hiring 100 people at $890,000 each instead? The answer isn't a foregone conclusion, but it's a vital exercise in checking one's perspective. ■ The same is true for other investments. Open AI is about to offer a package deal on access to its highest-level artificial-intelligence platform for $20,000 a month. That's the price, but how much is it worth? ■ Like CEO salaries, investments insist on being understood as comparative values. There are certainly some occupations that would benefit from an AI assist. For others, though, a $20,000-a-month package shouldn't be spent on artificial intelligence, but rather on a pair of high-value, $10,000-a-month human employees. ■ Our ability to comprehend numbers goes away quickly once we cross a bundle as small as three or four. There's a reason American telephone numbers are descrbed with three-digit area codes, and it's because we can't be made to hold more than a few digits at a time in our memory banks. It will save some money up-front, but not much down the chute. ■ AI is a mania right now, and seemingly everyone seems to want to prove a use case for it. When it comes to being hired out, the choice isn't in the dollar figure alone. The real price of anything is what you give up to get it.

March 2, 2025

The US needs to imitate Finland's forward thinking on media literacy

Finland's approach to educating young people about media literacy is something that can (and promptly should) be implemented in the United States, at the state level. State legislatures and education departments should not delay. And if they do, school districts should act. ■ Finland got ahead of much of the rest of the world because it's within the physical reach of Russian broadcasting antennas. A 100,000-watt FM radio station on a 2,000' tower can easily reach a radius of 100 miles, and there are portions of Finland within 100 miles of St. Petersburg (merely as one example). ■ Helsinki is just 50 miles as the crow flies from Tallinn, Estonia (which was long held under occupation by the USSR). In the United States, these places could easily fit within the same television or radio media market. ■ Circumstances on the ground forced Finland to adapt. And the Russian disinformation environment is mostly a continuation of Soviet disinformation. But now that we have the Internet, physicals limitation have been compressed -- everyone with a smartphone is within arm's reach of foreign propaganda. ■ Under those conditions, the the most important defense is to build up a public that knows how to resist mis- and dis-information. Reality is the best friend of liberty: Free people can face hard truths and good news alike, but trust in truthful representation is essential. That's why outlets like the BBC and the Voice of America treasure their reputations for journalistic independence. ■ It's the bad actors, like authoritarians, totalitarians, and fascists, who need lies to prop themselves up. Those regimes need the spectrum of bad information so much that they are incentivized to be both well-practiced and sophisticated at persuasion through untruth.

700,000 Federal layoffs could be pending

An aggressive plan to permanently eliminate a third of Federal jobs could materialize within the next month. That's big enough to have a measurable negative impact on the national economy.

US troops in Eastern Europe learn from Ukraine's innovations

The state of the art is moving forward, and it's critical for the world's preeminent military to learn. That's one of the reasons alliances are valuable.

Parents bring landlines back to keep kids off smartphones

When does it qualify as a trend or a movement? We'll see.

China's use of live-fire exercises puts airliners at risk

Unannounced use of real weaponry near civilian airplane corridors is massively irresponsible

March 1, 2025

Because life can only be lived in one direction, we mark it with familiar waypoints: Learning to walk, graduation, marriage, and a whole host of "firsts". This creates a seductive but faulty expectation that the same waypoints apply to society. ■ qqPolitical figures often use this expectation to their advantage by promising destinations. "Elect me and we will have/do/be something" is a common refrain because it satisfies our instinctive expectations. In human life, once a person has graduated, they don't un-graduate. Once they've learned to walk, barring a catastrophic accident or a stroke, they never have to re-learn. ■ The only thing politics of any sort can offer us is a direction of travel. More free or less free. More dignified or less dignified. More responsible or less responsible. ■ These things are much harder to sell because they depend upon abstract thinking. They also depend upon incrementalism: Taking steps, sometimes only small ones, and recognizing them as pieces of a bigger project which is never complete. ■ Under directional thinking, the work is never done: Good things must be secured through unrelenting attention and bad things must be fought without rest. Destination thinking relies upon appealing but false promises. Learning to recognize the difference doesn't often come naturally, but it's the essence of knowing what makes things tick.

February 28, 2025

The value of rain

The first Red Flag Warnings were issued by the National Weather Service in the 1960s. The warnings advise people that temperatures, winds, and relative humidity conditions are primed for wildfires. The warnings are fairly commonplace in some places, like California, which had at least 84 such warnings in 2024. ■ Other locations are less wildfire-prone. Central Iowa is just such a location. The National Weather Service office in Des Moines seems to have issued its first of the warnings in 2012, when there were four all year. A few were issued each year after that, rising to eight in 2015. The warnings lulled for a few years, then rose again in 2021, with five. ■ In 2024, the Des Moines office issued ten. And with 2025 barely underway, most of Iowa spent the day under a red flag -- in February, when there ought usually to be snow on the ground. ■ Any given year can be an aberration. And warnings are still human matters, so they are subject to some discretion. But the pattern has mostly pointed in an upwards direction, and that's indicative of chronically higher temperatures and lower relative humidity. Perhaps not by much, but by enough to count, especially in the aggregate. ■ It's a trend worth monitoring, to see whether it continues or abates. Odds seem pretty good that they will continue. That should give the relevant policy-makers reasons for caution about the road ahead. Chronically hotter, drier conditions would change the look of a lot of things -- and no matter what activists might try to say on either side of the issue, facts are facts. Mother Nature seems to be having an attitude problem.

February 27, 2025

The enemy is fatigue

After three years of war in Ukraine, it's no surprise that a measure of fatigue has set in with some of the public looking on from abroad. But fatigue shouldn't obscure the fact that one side remains responsible for both initiating the war and perpetuating it in the most heinous of ways. ■ Only Russia is responsible for bombing hospitals. Only Russia is responsible for routinely terrorizing civilian populations with drone strikes. Only Russia is responsible for stealing children from their homes and taking them to a foreign land to deny them their very identities, with the express purpose of breaking their bonds with family and country. ■ All of these acts are plainly evil. There is no siding with evil without becoming evil yourself. But, even short of explicitly siding with evil, we should remember that despair and indifference are their own kinds of sin. ■ Impatience with victory is no substitute for staying with a long-term turn of events. No matter what happens in this war, any outcome still results in Ukraine having to exist with Russia as its neighbor. ■ Defeat may mean existing as a subjugated state or a beaten-down junior, unable to defend against the next wave of warfare. If we believe that self-determination is a human right -- which it most certainly is -- then we can't expect Ukraine to win overnight. The invasion was less like a broken leg to be re-set and quickly healed, and more like an aggressive form of blood cancer that must be healed with patient but determined medicine. ■ It is a long slog, period. Ukraine can either bend into submission or it can emerge as a recognizable victor standing up to the bullying of its abusive neighbor -- one that bombed a theater full of children. The right to self-determination means that Ukraine must take whatever time is required in order to achieve victory on terms it sets, rather than on terms set for it.

February 23, 2025

Half our brains tied behind our backs

Researchers have spent plenty of time and effort looking for differences, but there is no scientific evidence for a meaningful difference in general intelligence between males and females. To any clear-headed individual, there's nothing controversial in that factual statement. ■ But it's worth observing that the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was only ratified in 1920. The judgment of women wasn't just excluded from the highest offices until just a century ago, it was mostly absent even from the voting booth. ■ Any society, institution, or culture that excludes half its people from the decision-making process on account of sex is making a colossal and stupid mistake. It's literally the surrender of half of the available intelligence. ■ And yet it still happens, either systematically or through the brute force of chauvinism. It is a matter of strategic stupidity that there are no women among the 24 members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party: Rival powers like the United States benefit from that decision to self-handicap. It is statistically quite nearly impossible for the 24th most talented man in the country to have better judgment than the most talented woman. ■ In any contest of judgment, the team most open to the contributions of all of its available talent stands the best chance of arriving at the best answers. Who gets excluded from the room when decision-making is taking place reveals quite a lot about whether the people doing the excluding care more about themselves or about the people they're ostensibly there to serve.

February 22, 2025

Tune in for more

If a primary purpose of a national public-service broadcaster is to sustain a sense of national identity, then it's hard to think of a set of conditions more suitable than those of Canada. It's the country with the second-largest land area, but 90% of its population lives within 160 kilometers (99.2 miles) of the US border -- less than two hours of driving at highway speeds and, for many, within the reach of radio and television broadcast antennas. ■ Its roughly 39 million people are outnumbered more than eight-to-one by America's 341 million, sharing a primary language and a fair amount of history. To be outnumbered by that margin in that close of proximity doesn't set up Canada to have a lot of its own cultural product. ■ No government, and certainly no public-service broadcaster, can force a culture into being. Culture is what people choose, within the constraints of their circumstances. But one of those constraints is whether they see anything distinctive and worth adopting. In theory, that's what an institution like the CBC is expected to promote. ■ At what cost? Yearly, about the price of a dinner for two at a quick-service restaurant. Is that what culture is worth? That's for Canadians to decide. But it seems likely that much smaller populations have credible claims to having distinctive cultures of their own, so it's a justifiable case. But especially as legacy broadcasting media come under heavy pressure from asynchronous digital alternatives, the need to have something distinctive to say about local history, values, habits, or other identifying touchstones becomes more of the focal point than simply making sure the meters are still moving.

February 21, 2025

A $1.5 billion robbery

Someone stole cryptocurrency with a market price of $1.4 to $1.5 billion from the Bybit exchange. The company's CEO rushed to do a live video statement on the incident about two hours after it happened, which has certain echoes of bank presidents addressing crowds of panicked depositors in the 1930s. ■ It is strange to hear an executive giving a lengthy account of a heist almost immediately after it happened. To a small degree, that's almost refreshing to see. When things go wrong, most corporations go into lockdown mode and pretend like they don't know things that are self-evident to any reasonable onlooker. ■ But the need to address the incident like that is a reflection of the high-speed, high-emotion environment of cryptocurrency. There's no FDIC waiting to reassure depositors. Cryptocurrency middlemen and brokers depend upon amplified emotions and a high-stakes trading mentality -- it's not built on patience, due diligence, and sound valuations, it's built on hype. ■ Warren Buffett will release his annual letter to shareholders at Berkshire Hathaway tomorrow, in which he will undoubtedly follow his half-century-old practice of using plain language to tell a clear story about his investment choices and the productive activity taking place at the businesses he controls. ■ It's a stark contrast with explaining a blow-by-blow account of how malicious hackers could steal $1.5 billion during a "cold wallet" to "warm wallet" transfer. Slow (and perhaps even boring) has a lot going for it, even if it's not much to stir the blood. But losing ten digits to North Korean hackers (or whomeveer was behind the heist) is the kind of excitement nobody needs.

Behind the scenes at "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood"

A wide-angle view of the set that never made it to the TV show

President fires top uniformed military officer in the US

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff received a Friday-night dismissal, as did the Chief of Naval Operations.

February 20, 2025

Whole parenting

Aside from clothing (where "fast fashion" is a very real market force), few areas of culture are as subject to trends as parenting. Even if not everyone becomes a parent, everyone has been on the receiving end of parenting -- so feelings run high and nobody much doubts that they, themselves, see how it should be done. ■ The latest in the ultra-long line of parenting trends is "FAFO parenting", which derives its name from an off-color phrase that effectively means "You'll get what's coming to you, and you'll deserve it". ■ To a narrow extent, there is some room for parenting via natural consequences -- when the stakes are low and the feelings run high, it can be useful for children to see that the world is indeed ruled by cause and effect, and that their choices can be those causes. As some people represent it, "FAFO parenting" is just an extension of that logic. ■ Yet it's noteworthy how many approaches to parenting -- and management, teaching, coaching, and law enforcement -- depend upon a faulty model of the person who is being influenced. The flaw is in seeing them as objects, rather than as complete human beings. Certainly, the whole experience of childhood is formative; there's lots of shaping and molding that takes place. ■ But we recognize fairness before we can form sentences and we remember circumstances of our treatment from our first years, even if toddlers can be unreliable narrators. Everyone has at least a hazy memory or two of how they felt in the midst of a pre-school experience. That memory is part of the integral whole of the person. ■ We are, in terms of temperament, personality, and lots of other orientations, whole not long after birth. And a lot of parenting would be better if it started from the assumption that the child is, in fact, complete, rather than some kind of puzzle still under construction.

February 19, 2025

Repair is possible, but it takes time

In 1945, the Japanese occupation of Korea was ended by the defeat of Japan by Allied forces. That occupation lasted for 35 long and painful years, during which countless crimes and horrors were committed against the Korean people. Korea had little time to recover before the Korean War split the peninsula and brought further agony to the people. ■ Yet, despite an often tumultuous path, South Korea has emerged as one of the world's biggest economies and most technologically advanced societies, with a civil society strong enough to put a rogue president in his place. ■ In the aggregate, it's a spectacular tale: The Japanese occupation ended just 80 years ago, the blink of an eye in historical terms, and yet the two countries were able to normalize relations just 20 years after the occupation ended -- and today, both are among the most advanced societies in the world, able to jointly celebrate their mutual accord. ■ That doesn't mean the past is entirely forgotten, nor forgiven, nor repaired. The relationship remains a work in progress. But it does go to show that prosperity and liberalization can go a long way towards creating incentives to get along and even to reconcile. ■ It's unlikely that the two countries would recognize anything remotely close to an alliance today if either one had remained poor or had rejected many of the hallmarks of a modern liberal society. That's worth remembering and recognizing in the affairs of the world around us: It's possible to overcome a terrible past, but doing so takes time and effort. It stands the best chance of success if other macro-scale conditions, social and economic alike, are right.

Why shrink the Pentagon?

The Secretary of Defense says he wants to cut Pentagon spending by $50 billion in a year -- out of a budget of about $850 billion.

On-ramp phrases for an Irish accent

"You know, your man across the road turned 33 the other day"

Russia attacks Ukrainian energy infrastructure

Look at whom they're trying to hurt and you'll have an idea of who's the evil side in the war

Warning indicators on the US economy

It's effectively impossible to predict when the economy will experience a downturn -- economics is a social science, and nobody can really predict the timing or the triggers that initiate a downturn. But it's prudent to keep an eye on mathematical models that have held up in the past.

Signet rings should make a comeback

The real killer app is to find a way to seamlessly use them for multi-factor authentication. If you could prove who you are with something light, simple, and always on your finger, it could be revolutionary. Multi-factor authentication looks for people to furnish two or three of (1) something you know, (2) something you have, or (3) something you are. Passwords are how we furnish the "something you know", but digital jewelry could be a great way to supply the "something you have".

February 18, 2025

A major warning sign from China

China has just issued a major warning sign which the rest of the world shouldn't ignore: Not about its external ambitions, but about its internal fragility. Xi Jinping has been quoted by state-run media saying, "It is the right time for the majority of private business and entrepreneurs to show their talent". It's not a particularly poetic take, but it reveals a lot in its subtext. Something has Xi alarmed about his country's economy. ■ It's also worth noting that among the audience members targeted for the message was Jack Ma of Alibaba. The same Jack Ma who effectively went missing for a couple of years after he criticized some government regulators. Someone like him doesn't just show up in the government's favorable public light if they feel strong enough to keep him in the penalty box. ■ If Xi is putting the private sector on notice that it's going to need to step up its game, he is telegraphing that the economy is weaker than he needs it to be in order to feel secure in his regime's internal stability. Every power structure depends on some form of legitimacy. Democratic elections are the best way, to be certain, but even dictators depend upon a certain amount of buy-in from others. When they lose it, they often lose their own lives (see: Muammar Qaddafi, final days of). ■ Xi needs economic growth because it is the widely-recognized token the Communist Party has exchanged with the people of China as a substitute for their natural political and civil rights and liberties. If the economy stalls, the party's legitimacy is undermined. And if it has stalled enough that Xi is trying to rally the economic troops in public, then things may be worse than the official data might reveal. ■ The CCP isn't particularly good at adapting to bad news or big trends promptly; look at how long it took them to realize that the One Child Policy was a demographic doom loop (something that should have been evident from simple math done decades ago). Even the tech industry can't move fast enough to reignite a stalling economy of China's size, so the fact there appears to be some grasping underway should serve as a noteworthy warning.

Someone's been trying to sabotage German naval vessels

It's not hard to guess which country is probably the culprit

Import taxes and the American manufacturer

The higher up the economic food chain, the more likely it is that import taxes are going to cause hassles

Nearby pilot caught Toronto crash on video

(Video) And there's at least some data to suggest that the plane was coming in hard at a very bad time for ground conditions

February 17, 2025

Some Los Angeles fires were sparked by live power lines

If there really were serious breakdowns in communication between firefighters and the power company, it points to a serious failure in systemic design. Some things just shouldn't be difficult to do, and getting power lines de-energized in the middle of a fire outbreak should be counted among those things.

Airliner crash at Toronto Pearson

Astonishingly good fortune that nobody was killed

The dawn of computer weather graphics

(Video) The BBC shares clips from the changeover from giant maps illustrated with magnets to computer-generated graphics. Noteworthy is how clean the graphics (including the text) come across, despite how comparatively rudimentary computer graphics were in 1985. Someone at the BBC put real thought into color, fonts, and shading.

February 16, 2025

An award one would rather not receive

Kaja Kallas, until recently the prime minister of Estonia and now one of the European Union's top diplomats, has been honored with an award at the Munich Security Conference to recognize her "for her essential leadership in rallying support for Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion, recognizing her as a resilient and widely respected leader and staunch defender of the rule of law". ■ Unsurprisingly, she deflected praise from herself to the people of Ukraine. Kallas proves that clarity and direct language have a vital place in orienting a response to bloodthirsty aggression. Everything that has happened to Ukraine over the last three years has been the result of choices ultimately made within the Kremlin. The war could end tomorrow if the right order were issued from somewhere within sight of Red Square. ■ Kallas is one of the clearest voices about the tragic consequences if no such order is given, because it's clear that the aggressor's impulses aren't limited to Ukraine alone. But Europe needs to not only be included in discussions about peace, but to have broad popular buy-in over the importance of standing strong, too. ■ Europe's defensive posture has, in many ways, grown flabby and sclerotic. That's particularly so when looking beyond just the obvious measures of military capability: Depending on natural gas from Russia or telecommunications equipment from China leave European countries strategically tied up. That in turn makes the EU less of a credible threat, and people other than the leaders of the Baltic States need to be vocal about fixing that.

Iowa: No teams, six "home" markets

Major League Baseball makes life really hard on fans in Iowa, giving six different teams the right to black out games in a state that is home to none of them.

A plea for the integrated psyche

Samantha Hancox-Li: "[P]arodies of traditional masculinity or femininity can never fill the gaping void left by the absence of the other gender's virtues"

Doing so much with so little

An assessment worth reading about what Ukraine has been able to do when challenged by a much more fearsome enemy

February 15, 2025

Trade you

One of the main objections cited against the practice of a country running trade deficits with others is that the accumulated deficits ultimately represent a transfer of capital, now or in the future, from the country running the deficit to the countries on the other side of the ledger. Some very intelligent people have raised this objection, as have more than a few unintelligent ones. ■ Foreign ownership is often unpopular: Just look at the excruciating lengths to which two Presidential administrations have now gone to block Nippon Steel from buying US Steel. And Japan is one of our strongest allies -- its interests are tightly aligned with America's, both geopolitically and economically. If ever there were a friendly country into whose hands we could trust to place a few assets, Japan would be at or near the top of the list. Yet even with that in mind, the objections remain loud and often deeply irrational. ■ But there is a different way to look at trade deficits. Lots of countries have really big export economies in very specific products: Finland exports a massive amount of wood. Saudi Arabia exports oil and its byproducts. Iceland exports lots of aluminum. These countries have certain inherent competitive advantages in those products, and it would be silly to expect them not to make full use of those advantages. ■ What if the United States were seen to have a massive natural advantage in business formation? What if our strength isn't an endowment of natural resources, but the ability to start valuable new companies? In other words, what if LLCs and Delaware-based S-Corps are our version of Saudi Arabian oil? ■ And what if that's OK? Ecuador produces more bananas than its population could possibly eat, so it exports huge volumes of bananas. Perhaps we simply ought to see (to oversimplify a bit) that the United States produces more shares of stock than our population is willing to buy -- at least, in comparison with the bananas and big-screen TVs and other stuff we'd rather buy -- and so we export those shares of stock rather than letting them go to waste here. ■ There may, of course, be sound reasons to object to other aspects of our trade behaviors, and some people are so unwaveringly opposed to foreign ownership of any type that they object on that principle alone. But just like Ecuador has a physical climate especially conducive to growing bananas, the United States has a legal, social, and economic climate that is especially conducive to business formation. ■ Maybe we should recognize that as a unique strength -- one that ought to temper how we look at trade deficits. If we can put aside our reflexive nationalistic pride, is there anything entirely wrong with selling off a few businesses once in a while, especially if our capital markets are so well-developed that domestic investors have countless other investments from which to choose? ■ There are few, if any, real obstacles to Americans buying American assets, so the ones that ultimately end up for sale on a global market might well be those that Americans don't see a future in owning. Besides, if those American companies require further investment to stay competitive, most of the spending on them will probably take place with nearby American vendors. If we can think of business creation as a special American export, then we might not be in the dire straits that conventional thinking about trade may lead us to believe. Maybe we're just bottling our entrepreneurial spirit and selling it for a premium price.

February 14, 2025

Like people, companies sometimes have suitors. And sometimes those suitors get rejected, just as OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) have spurned a takeover offer from X (formerly known as Twitter). ■ The offering price tells us one thing: At least two parties think the company is worth more than $97.4 billion -- the offeror and the offeree. It would be irrational to offer a price higher than the perceived value of the firm, and it would likewise be crazy to reject an offer for much more than intrinsic value. ■ But the whole story tells us something else. We are not well-equipped to handle large institutions run by any rules other than large, for-profit shareholding. OpenAI has an unusual structure that tries to blend a non-profit mission with a semi-profit business. The origins of the structure come from the perception that artificial intelligence is a special kind of public good, and that it requires a special kind of managerial orientation. ■ Within a capitalist or market-driven economy, the for-profit model will always predominate. The profit motive is almost undefeated when it comes to encouraging innovation, progress, and efficiency. But that's not always what's optimal for society. ■ Especially where there are distinct matters of public interest involved, we need to be experienced and familiar with a toolkit that doesn't just include C-corporations, but also regulated utilities, mutual associations, co-ops, and the like. And then we need to be sure those other structures attract people just as skilled, thoughtful, and forward-thinking as any conventional for-profit.

February 13, 2025

Enough is enough

Apparently not content with the neverending flood of spam texts and voice messages promising deals on "your car's extended warranty", Jeep has decided to permit in-dashboard advertising for an extended warranty plan on new vehicles. The oversized display screen has been a feature of some vehicles for more than a dozen years, and a majority of all new cars for at least ten, but the explicit conversion of the displays into advertising panels is reckless. ■ Giant touchscreens may be adaptable for the programmers working behind the scenes of automaking, but they are a terrible development for the drivers of any vehicles that are not fully self-driving. They are distracting (basically out of necessity) and inevitably cause problems particularly at night, when drivers' eyes need to be able to detect obstacles in low light. But even in the best of circumstances, touchscreens demand lots of attention that should be devoted to the act of driving instead. ■ Analog inputs, like buttons, dials, and switches, are not always well-designed. But, at their best, they are plainly easier to make intuitive and non-disruptive to the conduct of the driver. It's known that drivers perceive their vehicles as extensions of themselves -- it's why a rental car takes some getting used to, and why someone driving their own car can often tell precisely how far away they're parked from a curb. Likewise, a good cabin design becomes an extension of the driver's space, making it intuitive where to reach to raise the temperature or turn down the radio. Touchscreens and their menu trees are impossible to navigate so unconsciously. ■ And an analog display is much harder to abuse by filling it with uninvited advertising for extended warranties -- or anything else. Just because technology makes some behaviors possible doesn't authorize making parasitic choices about how to treat vehicle "consumers". It's dangerous enough to let us all on the road with vehicles that can weigh 7,000 or 8,000 pounds and have deadly blind spots caused by factors like wildly excessive hood heights. Automakers need to show the social sense and public-interestedness to know when it's time to pass on one more opportunity to advertise to chronically distracted drivers.

February 9, 2025

People aren't objects

What happens between and among celebrities is generally of lesser importance than the value of the paper upon which the gossip columns are printed. Very few things worthy of note or admiration happen in the limelight. ■ Occasionally, though, rather than serving as a helpful example to others, someone chooses to serve as a horrible warning instead. Howie Mandel, for instance, has done exactly this by bringing the comedian Bill Burr onto his podcast and surprising Burr with a guest visit from rock star Billy Corgan. ■ Corgan has previously suggested to Mandel that he has been told credibly of the scandalous prospect that he and Burr are unwitting half-brothers. Mandel decided to exploit this rumor because "I thought it was funny". ■ The stunt should have been stopped at the brainstorming stage for sheer lack of good taste. But there are certainly quarters where good taste isn't considered a useful boundary, since it can fail to get audiences' juices flowing. That's sad, and it speaks poorly of people who continue to patronize that kind of entertainment, almost as much as it does of the people who create it. ■ Certainly, though, the encounter should have been stopped on the grounds that it treated both Corgan and Burr as objects to be manipulated for entertainment value, rather than as dignified human beings. Something is badly broken in a person who sees a shadowy but potentially intimate connection between other people as a vehicle for laughs and attention. ■ It's even worse that Mandel has put on a show of feeling wounded by a lack of acknowledgment of his supposed apology. Nobody is entitled to forgiveness, and even a sincere apology is often far less than a complete act of repair for harm done to others. There's a real sickness in objectifying others and then whimpering about one's own hurt feelings. It may be too much to expect Mandel or anyone on his team to truly reconcile the error of their ways, but it shouldn't be too much for audience members to ask honestly whether their own appetite for shock value has gone too far.

February 8, 2025

Moral standing

Just half a decade before his death, Booker T. Washington wrote a set of memoirs which included this assertion: "Experience has taught me, in fact, that no man should be pitied because, every day in his life, he faces a hard, stubborn problem, but rather that it is the man who has no problems to solve, no hardships to face, who is to be pitied." ■ If the idea of Black History Month is to have any meaning, it ought to be in exposing Americans to more encounters with historical artifacts that been under-appreciated or under-exposed -- foremost among them, primary source materials written by authors like Washington. Invariably, that leads to uncomfortable tensions: After all, one of Washington's own "hard, stubborn problems" was that he suffered enslavement at the hands of another human being. The very idea is so offensive that it's natural to be turned away from wanting to consider such an awful institution or any of its consequences any further. ■ But if the reader looks away or retreats to a categorical way of thinking, they risk denying something enormously valuable to the author: His agency. Washington published "My Larger Education" in 1911, just shy of half a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and 46 years after the 13th Amendment. He had every reason to expect that any intelligent reader then would share the same categorical rejection of slavery as a reader would today. ■ Yet he still shared those words intentionally: He pitied people like those enslavers who enjoyed a life of nothing but ease, not because he wished enslavement on anyone, but because he knew that choices make a life just as much as circumstances. ■ Even if it makes us uncomfortable, and even if it makes us want to object categorically ("Nobody should have to face the circumstances he did!" is a perfectly normal reaction), it's important for modern ears to hear a reflection like Booker T. Washington's and appreciate the enormous strength of his character. To receive and repeat his words isn't to validate the conditions of slavery, it is to celebrate the triumph of human character over evil circumstances and sinister institutions. ■ This is a real person, speaking to us from beyond the grave, asserting the right to look down with pity upon people who undoubtedly thought themselves to be his superiors in life. That's an assertion of moral standing; one which says that his human life was fully valuable, no matter what others did, and that we should see equal value in all human lives in our own time.

February 7, 2025

UNI to tear down Campbell Hall

The University of Northern Iowa has announced its intentions to tear down Campbell Hall, a residence hall that has stood for seven decades. The dormitory "has $27 million worth of deferred maintenance" and only housed about 600 students. $45,000 per bed seems like a fairly high price to pay for a renovation, especially when compared with a median price of $148,000 per room to construct a brand-new hotel. There are probably some important differences in cost between the two types of construction, but assuming that each room could house two students, the cost to renovate clearly ran into the same zone as the cost of new construction. ■ For further comparison, the university built an entirely new apartment-style residence hall in 2011-12 for around $20 million, for about $100,000 a room. Construction costs have inflated quite a lot since that time, but certainly not by double -- perhaps by 60% to 70%. And at the end of the day, even a renovated building is still old. ■ Deferred maintenance remains the elephant in the room that America just doesn't want to address. College buildings are sometimes generously funded by benefactors at the time of construction but inadequately endowed for the long term. Computer systems are designed for the state of the art in one period but never fundamentally upgrades, leaving airlines (for example) still using dot-matrix printers. Cities build ambitious infrastructure projects with wide boulevards and eye-catching bridges, but neglect to upgrade the hidden infrastructure of levees and pipes and sewers that make urban life sustainable. ■ America is exceptionally good at tearing down the old and replacing it with the new; this much is to our credit. But we need to find ways to grow more dedicated to the often uninspiring but essential duty to pay for ongoing maintenance as an investment. That tends to express itself in political outcomes, but it starts as a cultural choice: We have to value a practice enough to be conscious of what it does for us, and to be ashamed if we don't follow through on doing it. Rust and entropy eventually come for almost all things.

February 5, 2025

A loving brother

A 10-year-old boy was one of the people injured by flying debris when a medevac airplane crashed in Philadelphia. He was in a car with his father and siblings, and as his father attempted to steer the vehicle to safety, the boy shielded his little sister. Despite taking a fragment of metal to the skull, he has regained consciousness and is on a path to recovery. ■ In the hospital, the boy asked his father, "Daddy, did I save my sister?" (The 4-year-old was OK.) Those words, though, are enough to arrest the full attention of any sensible adult. ■ A lot of people profit, either directly or indirectly, from trying to convince other people of the bad in the world: Conspiracies, criminality, and countless forms of malevolence. And it is true that there are evil people among us (a few), as well as people who really aren't motivated by evil but who may succumb to evil temptations (a few more). ■ But most people -- a supermajority, really -- are out to do the best they can for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. If we were truly drowning in evil spirits, humanity would have gone extinct long ago. Most people are like the heroic 10-year-old, who sense a responsibility to protect those more vulnerable than themselves. We express this sense in different ways and with different levels of self-sacrifice, but it's a thread that comes within human nature for most of us. ■ It's a thread worth remembering. There's no way for all of the imagined evils to be real, even if a few of them really are true. Our species is cooperative and social by nature -- anyone who violates those conditions through stealing, selfishness, or antisocial behavior is a threat to us in our natural state. If we expect that most others are trying to do right, even if in flawed or incomplete ways, then we can sustain hope. ■ A 10-year-old trying to save his sister is a hero, for certain -- but he's also an exemplar of what's most normal in all of us, rather than some strange outlier. If his story seems well outside the norm because we're consuming too much media that makes the deviants among us seem like the normal ones, then it's time to recalibrate our information diets.

February 3, 2025

Not much is new

Every organization, from the smallest mom-and-pop cafe to the world's most sophisticated military, depends heavily upon institutional memory: The knowledge held by the people who make up the institution. Most of that institutional memory in most organizations is retained informally, passed along through stories, apprentice-like relationships, and hard-won experience. In other cases, it's formally documented -- in training manuals, after-action reports, yearbooks, and corporate archives. ■ Well-run institutions treat this form of memory as a living resource. They study, document, and use their institutional knowledge, refining it and incorporating it into ongoing decision-making. Documentation is a sort of superpower: When it's done regularly and kept current as evolutionary progress is made, it allows the organization to become better and entrench those gains, even as old members leave and new ones are brought in. ■ Documentation is also vital to ensuring that people don't get out over their skis. Every generation and every line of human endeavor brings about a fresh crop of people who think they know better than everyone else because some seemingly new idea has occurred to them. It's an especially common trait of the young and intellectually gifted. (Who hasn't encountered an insufferable teenager who won't shut up after their first reading of Ayn Rand or Karl Marx?) ■ Clubs, private firms, government agencies and departments, charities, and NGOs with what we might call "living" programs for institutional memory can help to protect themselves from the damage these neophytes can do. Calvin Coolidge put it succinctly: "It is characteristic of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old and, because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to be new." And he said it more than a century ago, in 1919. ■ Very few ideas are really ever entirely new, and those who loudly and overconfidently represent themselves as the first to "discover" things are often merely novices who don't know how much they don't know. A living program of institutional memory won't always tone down the confidence of the zealous convert, but no organization should think itself immune to risk without making a deliberate effort to approach knowledge-keeping -- not just "what" and "how", but crucially "why" -- as an intrinsically important function.

February 2, 2025

Who gets co-author credit?

Technology rules don't always make sense, but the United States Copyright Office has done the world a favor by issuing guidance that quite rationally concludes, "Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements". It's a good conclusion on both of the most important levels. ■ First, it is a rational conclusion on the merits and appeals to existing law (instead of staking out new ground unnecessarily). Copyright law -- which in America is as old as the Constitution itself (Article I, Section 8) -- is for the protection of people, not automation. Thus the guidance is harmonious with the very point of having protections for intellectual property; machines don't need our help. ■ The decision also makes sense on a practical level. If any content generated by unsupervised artificial intelligence can be granted copyright protection, then the incentive structure for content mills to carpet-bomb society with rent-seeking content would go wild. AI-generated slop is already gumming up the works of the Internet, with bad or hallucinated information now appearing in places where it contaminates the training material for further generations of AI, adding an apparent (but utterly misleading) paper trail to bad information. ■ Some of that may get sorted out. But it also might not. And if it's bad for junk content to clutter the Internet, it may be even worse for it to begin cluttering the shelves of libraries and other curated repositories of information. It's one thing if Tom Clancy is still employing an army of human ghostwriters from beyond the grave; it's quite another if human names can start getting copyright credit for junk content published into books by the thousands. ■ With so much worthwhile and timely content already available in the marketplace, we should hope to see quality take precedence over a firehose of often false mediocrity. Much of that content will still make its way into the world, but denying it the protections of copyright is a good first step.

February 1, 2025

Plan thoughtfully and execute with humility

Facebook's computer-engineering mantra for a long time was Mark Zuckerberg's rallying cry to "Move fast and break things". It's catchy, and it sounds like the kind of attitude that gets results. But even at Facebook, the motto quickly outlived its usefulness, and it gave way (in 2014) to the much less mellifluous "Move fast with stable infrastructure". Zuckerberg himself may not have matured much, but his product had to. ■ "Move fast and break things" may have impressed the sort of minds that are impressed by mere pithiness, but it was bad practice even when Zuckerberg initially made it his slogan. Complex systems are always to be handled with care: Is there a backup plan in place? Have critical processes, settings, and data been archived safely in case a reversion is needed? Are there checkpoints and validation steps along the way to make sure that dependencies aren't inadvertently broken? Does everyone on the team have an understanding of what results will indicate success or failure? Has security been designed into the process and into the final product? ■ All are vital questions to ask in the process of making significant changes -- not only in computing, but in any other process involving more than a handful of people. Speed can be a virtue -- "Speed equals success", in the words of Jim Mattis -- but successful tactical speed is virtually always the result of strategic prudence. An army (or a Marine division) can punch quickly into enemy territory, but it had better not do so without planning and forethought around matters like the supply lines that ensure food, fuel, and bullets make their way to the front line. ■ A bias in favor of impulsive speed isn't a virtue. "Move fast and break things" is a battle cry of emotional immaturity, combining an overconfidence in one's own raw intelligence, an underappreciation of unforeseen consequences, and a potentially devastating lack of intellectual humility. Computer systems can be both powerful and amazingly responsive, so it's no surprise that people who spend lots of time around them can fall into a sort of God complex. But they also need to know better. ■ The things we can create with our massive human brains can quickly become even more complex than any one of us can fully understand. People who prioritize speed above all and disregard the fragility of the innumerable complex systems around us put themselves and others at great risk. To those minds that only respond to simple turns of phrase, consider this: Plan thoughtfully and execute with humility.

January 31, 2025

War of words

For most of the electronic media age, one of the key steps in any military invasion, popular uprising, or coup attempt was to seize control of the broadcasting outlets. It's why the BBC went to such great lengths to make contingency plans during World War II, and why the Russian people learned a peculiar connotation to broadcasts of "Swan Lake". ■ As the Internet has displaced the airwaves as the leading conduit for communications, the strategic significance of seizing the radio and television stations has fallen behind the significance of capturing control of the official websites and domains. Thus the sweeping disruptions to the online domains of the Federal government reveals just what is now valued most, by all sides in political conflict. ■ Controlling the words people use for outward display on public-facing government websites is so important in some quarters that it effectively eclipses all other considerations, including the basic availability of the websites themselves or content contained therein. Sections of some government websites have been blanked, while other sites have been sent offline altogether. ■ It's interesting to note the similarities in outcome between a self-imposed content purge and what would happen if a hostile entity (like an adversarial foreign government) were to disable a government website for tactical advantage through malicious hacking. Either way, the site becomes unavailable. ■ Few systems are as fragile and as susceptible to breakage as the computer systems belonging to government agencies -- and their website servers are no exception. Breaking things is easy; repairing them is hard. Prudential treatment of those high-tech outlets is today as important as not breaking the vacuum tubes once would have been at a captured radio station.

Return of the Pebble

After getting subsumed into the Google-borg and fading away altogether, the Pebble smartwatch is set to return later in 2025

Cyberattack "compromised the personal data of more than 134,000 students"

Evil people are targeting information belonging to children, and we should be a great deal more clear about the fact it's neither inevitable nor benign. It's sinister stuff they're up to.

January 30, 2025

The problem with website monoculture

A huge share of websites are managed through the same platform: WordPress is the 800-lb. gorilla. Some claim that it serves as the foundation for more than 40% of sites on the Internet, which is a huge fraction, if true. Thus, even if it isn't technically a monoculture, it is the decisive player in the content-management market. ■ But any time a large number of attractive targets are lined up in one place, that presents a danger. Having the same website backbone as 40% of all other websites makes every individual site using WordPress more attractive as a target for both crime and mischief, because the vulnerabilities discovered for one are replicable for many others, if not all. ■ That is presently the case, as a coordinated attack campaign appears to be underway. Outdated plugins and obsolete versions of WordPress are being exploited by the crooked in order to snare information they shouldn't have. ■ WordPress is nice in that it does permit people to put up websites without having to develop in-depth coding expertise. But that's a vulnerability, too, since a user base heavily populated by those with modest technical skills is also one in which precautions (like a regular schedule for installing platform upgrades or a policy for user data securuty) may be few and far between. It's a little like having lots of banks use the same keypad on their vaults -- especially if many of them don't know how to. ■ Farmers raising row crops know that a healthy soil environment often depends upon rotating among crops. The website owners and managers of the world need to learn that monoculture is equally problematic when so many websites are driven by the same tools on the backend.

The driest of Dry Januaries

The relative humidity recorded in Des Moines on January 27th was 20%, the lowest since 2002

The Collier's archives

Collier's, once an influential publication, has been partially preserved in certain online archives

January 29, 2025

The quailty of content on Saturday Night Live has ebbed and flowed with the times, but other than the cold open and the guest host monologue, no feature has come to the rescue of an episode more often than "Weekend Update". Sketches can be about anything (and often are), but "Weekend Update" is constrained by the news of the week. Anything older feels dated. ■ The constraint often works. Whereas the monologues on the Monday through Friday late-night shows are often trite or predictable, having all week for a team of writers to refine the content helps to sharpen the wit and make it consistently the first- or second-most-rewatched segment of the show. It's not always good, but it's generally much better-watched than nightly monologues written mainly about the same news items. ■ It isn't hard to find breathless but serious commentary and analysis about the news. The torrent is often too much for anyone to digest and remain of sound mind. If, after 50 years, "Weekend Update" has a lesson for the real news, it is that the American media landscape is in need of something not intuitively obvious: More mass-market literary magazines. Or, to be more precise, more outlets aiming to reach a broad audience, devoted to a restrained frequency of publication, and interested in ideas more than individual people or instantaneous events. ■ A big part of publishing survival seems to have pivoted towards having more to say, more often: What used to be the Atlantic Monthly is now very much a daily publication rivaling the country's newspapers of record (literally even recruiting journalists directly away from the Washington Post). Much the same could be said for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, which are not always quite CNN-like in their coverage of breaking news, but which no longer see fit to wait. ■ If even those with access to the best information-gathering tools in the world still can't refrain from speculation in light of news events, perhaps that is a sign our social appetite for instant commentary has outpaced what's really good for us. "Weekend Update" proves that people are willing to wait a week for a good laugh about the news. We could use a diverse array of editorial voices to prove that we're willing to wait a week for good insights into the news. Impatience hasn't paid off that well up to now, and there are no signs the news will abate a week, a month, or a year from now.

January 28, 2025

No fun, but five stars anyway

Dr. Mark Lewis, a Utah oncologist with a substantial social-media following, once earned a lot of laughs for sharing a patient review: "Dr Lewis saved my life! [4/5 stars]". His wry rejoinder? "Honestly don't know how to earn that 5th star". ■ Ratings can serve useful purposes, especially when used for low-stakes choices for which a lot of investigation would waste useful time: Which restaurant in the neighborhood serves the best steamed dumplings? Did other people like this toaster they found in an online store? Expertise isn't always useful; sometimes, the wisdom of crowds is more than enough. ■ But ratings can also deceive, particularly if they are solicited poorly. One Ukrainian points out that her review of the Air Alert app is five out of five stars, but takes issue with Apple's way of asking for the rating: "Enjoying Air Alert!?" Considering that it's an app designed solely to warn of incoming aerial attacks from Russia, there is nothing enjoyable about it. ■ It does speak to the chronic infantilization of the user experience by companies like Google and Apple that they use "enjoying" as the test verb by default, as though every experience with a product should "spark joy". Some of the most important and useful things in the world (like vaccine shots, sewage treatment, and air raid alerts) aren't enjoyable at all, but they can be literal lifesavers. It's nobody's job to make those experiences enjoyable -- the important question is whether the solutions are useful, efficient, and reliable. ■ Some people only wish to be treated like perpetual adolescents, but they shouldn't steer the rest of society. Life comes with hard times, tough choices, and burdensome sacrifices. Learning to muddle through those with the help of friends, family, and a cheerful disposition is one of the defining ways we become adults.

January 26, 2025

The very long arm of the law

The metaphor of the "long arm of the law" has roots that are nearly 500 years old, but it has a whole new applicability in the Internet age. The US Department of Justice has indicted a group of people for using computers in the United States to facilitate remote work done by North Korean IT workers in order to fill North Korea's government treasury with income earned at wages prevailing in the US market. ■ The DOJ says that "North Korean IT workers could individually earn more than $300,000 a year in some cases [...] The North Korean government withheld up to 90 percent of wages of overseas workers, which generated an annual revenue to the North Korean government of hundreds of millions of dollars." ■ For a country with virtually no meaningful international trade other than a busy market in exporting wigs and fake eyebrows to China, "exporting" IT labor is a clever solution to generating some foreign cash. If the trade were legal, it would still be awful for the government to rob the workers of 90% of their earnings, but it would still be a rational strategy for the government. ■ But for good reasons, including those abuses of North Korean workers by their government, the United States has severe sanctions on doing business, electronic or otherwise, with North Korea. That's why the indictment points to an elaborate scheme to cover tracks and maintain the fraud. Nobody should underestimate the need for people in unlikely fields (like law enforcement) to develop and apply high-technology skills in ways that weren't on anyone's radar 25 years ago.

January 24, 2025

The cost disease that's hard to cure

The concept of Baumol's cost disease holds that the cost of some services will rise even without improvements in quality because the work itself cannot be achieved more efficiently, and the people performing the work have to be incentivized to choose doing it over doing other work for which wages are rising. There are, for instance, only so many surgeries that a surgical team can perform -- the cap on productivity is relatively immobile. ■ At the extreme end of the example, there's no way to increase the productivity of a string quartet playing a piece of music with a known tempo. Three people cannot play all four parts adequately, and playing the song at twice the tempo won't enhance the experience of the audience. Despite these hard limits, musicians' wages have to rise or else they will find work doing something else -- perhaps composing music for YouTUbe videos. ■ There may be something even more sinister than Baumol's cost disease, though: Whereas the cost disease isn't anyone's nefarious design, there are certain occupations where people are rewarded for halting the progress of others. ■ It is generally easier to destroy than to build; look no farther than any war. Destruction can happen in a moment; reconstruction can take generations. When an economy induces too many people to become obstacles to productivity, it asks implicitly to become hamstrung and listless. ■ Lee Kuan Yew could be an autocrat, but he also knew how to make sure Singapore could grow economically, despite its meager natural resources: "Those with good minds to be scholars should also become inventors, innovators, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs; they must bring new products and services to the market to enrich the lives of people everywhere." ■ There are disruptive forces all around, both in the public and private sectors, who are rewarded mostly for getting in the way of initiative shown by others. Americans need to be on the lookout for drift in that direction, particularly as people get their hands on the levers of regulatory and other legal powers and see opportunities to favor their own preferred outcomes. It's already easy for that kind of creep to settle in as large private firms see opportunities to squeeze out rivals not by innovation but by litigation (and contract-terms inflation).

January 23, 2025

From the local forecast office

When television broadcaster Allen Media Group announced that it would be replacing local TV weather teams with a centralized forecasting hub tied to the Weather Channel, it made the announcement under an avalanche of words like "groundbreaking format", "cutting-edge technology", and "superior weather content". The disquieting reality was that the plan was a move to cut the costs of employing at least 100 local meteorologists. KWWL-TV in Waterloo, Iowa, was among the stations affected. ■ Some changes represent progress. Not all do. The plan to replace local expertise with a centralized weather office represented neither strategy nor initiative. It was fatally flawed judgment rooted strictly in cost-cutting with insulting disregard for the viewing public. ■ Weather coverage isn't just about technical proficiency in reading a Skew-T plot or looking for a hook echo on a radar screen. ■ It's about knowing how to pronounce obscure but meaningful local place names (good luck to someone cold-reading the Eastern Iowa town name "Maquoketa"). It's about recognizing meaningful local patterns, like the impact of a strong westerly wind during an ice storm for drivers traveling over the Iowa River bridge at Steamboat Rock. It's about having a sense for what numerical data doesn't always tell you (yes, there are days when acute observers can smell tornadoes in the air). ■ Authentic experience on the ground matters when you're talking about the intersection of physical science and social science -- that's the essence of weather reporting. ■ Broadcast licensees don't "own" the airwaves; they borrow them. And their products should serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity. That's a matter not of opinion, but of law. Indications are that Allen Media Group has reversed its decision, at least for some individual employees in some markets. That's good, because the plan as announced was anything but a public service.

January 19, 2025

Almost 9,000 single-family homes destroyed in California

Almost 9,000 homes were destroyed by the fires around Los Angeles -- that's the early estimate being used by reinsurance brokerage Gallagher Re. For perspective, the US builds about 1.4 to 1.5 million new homes a year. But that's a national figure. In California alone, new single-family housing starts run about 8,000 to 9,000 per month. ■ In other words, the Los Angeles-area fires aren't just substantial in their scale and impact, replacing them is going to materially affect the construction rate for the largest state in the union. It's extremely unfortunate, but the event is going to present a dramatic set of natural experiments for economists. ■ For one, the differences between the post-disaster rules imposed on rental versus owner-occupied housing will have significant consequences. Price limits in the name of "gouging prohibitions" will only affect rental housing: Nobody can tell you not to price your house for sale for an exorbitant amount. Indeed, nobody can force you to sell your home at all (aside from exceptional circumstances involving public domain). ■ For another, the process of local regulatory approval is going to discourage innovations. Local authorities have already said they want to see like-for-like replacements, via statements like, "if you got a mid-century modern, we want to see that mid-century modern come back". The mayor's executive order includes "Clear the way to rebuild homes as they were" as an express bullet point. ■ It's understandable why regulators would prefer like-for-like replacements; the less change, the easier to review. But the mayor's executive order says that for expedited review policies to apply, "The structure or facility to be repaired, restored, demolished, or replaced does not exceed 110% of the floor area, height, and bulk of the structures or facility existing immediately prior to the Wildfires" and says, "the project cannot result in a change of use from [...] a less intensive use to a more intensive use, or an increase in density or units (including accessory dwelling units)". ■ The problem for residents is that they need as much square footage to be built as quickly as possible: It's not hard to imagine neighbors helping neighbors by offering them temporary space in a freshly-built accessory dwelling unit (ADU), like a granny flat or a prefabricated tiny home, while more neighborhood homes are reconstructed. Most people probably want to get back into their original neighborhoods as quickly as possible, and living temporarily in a neighbor's back yard studio probably beats having to live for a longer time in an RV. ■ Likewise, manufactured and modular housing doesn't fit neatly within a regulatory model that favors like-for-like reconstruction, but it could provide a significant way to expedite the reconstruction process and get people home faster than waiting for site-built assembly. Manufactured housing is wildly under-appreciated in America today, and that under-appreciation has stifled much-needed innovations. Helpfully, California's recent statewide liberalization of ADU rules has done much to boost the market. ■ Regulators and city officials too often assume that what matters most in a community is the superficial stuff: Architectural styles, paint colors, and the like. That's a mistake. The lesson of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is that people want to get home, but if there are too many obstacles, they'll be forced to make their homes elsewhere. Neighborhoods are made of people, not just the buildings where they live. If the fire-devastated communities around Los Angeles are to recover, what matters most is getting the people back as soon as possible. How the homes look should be a far-distant lesser consideration.

Users surge to all the wrong services

American users of TikTok, facing the app's shutdown over national security, have joined another China-based social media platform in such numbers that it is scrambling to find English-speaking content moderators.

Enough with the "red state/blue state" stuff

According to Pew survey data, there are five states where a majority of voters are registered Republicans and eight states where a majority of voters are registered Democrats. The largest majorities are just 57% each (Republicans in Wyoming and Democrats in Vermont). No party has an impenetrable majority anywhere, and every state has a substantial number of minority-party voters. Things are not as binary as they seem.

FTC goes after Pepsi for giving pricing favors to Walmart

Is this really what the government needs to be using its law-enforcement powers to manage?

Self-interested Crankery Rules Everything Around Me

People whose bread is buttered by the exchange of cryptocurrency have come out in favor of a "strategic Bitcoin reserve", which might be the most transparently self-interested proposal imaginable. ■ Even in the most favorable of interpretations, cryptocurrency is an extremely speculative asset: Something that Party A purchases strictly in the hope that Party B will purchase it later for a higher price. The greater the speculative excitement, the better for Party A -- because there is no true underlying value to the asset. ■ It's not an enterprise that produces an ongoing stream of valuable output, like farmland or a share in a productive business. It's not an investment in future returns, like a college education. It's not even like a pile of gold bars, which, even if they had no exchange value, could at least be melted down to make dental fillings. ■ Cryptocurrency, at least as an "investment", is entirely a gamble that a greater fool can be found. Anyone proposing that the government should purchase lots of cryptocurrency isn't seriously arguing that there is a "strategic" reason for so doing. They're doing it to get the government to take a pile of their asset class out of the marketplace in order to artificially drive up the market price that the next fool might be willing to pay. ■ It's not one iota different from collectors of any other "asset" -- like Beanie Babies, Hummel figurines, or baseball cards -- proposing that the government needs a strategic reserve of their plush toys, porcelain statuettes, or cardboard-backed photos. And in the case of those other assets, the producers at least knew enough to limit total production. Whole new cryptocurrencies are still being invented, and even the biggest names (like Bitcoin) aren't promising to stop producing new "assets" until 115 years from now. ■ Can cryptocurrencies be used to store value? Potentially -- just as value can be stored in the form of fur coats or antique paperback books. But the government doesn't need any such store of value when it's got the U.S. Treasury Department. A "strategic Bitcoin reserve" is nothing more than a proposal to enrich a handful of speculators at the expense of every taxpayer. Its proponents should be laughed out of the public square.

January 17, 2025

Grade your evils

A healthy, even vigorous, skepticism of certain high-profile technology moguls is entirely justifiable. Elon Musk took Twitter private, changed its name in the hope of turning it into an all-encompassing lifestyle brand, and implemented policy changes that have opened the door to giving thoroughly antisocial voices all too prominent a platform. Mark Zuckerberg has deftly managed to turn Facebook into a publicly traded company while maintaining strictly dictatorial voting control, all while collecting vast amounts of data on the behavior of more than a billion users -- and their intellectual property. ■ To be wary of their intentions and behavior is a rational act. But as with virtually all human behaviors, their choices -- even the ones that may be selfish or even malevolent -- land on a spectrum. There are gradations to "bad", ranging from things we dislike to things that are purely evil. What constitutes a poison is often determined by the dose. ■ Robert Reich doesn't like their behavior. But for a person who has held a Cabinet office and has access to such an ample megaphone, he demonstrates a chronic disingenuity when he reaches for an applause line on social media. Consider this pronouncement on Reich's Bluesky account: "So it's dangerous for China to have the ability to access our data and manipulate us via social media apps. But it's okay for America's billionaires to have the ability to access our data and manipulate us via social media apps. Do I have this right?" ■ It is, of course, entirely fine to have concerns about how user data is treated -- whether it's in the hands of Facebook or Twitter/X or Snapchat or (as is the subtext of Reich's comments) TikTok. It is not, however, fine to pretend as though there is a true equivalence between what happens with data in the hands of American companies -- subject to supervision by the FTC, the SEC, American courts, and many other domestic legal structures -- and what happens with it in the hands of Chinese companies. ■ Facebook didn't conduct the OPM hack. Twitter wasn't responsible for the Equifax breach. Snapchat isn't running Volt Typhoon. All of those sinister acts -- and many others -- have been conducted by arms, agents, or allies of the government of the People's Republic of China (or, more precisely, of the Communist Party which controls China's government, military, and police). ■ TikTok and its parent, ByteDance, can protest all they want, but their social media platform is plainly considered a state asset by the government of China. ByteDance may be a state-owned enterprise or not -- those facts are hard to make plain. But even that ambiguity alone is enough to cast a very long shadow of doubt over any claims they might make to independence. ■ This doesn't make the TikTok ban a good policy. Nor does it make it a bad one. It simply means that Reich's pseudo-clever attempt to draw a false equivalence is far outside the bounds of reality. No matter what an American might think of Musk or Zuckerberg or any American social-media executive, recourse against them exists, should they commit misdeeds. That recourse may be slow and imperfect, but that's the way of law. ■ China's government, by contrast, exists far outside the reach of American law. It has shamelessly exploited that protection from consequences and weaponized data theft on an incomprehensible scale. And it wouldn't squeal so much about TikTok if it didn't have a hand in its operation. Reich is an objectively intelligent person. But in coloring people he doesn't like with the same brush he uses to paint a known malicious adversary, he's conducting himself like a useful idiot.

An unpleasant first

The first "Cold Weather Advisory" touching both Iowa and Nebraska

January 16, 2025

Old games for history's sake

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization best known for the Wayback Machine, a storage point for billions and billions of snapshots of web pages collected for almost 30 years. The "Wayback Machine" is an incomparable archival resource that preserves the ephemeral history of the digital world that would often otherwise blow away forever. ■ But the Internet Archive has taken on a much larger portfolio than just saving copies of old web pages. It's become a repository for noteworthy video recordings and genealogical source materials, among other treasures. ■ Perhaps most extraordinary among their collections, though, is the software emulation section, where it is possible to not just read the information about old computer programs, but to actually play them (over a web browser) in almost exactly the same condition they would have appeared originally. ■ It may not seem like it should matter that one can play Mortal Kombat or ride the Oregon Trail in its earliest form, but they are authentic preservations of cultural experience -- just as much as a way to re-live history as any other interactive museum experience. And the skill of figuring out how to emulate old computing devices may turn out to be the only way for us to recover data stored on old floppy disks and magnetic tapes. ■ A lot of history -- especially that part preserved only on electronic media -- is lost through neglect, obsolescence, and even mold. Some of the technical experts who sustain the archives are colorful characters in their own right, and their work is well worth supporting. In a world where the digital-first mentality is literally driving history out of print, electronic archivists and librarians are doing irreplaceable work today.

January 15, 2025

If it hadn't been for a particularly ungraceful snub of the Vice President by the husband of a returning Senator, it's likely that few Americans would have noted that the 119th Congress has been in session since January 3rd. Hearings are underway, bills and resolutions have been submitted, and leaders have been elected. ■ The election for the Speaker of the House garnered more attention than usual this year, but the entire seating of the new Congress receives a mere fraction of the attention paid to the farewell activities of the outgoing President and the inaugural preparations for the next. The latter shouldn't so dramatically overshadow the former. ■ The Constitution of the United States addresses the formation of Congress first, in Article I. The Executive Branch is created in Article II. By a reasonable interpretation of the plain language, that should be an indication that we should show at least as much enthusiasm when Congress gets its work underway as when a new President is sworn in. ■ But the unfortunate way in which the Presidency has been treated more and more as an imperial office -- and the steady surrender of real Congressional expertise and legislation to the whims of executive orders and administrative rule-making -- has given the public the impression that the individual person of the President matters more to the direction of the country than the makeup of the Congress expressly elected to represent their interests. That isn't a party problem; both major parties have taken an active part in enlarging and extending the Presidency and in neutering the Congress. ■ It is a national problem instead. And it is one in which it is hard to imagine change coming about without steady, committed effort. Things shouldn't change dramatically just because the Oval Office changes hands; that's not how checks and balances are supposed to work. The House of Representatives is supposed to be where we get our whims and tempers out, the Senate is supposed to put the brakes on bad ideas, and the President is supposed to reject the worst of the bad ideas that still get through, while primarily doing what he or she is instructed to do by Congress. The State of the Union address should never have turned into a campaign-style stump speech; it's supposed to be the report of an agent back to the principals who have the authority to fire him or her. ■ Some complain that they think the Constitution is inadequate to the task of running the United States in its current size. To the contrary, the Constitutional order -- the very thing that officers of the government are sworn to uphold -- is entirely capable of scaling itself effectively, provided that we choose to observe it rigorously. But the demand to do that can come only from the voting public.

January 12, 2025

Four voices that should shut up

Whenever a calamity of shocking proportions comes about, four entirely predictable voices are sure to pipe up. One blames the victims, usually for vaguely defined moral failings. One calls the tragedy a judgment from God. Another blames it on "late-stage capitalism". And the fourth uses it as a case for hoarding weapons and preparing for the collapse of civilization. ■ All four of these voices ignore one of the foremost characteristics of human life, if not the most important aspect of all: We are a cooperative species by our very nature. We are not the strongest, nor the biggest, nor the fastest members of the animal kingdom. But we are endowed with the ability to communicate, cooperate, and organize among ourselves -- and to do so quickly, spontaneously, and voluntarily. Wild animals don't lift cars off crash victims or resuscitate heart attack patients in mid-flight. ■ The knee-jerk reactions either ignore or deny this reality at their own peril. If your philosophy depends upon denying aid when others are in need, then you'll find yourself without friends sooner rather than later. If you blame all bad things on godly judgment, then you'll probably succeed mostly in converting people to disbelief in God. If you wave your arms and vaguely decry the social systems around you, then you'll mostly find yourself isolated inside your own ideological rigidity. ■ And if your plans for a nightmare scenario consist of shooting people rather than cooperating with unlikely allies, then in the unlikely event of an apocalypse, you'll probably make it just long enough for an even bigger warlord-wannabe than yourself to discover your cache of stuff and take it for his own, with you left behind as collateral damage. ■ No social order is perfect. Democracy needs to be maintained within the rule of law. Shortcomings of market economies need to be corrected through regulation or intervention. Peace must often be maintained by stockpiling (and occasionally showing off) the weapons of war. ■ But in any contest among economic or political systems, what perpetually emerges on top is whichever alternative does the most to facilitate freely-chosen cooperation. When people have agency and get to choose what skills and resources they can share, we often share better and more productively than when told what to do. ■ It's rarely flawless; human choices never are. Thus, no social, political, or economic system will turn out perfectly, either. But the application of free, uncompelled choices -- in markets, elections, and in day-to-day life -- more consistently gets us to better outcomes than anything else. The voices that scream otherwise are best told to shut up.

January 11, 2025

From the recording archives

With the Palisades and Eaton fires alone accounting for the incineration of more than 37,000 acres and at least 12,000 structures, the Los Angeles fires are nearly incomprehensible in scope. Yet they seem oddly personal because so many household names have been affected: Anthony Hopkins, Ricki Lake, John Goodman, Paris Hilton, Jeff Bridges, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Billy Crystal are all named as having lost their homes to the fires. ■ The high concentration of entertainers in the area means that we will likely hear other stories like what happened to music producer Bob Clearmountain, who lost his home recording studio and who thinks many others have been lost, too. There's a good chance that many original recordings themselves have been irreplaceably lost, just like what happened when some 500,000 master recordings were destroyed in a 2008 fire at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. ■ At first, it seems strange to lament the likely loss of recordings in a time when Taylor Swift grossed $2 billion on ticket sales in one concert tour. For many people, the experience value of a concert can be priced far higher than the ongoing enjoyment value of a recording. ■ Still, great musicians should create gobs of recordings so that posterity can sift through them. Not everything has to be "A" material to still be worth saving! Imagine what a corpus of work we might have gotten from Beethoven or Mozart, had they been armed with modern tools for recording and transcribing music. Each wrote more than 600 pieces when they had to do all composition by hand. By hand! ■ To leave behind an enormous body of work isn't the only thing that matters in art, to be sure. But just like Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" re-imagined Beethoven's original without replacing the original, consider a world in which someone digs through the titanic unreleased archives of hundreds of songs recorded at Paisley Park and finds some random Prince riff that's never been developed before, then turns it into an original (if postmortem) collaboration. That would be a richer world than one in which a fleeting composition had crossed Prince's mind and been lost forever. ■ This need for talented artists to record what comes to their human imaginations will only become more important as AI slop takes up ever more space. The potential for computers in the hands of custodians -- rather than click-hunters and engagement-farmers -- to help enhance and grow our humane cultural footprint is great. But it won't get very far if the recordings are lost or the ideas are never recorded in the first place.

January 10, 2025

Smarter than the ants

It's an arresting headline from the pages of the journal Science: "Ants best humans at test of collective intelligence". The story is a distillation of a research study conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, which found that groups of ants trying to solve a puzzle-like spatial problem did better than humans solving an identical (but scaled-up) version of the same problem. ■ The reported conclusion is tantalizing, but there's a problem: "To make the comparison as meaningful as possible, groups of humans were in some cases instructed to avoid communicating through speaking or gestures, even wearing surgical masks and sunglasses to conceal their mouths and eyes." ■ That's no small caveat. By "leveling the playing field" in such a way, the researchers denied their human subjects the use of what makes our intelligence collective. We are a cooperative species, but our cooperation depends upon communication. Not just among ourselves, either -- part of what makes our relationship with dogs so special is that they know how to follow our gaze. That's an enormous factor! We can't share our intelligence effectively without a combination of both our extraordinary verbal skills and our advanced nonverbal skills, too. ■ Perhaps if ants had the same evolutionary advantages, they'd be even better at collective intelligence than humans (again, "on a level playing field"). But if you take away from humans some of the most defining features that make us human, then it should be no surprise that the denial leaves us looking pretty stupid. ■ Communication doesn't always make our decision-making better; we have social media, TV talent shows, and no small number of democratic election results to disavow us of assumptions otherwise. We would be fools, though, to underestimate the scope of communication as part of human intelligence or to disrespect the importance of communication as a skill.

January 9, 2025

Don't be the unlettered one

The denunciation of first and often last resort is to call an opponent "stupid". It is a word that gets applied everywhere from the playground to the bully pulpit, a catch-all for dismissing someone else as being too dense to "get it", whatever point "it" may be. ■ Besides being unoriginal, "stupid" is a pretty faulty ground on which to dismiss anyone. After all, some people may be stupid about many things, but everyone is stupid about some things. That's the inescapable curse of living in a complex world: You may be smart about corporate income tax strategies, but do you know how a small modular reactor works? You might be able to recognize a three-phase Delta transformer from 50 yards away, but do you know what a normal white blood cell count should be? Maybe you speak five languages, but can you explain the CIA triad in cybersecurity? ■ No one can entirely avoid being stupid, at least about some things. And in many cases, an individual has little control over either their innate intelligence or their exposure to a wide range of subjects. Even when we want to know, we often encounter gatekeepers who depend on making their own knowledge seem mysterious. ■ But we could stand to revive a much more useful rebuke: "Unlettered". Unlike "stupid", "unlettered" is a matter of at least some choice. Never before have there been so many things to read on so many subjects, in so many translations, and across so many formats. ■ We can even "read" even when normal reading would be impossible. A phone can translate written text instantaneously and artificial intelligence can convert entire manuscripts to customized reading levels. Where audiobooks are lacking, text-to-speech synthesis can step right in. To read -- in a world where literacy rates have never been higher -- has never been a more accessible act. ■ Yet there is no intelligence so stupid as the one which thinks it knows best by mere instinct and does not need to learn. And that offense -- to be unlettered by choice -- is far more deserving of scorn than to merely be stupid. Stupidity can easily lead us astray, but it is not always a matter of choice. Being literate but deliberately unlettered is. And it's a shame.

January 8, 2025

Not for sale

Americans may not be particularly close readers of the minutiae of terms and conditions, but all competent adults at least ought to be aware that they exist for most goods and services that we exchange with one another. In particular, the most hotly-contested subset of terms and conditions -- especially with online services -- is typically the privacy policy that governs how user information may be bought and sold. ■ Indeed, if you want to get people riled up, get them arguing over what Facebook is allowed to do with their personal information. The level of consumer sophistication on the subject is often very low, but the feelings run extremely high. Nobody wants to believe that something personal to them can be bought or sold without their express consent. ■ Yet from the same population that holds strong feelings on what Mark Zuckerberg can do with the knowledge of your favorite brand of toilet paper, no small number of people have jumped aboard a bandwagon that says the citizenship of people in foreign places can be bought and sold without their control, like trading Baltic Avenue and Park Place in a game of Monopoly. ■ People everywhere have a right to self-determination; it's the violation of this principle that makes Russia's invasion of Ukraine so vile and obnoxious. Citizenship isn't to be traded like a matter of commercial real estate. ■ In a rational world, the United States would have a clear, published, and widely-known set of conditions for any established civic entity to apply for accession. There's a published policy for how to join the European Union; we should have a plain and rational way to join the United States, too. ■ To do so would tend to have a stabilizing effect on the world, which is the least we could do as a benevolent superpower. Regarding others as little more than pieces on a game board not only subjects us to scorn from abroad, it undermines the goodwill upon which we depend for alliances and trade in a tightly-connected world. We must not be more cavalier with the citizenship of others than we are with our own privacy rights on social media.

January 4, 2025

The perfect domestic buyer isn't coming

In issuing an order prohibiting Nippon Steel from buying United States Steel, President Biden claims to be acting on an "unflinching commitment [...] to defend U.S. national security". In theory, domestic ownership of major manufacturing operations may be favorable to national security, at least in the sense that their decisions may, in some sense, reflect a set of values which may include a greater sense of the national interest. ■ But the order has many of the markings of a choice to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Nippon Steel had made promises to invest in facilities in Indiana and Pennsylvania that would have measured in the billions and might well have done a considerable amount to secure the long-term health of US operations. There is no such guarantee that any alternative buyers (should they even be found) will do the same. ■ There is no shortage of investment money lying around: Private-equity companies are estimated to have done more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars in deals in 2024. The $15 billion offer from Nippon Steel would barely move the needle on the $320 billion of cash and Treasury bills burning a hole in Warren Buffett's pockets at Berkshire Hathaway. If a better offer were coming from stateside, we'd know it already. A perfect domestic buyer just isn't forthcoming. ■ What is the concern, after all? That, in a time of international crisis, Japan will abruptly abandon us as an ally? Of all the unlikely scenarios in an uncertain future, Japan making a hard turn against us is about the unlikeliest. The US is a huge trading partner for Japan, a defense treaty partner for well over half a century, and the source of Japan's nuclear umbrella. ■ The only plausible scenario that could threaten the mutual partnership in the short- to intermediate-range future is the unlikely prospect that China might conduct an invasion of Japan. Nothing is really impossible, of course, but were it to come to something as drastic as that, not only would the US be involved in repelling the invasion, but occupied-Japanese ownership of US Steel would become a mere formality, which Washington could waive through an emergency nationalization. ■ It's old and tired thinking to treat Japanese ownership of distressed smokestack industries as a hazard to American national security. If Nippon Steel can run US Steel better than domestic ownership while reinvesting heavily in facilities and promising at least ten years of stability, then blocking the deal is, on balance, the bigger threat and an entirely unforced error by the White House.

A community really thrives when it has a steady source of profitable "exports" that mean its people aren't just exchanging goods and services among themselves. And it further prospers when it can grow its own local enterprises from scratch, usually on the backs of skills developed or demanded by the flagship employers.

January 3, 2025

An improving forecast

The weather forecast for the Midwest is looking terrible, but all credit is due to the National Weather Service in Omaha/Valley for its extremely creative public messaging about the event.

$80 billion in computing power

Microsoft is planning to spend $80 billion on data centers before the end of the fiscal year -- an amount that ought to make people sit up and take notice. As an infrastructure project, it's huge. ■ $80 billion is more than the $65 billion in electrical grid upgrades promised by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. It's comparable in scale to one of our biggest industries -- roughly the value of net aerospace exports from the US. ■ It's more than the market capitalizations of businesses that are household names, like Ferrari, US Bank, Marriott, BP, or 3M. Most notably, $80 billion is more than the gross domestic products of at least seven states. ■ But Microsoft says it "is on track to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world". AI is the subject of immense hype and enormous amounts of overstatement. But $80 billion is an extraordinary amount of real money. ■ If the figures are true (and as a publicly traded company, Microsoft is subject to reporting requirements that will bear them out), it's an investment -- or perhaps a speculation -- of historic proportions.

Finding the January 6th bomber

It's been four years since someone left pipe bombs at the headquarters of the two major political parties, and the FBI still hasn't identified the presumptive terrorist. They've published an estimate of the perpetrator's height (5'7") and a halting security camera video of one of the drops.

January 1, 2025

Welcome to the public domain

Protections on intellectual property (primarily patent and copyright law) are valuable means of encouraging people to generate original thoughts in a world where copies, rehashes, and knockoffs can be profitable. Originality still matters, whether it's in the development of new technological advances or the production of new works of culture. ■ But especially as the artificial intelligence "learning" models have been set loose to gather data on almost everything that has ever been published online, it's good to see that intellectual property ultimately enters the public domain, just like several items have just done with the turn of the new year. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and the Marx Brothers film "The Cocoanuts" have both entered the public domain with the turn of the calendar page. ■ There's going to be a lot of tension for the foreseeable future, between those humans who create novel ideas and those humans who corral computers into generating new material of their own. Public-domain content is especially important under those conditions. ■ We probably privilege intellectual property too much; copyright doesn't really do much economic good to most copyright owners beyond the first couple of decades, and it's hard to believe that copyright terms of nearly a century really reflect the Constitutional intent "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". ■ If life expectancy is around 80 years, then a 95-year protection term isn't effectively "limited". The 14-year, once-renewable terms of 1790 probably had the right general idea. AI models are getting away with effectively converting everything to public-domain work (but keeping the value to themselves), while real people are kept from using material that by any reasonable estimation ought to have entered the actual public domain long ago. ■ Anything that connects new thinking to old works -- including putting old human-made content to renewed work in the hands of new humans -- is a way to extend the threads that remind us of the continuity of the human condition. The more that people feel atomized and isolated by cultural and social conditions, the more important it is to be reminded that we're all part of a vast chain extending back through the millennia.

Recent history...

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Archives (2001 to present)

Comments or questions? Contact Brian Gongol