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September 30, 2024

Americans are a notoriously self-organizing people. We can point to a heritage celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 or reported with pride by Benjamin Franklin in 1790 for evidence of its long lineage. ■ But there are times when voluntarism can only do so much, and the catastrophic damage left behind after Hurricane Helene -- especially in western North Carolina -- gives an unfortunate example of the limits. North Carolina's state Department of Transportation has said, "Unless it's an emergency, all roads in Western NC should be considered closed". Local media depict complete devastation of the local transportation infrastructure. ■ Individual states within the United States already have a considerable supply of what we call "state capacity": The ability to get things done. Most states are comparable in population to independent countries around the world, and almost all have state-level gross domestic products that punch even further above their weight for population. ■ It ought to be well within our capacity at the national level to have a sort of backup level of service that can be rushed to the scene of similar disasters -- in much the same way that insurance companies have reinsurance companies to help backstop their own risk. More than anything, the national level of government should be able to supply a rapid-reaction effort to fill in for ordinary transportation and logistics networks until those networks can be brought back into operation. ■ We lean heavily on the National Guard to do that work, but considering the volatility of the geopolitical situation, it might be time for us as a nation to decide that the risk burden is large enough and widespread enough to justify a commonwealth investment in building the capacity to make the fastest repairs possible to stand in when everything else falls apart.

It isn't uncommon for someone to look at a weed growing in an inhospitable location like a parking-lot crack and have a fleeting thought of respect for the cleverness of the weed. Of course, it's a mistake to anthropomorphize a weed. The weed is no smarter than evolution has selected into its genes. ■ Yet we should recognize that nature does have a characteristic that we would recognize as intelligence, even if it isn't truly sentient. Sometimes intelligence shows up simply in adaptation to circumstances and the development of responses to those circumstances. A conditioning effect, as it were. ■ There are plenty of human beings who demonstrate the same kind of quasi-intelligence, and we often struggle to depict it correctly. Sometimes it's called "cunning" or "guile". Other times, it's even begrudgingly described as an "animal intelligence". ■ These people adapt their behaviors around circumstances or respond to stimuli in a way that almost looks like intelligent thought -- but most people of goodwill struggle to call it that, because it isn't a sense of deliberate, enlightened self-improvement. That's what we usually like to describe as "intelligence": It can start as a gift, but it takes form when the holder decides to make something better of themselves with it. ■ Enlightened self-improvement comes from a choice. There lots of people who show that kind of enlightened self-improvement, even when they are not innately "smart". That's what makes it laudable: Enlightened self-improvement can be undertaken by almost anyone. What we shouldn't do is applaud people who simply adapt, weed-like, around circumstances for selfish gain. ■ Words matter. Often, the lack of good words to describe things matters quite a lot, too. That we don't have an evident turn of phrase for this "weed intelligence" is a misfortune for us all, especially because those who exhibit it are often the ones of whom we ought to be most wary.

September 27, 2024

This excuse won't pass

While under investigation for bribery and other criminal charges, New York City mayor Eric Adams claimed to the FBI that he forgot the passcode to his phone and thus couldn't unlock the phone to permit investigators to dig in. It is a claim that is at once both plausible and unbelievable. ■ It is plausible because passwords are a mess. What might have been good for security purposes in 1990 is wholly inadequate today. Every phone, for instance, should have a lock screen -- but anyone with children in the home knows that even a toddler can learn to "shoulder surf" and break those codes with only the slightest amount of attention. ■ Real passwords, meanwhile, like the ones we use on everything from high-risk activity like online banking to low-risk activity like ordering take-out, are an utter goulash of inconsistent rules and requirements. Consequently, most people either duplicate their passwords in highly predictable fashion across all kinds of services, or they get into the habit of writing or saving the passwords in places that are easily cracked. One site may require a minimum of 12 characters, while another may impose a 12-character maximum. "Special characters" are often required -- but sometimes, only a select few are allowed. And then there are the services that require password updates every 3 or 6 months, only contributing to the confusion. ■ None of these are believable excuses in Adams's case, of course. He has overwhelming reason to try to hide his tracks, and offering a phone that can't be unlocked seems consistent with such a pattern of behavior. If there's one password or code someone had be dead certain to remember, it's the one to get into a personal phone. ■ Phones are the holy grail of two-factor authentication: If you are smart enough to require more than just a password to login to any site or service, then you almost certainly need your phone to receive the second "factor" -- usually a challenge code sent either to an authenticator app or a one-time code that arrives via text or email. ■ If the mayor of America's largest city is too dumb to manage his personal phone security well enough to remember a 6-digit screen lock code, then everyone on his personal staff, executive protection unit, and cybersecurity team (especially) ought to be fired for gross dereliction of duty. Your phone can tell people where you are, it can spy on your conversations, and it is the virtually unobstructed expressway straight to your brain. Any VIP needs to have ten times the phone savvy of an ordinary person, and it's up to staffers to be sure they have it. ■ At the very least, though, Adams's folly ought to be a good news hook to get everyone talking: Everyone needs good passwords, everyone needs good screen lock codes, and nobody should trust either of those things exclusively.

September 26, 2024

The theater of readers

An article published at Inside Higher Ed suggests that college undergraduate students aren't reading much of what is being assigned to them by their professors, and adopts a tone suggesting that summaries generated by artificial intelligence and video-based subject primers are displacing the act of reading. It is entirely possible that "kids these days" are too often choosing shortcuts around the learning process, to give off the superficial appearance of having engaged with the material rather than doing the actual engagement. ■ It would be hazardous, though, to assume that every undesirable-looking change is attributable to laziness. For one thing, academic writing is often notoriously bad. That's nothing new: Theodore Roosevelt lamented in 1912, "Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of readableness in a book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a few learned people seem to feel that the fact that a book is interesting is proof that it is shallow." ■ Moreover, academic writing is often wordy for its own sake. Ben Sasse, who has twice served as a college president, has noted, "I think lots of 300-page books could (and should) have been 30-page articles, but neither magazines nor book publishers have much of a market for 30 pages." It hearkens to an old joke that goes, "My book was 400 pages long because I didn't have time to write it in 200 pages." It takes real dedication to say things both briefly and well. ■ And there is one other matter that can't be overlooked: By the time students are in college, the burden has begun to shift. Whereas the high-school student is required to attend (less they be counted truant), a college student is generally free to attend a lecture or not, and to read the material or not. Consequences might follow, but that depends on the instructor's expectations and assessment structure -- far more than is the case in a high school, where standardized testing often prevails. ■ An adept instructor of college-aged learners (or adults beyond) ought to put real thought into what is being taught, why it matters, and how it can best be assessed. If the knowledge being imparted by lectures and textbooks can be delivered well enough by a YouTube video that the students can pass the test, then either the video is good enough (at least for some learners) or the test isn't very good at all. The burden of assessing these things falls on the instructor, not the students. ■ In many subject areas, reading remains (on average) the fastest, most reliable mode of transmitting information. But that isn't always the case, and it also may vary from one student to the next. Sometimes the writing just isn't very good! ■ That's where pedagogy comes into play: A subject-matter expert isn't always the best teacher -- nor is a great teacher necessarily always a subject-matter expert. Recognizing that instructional design matters -- and that it is just as valid a field of expertise as any other -- is probably more important now than ever before. Those who fail to adapt do so (or, rather, don't) at their own peril.

September 25, 2024

Warren Buffett is credited with saying, "Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." With Helene bearing down on America's Gulf Coast today, we ought to acknowledge a different flavor of Buffett's sentiment: Somebody evacuated safely from the path of a dangerous hurricane today because someone started collecting data and building a model a long time ago. ■ We should be astonished by the quality of the forecast models developed by teams at the National Weather Service and other meteorological organizations around the world, like Europe's ECMWF. They're able to foresee the genesis of a potentially catastrophic hurricane days in advance, when it looks like nothing but a small batch of clouds in the western Caribbean. ■ Meteorologists should be proud of themselves for having made such developments, and society should be thankful to our predecessors and our past selves for investing in a system of scientific development that has made so much progress. The advancements that sometimes look only incremental have compounding effects, and they don't happen by accident -- they happen through intentional efforts to get better in the name of saving lives and protecting property. ■ Other sciences ought to look to the example of meteorology for an example of how to drive a science toward ever-increasing maturity. The public should look to the field as an examplar for generating a responsible return on public investment. ■ We don't have the technology (at least not yet) to keep adverse weather from happening, and there's little reason to believe we ever will. But improving the quality of the science involved and communicating it well to mass audiences are two things our experts have shown their dedication to doing well.

September 24, 2024

Art is in the constraints

A former BBC editor, reminiscing about working on the organization's "Ceefax" teletext service, says this of the transition to delivering news content on the Internet in a hybrid model with teletext: "Because we now had to service audiences for both Ceefax and the website, the top four paragraphs of a web story still had to be totally self-contained. In other words, all the relevant facts -- with balance -- had to be in there, just as they always had been. Writers then had to write a fifth paragraph of context before expanding the story on the website." ■ As trivial as that may sound, it speaks to the way that constraints cause us to create memorable things. When an artist selects a medium or a style -- pointillism, or a capella singing, or black-and-white photography, or haiku -- the constraint enforces discipline, which in turn often instigates deeper creativity than saying "anything goes". ■ That's one of the characteristics so often lost when people turn to digital media today: There's no inherent limit to the length of your podcast series, your Substack newsletter, or your YouTube channel. Unbound by artificial constraints, people feel like they have to go on and on. The constraints are what generate real artistic flair. ■ Without those constraints, people tend to optimize around low-input, high-output formulas, like the tiresome "I'm a ___, here's why ___" structure of news headlines seen everywhere. Those headlines used to be constrained by physical space on the printed page and thus had to convey lots of information in the equivalent of a few bytes; now, they're written as long as needed in order to tick the boxes that boost their search-engine performance. ■ It can be hard to appreciate the power of limitations in a time when most of the talk is about the blue-sky potential of technologies like artificial intelligence, but human intelligence is geared towards problem-solving. We're often at our best not when faced with a blank canvas, but rather with a puzzle to figure out. Constraints (like the character count enforced by a tool like teletext) lead to more colorful work.

September 23, 2024

Main character syndrome

The promise of a new app called "SocialAI" is that users will be able to turn to an environment that feels like a social network, permitting them to plumb the responses of "millions of AI followers" to their comments. The app developer says, "SocialAI does not have real users. All 'followers' are simulated fictional characters. All generated user posts are private and not shared anywhere." ■ The most charitable perspective on the service is that it will provide users with the ability to express feelings and thoughts to a "crowd" without suffering the consequences of putting an ill-considered Facebook post or Tweet out into the world for actual human consumption. ■ In that sense, it is perhaps best viewed as a harm-mitigation tool, rather like getting a cigarette smoker to switch to vaping instead. Not perfect, but probably less harmful than the original behavior. For some people known to have poor impulse control, that might be the trick -- especially if they are naturally inclined to process their thoughts externally. ■ An uncharitable perspective on the concept of the app would warn that it appears dangerously constituted to keep people from engaging with their own internal dialogue. Part of the danger of having literally unlimited sources of content at our disposal at all times is that people can become addicted to consuming inputs without reserving adequate time for processing. ■ The app claims it is a feature to "Feel the boost of always being surrounded by your AI community". One doesn't have to be Henry David Thoreau to recognize that sometimes what we need least is more external input. ■ Computerized tools can offer lots of useful ways to supplement the work of human beings, and from time to time, feedback that feels like it's coming from a human (when it is expressly not) might be a useful adjunct to some. But self-restraint is rarely the characteristic app developers seek to encourage, so prospective users ought to beware.

September 20, 2024

Don't panic

Poland and Czechia are experiencing catastrophic flooding -- enough to cause disruptions in Czech elections and leave billions of dollars in damages behind. It's an event so widespread and significant that it's engaged an EU-wide response. ■ Neighbors being neighborly, Germany has offered the assistance of some of its military units. Poland's president, Donald Tusk, announced the help with some deadpan commentary: "If you see German soldiers, please do not panic. They are here to help." ■ It's a funny line that speaks to a much more serious issue: We should never assume that the conditions that prevail today are going to continue in a straight line projection into the future. Germany, projected on a straight line out of 1939, would have been irredeemable. It needed to be stopped by a stronger power with greater moral bearings, and it was. ■ The evil within Germany had to be defeated -- crushed, even. The worst perpetrators deserved punishment as exactly the war criminals they chose to be. ■ But Germany as a concept? As a nation of people, representing a culture? As a historical continuity? It went wrong and it needed correction, including an occupation and reconstruction. ■ The world demanded that Germany become better, that it redeem itself and stay redeemed. Now, a human lifespan removed from Germany's deepest evils, the world remembers -- Donald Tusk's teasing proves that. ■ Yet the world also expected Germany to live up to a better standard, and after lots of work, we are all better off for it. It's a lesson worth applying to the conditions in any number of places around the world that look unsalvageable to us today. Straight line projections don't apply.

September 19, 2024

In the course of critiquing the behavior of certain newsmakers, economist Daron Acemoglu offers an interesting two-fold analysis of behavior at the extremes, noting: "[S]tatus is largely zero-sum. More status for somebody means less for another. A steeper status hierarchy makes some people happy, and others unhappy and dissatisfied. Investment in zero-sum activities is often inefficient and excessive, as compared to investment in non-zero-sum activities." ■ It's an observation worth applying to the world where ordinary people live, too. At the extremes, some people try to gain status over others by buying expensive things and showing them off. This is the classic folly of "conspicuous consumption". ■ But who hasn't heard the argument that it's better to buy experiences rather than goods? And is there anyone for whom is it not generally true? ■ Acemoglu's follow-up to that material/immaterial divide is important, too: "Compare, for example, the social value of spending money on pure gold multi-million-dollar Rolex watches versus spending time to learn some new skills [...] The second type of investment, on the other hand, increases your human capital [and] also contributes to society." ■ Goods, though, are easier to mass-produce than experiences -- especially ones that "increase human capital" (by developing new skills). Perhaps one of those people with lots of resources could chase some of that zero-sum status by investing in the creation of the kinds of tools and institutions that make it easier for others to access new human capital. Carnegie's libraries did something just like that a century ago. The innovation ought to continue.

September 18, 2024

Good elders and bad ones

Elon Musk has taken to his place on the platform formerly known as Twitter to amplify a false rumor about a bomb threat at a political rally. As one of the wealthiest and most widely-known people on the planet, he has considerably more ability to amplify a claim than, for example, the police department saying the bomb story is false. ■ Musk probably doesn't consider himself an "elder", but at the age of 53, he is 14 years older than the median American and thus certainly qualifies, at least in the chronological sense. In some cultural contexts, age may play a part in defining an elder; in others, a person might be an "elder" as young as age 18. Thomas Jefferson was merely 33 years old when he acted as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. ■ Many cultural institutions observe an implied covenant between "elders" and the rest of the community: We, the community, listen gracefully, while you, the elders, seek to provide real wisdom born of reflection, consideration, and judgment. Those elders who choose to break the covenant don't deserve continued respect. ■ Lots of people who ought to know better misuse their influence for selfish ends. It is telling just how disconnected so many people who are (at least) chronological elders seem to be from the wisdom of their own ancestors and elders. This choice to divorce themselves from the custody of some kind of continuum seems to make them less likely to recognize their own responsibility to act as a link in a chain, transmitting "elder" wisdom on to their juniors and improving upon it with each retelling and each new generation. ■ The instinct to seek guidance from elders remains as strong as it has ever been, but if people held in high esteem -- whether on a global scale or merely at the family level -- cleave off their sense of duty to first learn and discern before spouting off whatever has most recently tickled their fancy, then we are headed for trouble. Eldership is a mutual responsibility.

September 17, 2024

From time to time, an American might be asked to observe a dress code at a public event, or a student may be asked to reverse a t-shirt with a provocative slogan. It's fairly uncommon; we tend to be free-speech zealots in this country, and the occasional invocation of restrictions on time, manner, or place tend to stand out as the exceptions that prove the rule. By and large, words are welcome to do combat so that fists do not. ■ Such is not the case everywhere. In Hong Kong, a 27-year-old man has just pleaded guilty to a charge of sedition merely for wearing a t-shirt in public. The words "Liberate Hong Kong" were just too much for the Chinese Communist Party (and its local quasi-apparatchiks) to bear. Hong Kong, of course, has been in a free-speech freefall since the imposition of a draconian law restricting speech in 2020. ■ Americans would be merely interested onlookers -- hopefully, sympathetic to the cause of freedom -- if it weren't for the growing projection of the Chinese regime's anti-speech attitude far beyond the country's own borders. They've threatened American movie studios, created human blockades in Australia, and opened secret-police bureaus in free countries to monitor and intimidate dissidents (or perhaps worse). ■ These offenses make Chinese laws on speech into significant global issues, rather than mere domestic ones. The dismantling of the "second" system which Hong Kong had been promised is a reminder to the world that if there's one thing an authoritarian regime cannot stand, it is the liberty of individual thought. Today, it's a personal crisis for one dissident. But in a world where pressure against activists and political figures can take on an instant global footprint, there's no need to wait until tomorrow to take it seriously.

September 16, 2024

A philosophical current that has gained some traction and influence in recent years has adopted the peculiar label of "postliberalism". Within this tent, there are some objectively intelligent and often persuasive thinkers who try to make the case that the "common good" must be made to prevail over individual freedom. ■ If we understand the word "liberalism" not in the odd sense that the American left/right scheme misuses it, but instead in the way it makes sense in a universal way, then we recognize it as a philosophy that values individual liberty as the most important value for a government to preserve, protect, and defend. ■ That isn't to say that individual freedoms are the most important of all values a society can uphold -- only that the purpose of forming a government, which can do lots of things to the individual (like imprisonment, conscription, or even execution), is to protect those liberties. ■ Other things have to go along with freedoms in order for a system to work, but those things have to be chosen. Humans know we're meant to be free. We have to be taught how to be responsible. The institutions that teach concepts like duty have to be flexible, because what's needed from dutiful people changes over time. ■ And thus, the problem with people who say they want more things like responsibility and duty, but who call themselves "postliberals": There is no post-liberalism. There is either liberalism or illberalism. ■ There is no logical consistency to thinking that there is something "after" personal liberties, free inquiry, and the intrinsic worth of the individual. There are complementary virtues (like duty and responsibility) that go along with liberty, but governments can only be good if they are constrained. Specifically, they must be constrained from harming personal liberties. That is the soul of humanity's liberal experiment. ■ Anyone who insists that they can solve complex (some would say impossible) problems like maximizing the "common good" by telling people how to live isn't choosing something "after" liberalism; they're choosing something before or other than liberty.

September 14, 2024

Yesterday's city mouse; today's country mouse

Tales that trumpet the moral high ground of the "country mouse" over that of the vice-beholden "city mouse" are at least as old as one of Aesop's fables -- recorded more than 2,500 years ago. So, on one hand, it is no surprise that the spirit of the tale remains around even today, when some people turn to spinning tales about where to find "Real America". Invariably, they find it off the beaten path. ■ On the other hand, the longevity of the supposed contrast should be all the proof anyone needs to dismiss it as absurd. The biggest city Aesop could have possibly meant in his allegorical tale would have been Athens, which might have contained 200,000 people at most. Not a village, of course, but probably a little bit smaller than the metropolitan populations of Monroe, Louisiana, or Johnson City, Tennessee, today -- places that almost certainly fit the stereotype to be called rural, "real" America. ■ Some people are "country mice" by nature, preferring an unhurried pace and lots of space to themselves. Others are natural "city mice", favoring crowds and noise and speed. But it's all relative: The biggest Greek city of Aesop's day would be only the eighth-largest in Louisiana today. ■ We shouldn't confuse some preferences for others. There's nothing wrong with preferring a country-mouse pace, nor with a city-mouse pace, either. Neither confers any elevated moral stature -- nor any depravity, either. ■ It's not even valid to think that they reflect adjacent preferences about things like introversion or extroversion. There are plenty of extroverts who like the country life, and plenty of introverts who want to be close to the center of action (even if they don't want to talk to anyone when they get there). "City" versus "country" is often a proxy for other assumptions, and quite often we're not at all clear with one another about which of those assumptions we're making. ■ What really matters is whether people have the maximum freedom to choose what fits them personally, allowing them to optimize their own lifestyle choices in the limited time any one of us has on Earth. The freedom to move about -- even to literally take an entire home with you on the road -- is the thing that actually makes America great. All of its places are real.

September 13, 2024

Two plus two equals more

A recurring theme in national news coverage about education is the well-worn "contest" between the classic college education and the trades. Headlines like "Want job security? Trade school could help" almost invariably lead stories that pitch technical or blue-collar skills as rivals to the liberal arts and white-collar career training. ■ It is, as it always has been, a false dichotomy. The technical trades, crafts, and occupations don't have to be rivalrous with a liberal education; likewise, those who go on to earn bachelors' degrees and onward should probably include some kind of vocational skill development as part of a well-rounded education. The two fields should be harmonized and complementarized: Plumbers who read the classics? Accountants who know how to wire low-voltage panels? Why not both? Why not a pathway from alternative rocker to Ph.D. molecular biologist? ■ What America could really use is some innovation around a 2+2 model of post-secondary education: One that makes room for both trade skills and liberal arts, ensuring that most everyone who wants it can enter adulthood with marketable skills. Many paths would fit naturally together; a wiring trade might fork naturally into computer science or electrical engineering. Bookkeeping might wind its way later on to a CPA or an MBA. A digital marketing certificate may end up pointing towards application development or system administration later. ■ Most important is that we seek to lower the barriers to human-capital formation. People shouldn't find themselves irrevocably locked into choices they made at age 18. For some, college ends up as an expensive false start towards a bachelor's degree. For others, the long path to a degree in law or medicine ends up at an unfulfilling destination -- but between student loans and foregone opportunities, they may see no way out. ■ For everyone across the spectrum of possibilities, more stackable credentials (individual achievements that can accrue towards larger goals) and more pathways are probably the answers. ■ Especially as technological and economic progress ensure that almost every job becomes more complex with time, an increasing number of people would benefit from a liberation from inflexible educational and career paths that treat ages 18 and 22 as magical "on" and "off" ramps, never to be revisited. The more we see education and training as parallels with work rather than things we must do in series, the better.

September 11, 2024

A time for every name

The annual recitation of the names of those killed in the September 11th attacks remains a solemn event; it is a litany lasting nearly four hours. It is small counterweight to the way history encroaches on living memory. The median American living today was about 15 years old at the time of the dreadful events of that day; it won't be long before more people know it only as an abstraction from textbooks rather than a remembered trauma. ■ Reading a name alone isn't all that much in the way of tribute. By comparison, even the sparse half-dozen or so words that can be added to a veteran's headstone seem like they convey volumes about the decedent's time on Earth. Yet it would be difficult to add even that much to a roll call of those who perished on 9/11 without making the annual memorials altogether too long. ■ Yet a great deal of merit is done by reciting those names, rather than merely recounting the dead as a single whole number: 2,977. It wasn't their tragedy all together; it was a sinister deed resulting in 2,977 unique and individual calamities. ■ The importance of remembering and saying the names of the dead is of shared significance across many cultures and religious traditions. It's an important act for the living because it serves as a reminder that no matter how many we are in number, whatever our circumstances may be, each person affects the world around them individually. What we do in large groups matters, too, but seldom if ever does it matter as much as to those who would recognize a name.

September 10, 2024

ABC News will host a Presidential debate tonight under unprecedented circumstances; never before in the television era has a Presidential campaign begun with two presumptive party nominees debating one another, only for one of those presumptive nominees to be replaced before Election Day. It is in the self-interest of ABC News to make as much hype of the event as possible. ■ A serious Presidential debate would ask several questions. The seriousness of this debate will be reflected, in part, by how close any of the questions come to issues like these, which are (a) of significant national interest, (b) closely under the umbrella of the President's Article II duties under the Constitution, and (c) likely to have at least some meaningful effect on the next four years, especially if not dealt with assertively. ■ Question 1: "What tools of the Executive Branch would you use to encourage the development of new tools to combat the effects of antibiotic resistance?" Health care has been a major part of the national menu of issues for decades, but we have generally avoided addressing significant growing threats like antibiotic resistance. We saw the consequences of long-term underinvestment in pandemic preparedness in 2020, and the unfathomable costs of that underinvestment. The market incentives to develop new antibiotics are no longer working adequately, so what can or will the next President do about it before it's too late? ■ Question 2: "What do you propose as the appropriate size for a modern US Navy? If you propose one larger than we have now, how would your proposal deal with shortages of both shipbuilding capacity and willing sailors?" America's naval power remains enormous, but our shipbuilding has stalled at a time when China is taking an adversarial posture in the Pacific Ocean. As a matter of national defense, this issue matters enormously to the next Commander-in-Chief. ■ Question 3: "Ukraine has demonstrated novel uses for drones in wartime. Now that the cat is out of the bag, what priorities would you set for the Defense Department around both drone deployment and our own domestic defensive vulnerabilities?" Ukraine has just projected its response to the Russian invasion straight into Moscow with a drone attack. What is learned on the battlefield in this war will only spread globally. We need to know that the next President understands that Russia's unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine has just sped up the timetable for new strategies and tactics that will affect us in the next war. ■ Question 4: "Local water utilities have expressed grave concerns over the costs of removing the PFAS 'forever chemicals' from water, as Federal regulations appear to expect them to do. How would you address the tension between these competing regulatory interests?" It's already widely-known that the United States has badly under-invested in infrastructure for a long time. New regulatory postures are likely to require much more sophisticated and expensive treatment far beyond the existing standards, in which investment was already lax. These are competing interests largely imposed by the Federal government, so what will that government do about it? ■ If we don't hear anything like any of these questions during the Presidential Debate, then we should cease the practice of televised debates immediately and instead subject the candidates to timed essay exams. (They could even be televised, with hushed, golf-like commentary!) But if the practice of "debate" is nothing more than performance art, it's hard to see how any of it advances the public interest.

September 9, 2024

Checking ourselves

If Americans can be rightly accused of having a national personality characteristic, a thoughtful analyst might say that we have a predisposition in favor of action. "Shoot first and ask questions later", if you will. Alexis de Tocqueville said of it: "In Europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire of riches, and an excessive love of independence, as propensities very formidable to society. Yet these are the very elements which ensure a long and peaceful duration to the republics of America." ■ Yet on the other hand, we are known to be painfully slow to act on large and dreadful threats. The apocryphal quote from Winston Churchill goes, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities." He probably didn't say it, exactly, but it has survived in lore because it contains at least a kernel of truth. ■ So are we hot-tempered or blissfully untroubled? Perhaps it's a hybrid of the two: We are prone to liking quick decisions, but we're also habituated to realize that those decisions often need to be revisited not too much later. ■ Thus we have the world's longest-serving written Constitution -- but one that was amended immediately out of the gate. We have an often hot-headed House of Representatives with zippy two-year terms, but also a Senate that acts like a tenured university faculty. We are prone to a lot of "Yeehaw!" but also a substantial amount of second-guessing. ■ Now is a time to make sure we are second-guessing wisely: On any number of fronts, looming issues that haven't gotten thorough consideration are starting to show themselves once again to the forefront. Many of them are deeply complex, from the reach of artificial intelligence to the ambitions of rival powers to the costs of a Federal budget that we seem obligated to keep expanding. ■ Impulsive figures of both left and right once put into power might need to be benched until we have a steadier view of a turbulent future. There's nothing wrong with reconsidering past judgments: That just might be the American Way.

September 6, 2024

The contemporary ease of content creation has stripped away some of the obstacles that used to stand in the way of producing material for its own sake. On one hand, that frees some worthwhile voices to get exposure that would otherwise have never broken through in the more heavily-mediated past, when editors and publishers and producers decided what got made and disseminated. ■ On the other hand, it sets up incentives that reward people merely for being "influencers" -- no matter what malignant nonsense they project into the universe. And that's ultimately why the US Justice Department has "charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, in a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging". ■ The plot made a handful of people very rich in exchange for their dignity. They effectively, whether wittingly or unwittingly, acted as tools of an adversarial foreign government. They may face criminal penalties, too. ■ But they made lots of money, and to people for whom civic duty is no object, then the remuneration is all that matters. The results, of course, tell any honest onlooker that something beyond remuneration must matter -- that civic responsibility really is a meaningful thing. ■ That modern tools have made it easier for people to profit by selling their souls is a fact we can't escape. Teaching the next generation that intangibles like duty still matter is the counterweight.

3.4 years per hour

At some time in the future, probably not that long from now, people will look back on the present as a time of excruciatingly low information density. We are living through a conspicuous explosion of content creation -- YouTube alone claims that more than 500 hours of video content are being uploaded every minute. That's the equivalent of 3.4 years of new content per hour. And then there's TikTok, Instagram, Spotify, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and on and on. ■ Some of this content is astonishingly good. Much of it is middling. No small portion of it is garbage. The well-known historian Niall Ferguson examines the world of pop history delivered via podcasts and declares, "They are mostly drowning it [history] in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst mendacious." ■ There is another side to the coin, of course, which is asserted in the words of another historian, David H. Montgomery: "There are awful history podcasts -- and also great ones, with excellent research. (This statement also happens to be true of books.)" It is not the medium itself that determines the quality of the content: Someone keeps paying Bill O'Reilly to put his name on books. That doesn't make the printing press the problem. ■ But thanks to the ease of production and dissemination, so much content is being poured out at such low information density that the pendulum almost certainly must swing somewhat back in the other direction, if from nothing else than audience exhaustion. There are only so many swipes a person can give to a litany of mediocre Facebook Reels before they may begin to regret not simply picking up one of the 100 books everyone should read. ■ The immediacy of electronic media can be utterly seductive, but if that seduction isn't followed by a fulfilling experience, then people will ultimately grow weary. And wasn't weary boredom what the Internet promised to eradicate?

September 5, 2024

Speak the tongue, remember the decisions

A project is underway to revive the Dakota language of the Santee Sioux by teaching it to volunteer adult learners. It is a story we hear periodically about someone working earnestly to teach people a rare language before it goes extinct, one that usually begins as a bittersweet tale about someone's labor of love to honor a parent or a grandparent. ■ Languages matter as a vital form of cultural expression. There's no doubt that the survival of a language is vital to preserving cultural history -- not just a code to translate it, but real, live speakers who recognize things like idioms and nuances, and who are able to translate, knowing the difference between poetry and prose. Lots of languages are known only by speakers numbering in the dozens or hundreds, and they are vulnerable to withering away altogether. ■ Some of the information carried in languages is self-rewarding; that is, the speaker or reader gains something directly from the original that cannot be obtained from a translation. Prayers and hymns can be a great example. But, generally, those artifacts will either be preserved or lost on the basis of their relevance to the people within the culture, and little can be done to prod their protection from the outside. Many religions have gone extinct. ■ But if learning a language can be hard (especially if the speaker has no particular emotional compulsion to learn it), then something else may need to be done to preserve and disseminate some of the other cultural information that defines cultures whose populations may be in decline. ■ People generally learn best when they can recognize an element of self-interest to what they are learning. (You can't blame our genes for rewarding the learning processes that raise the odds of them jumping to the next generation.) So how do you make that cultural transmission process more friendly to individual self-interest? ■ The answer likely lies in recognizing that the real blueprint for a culture is found in how it reaches decisions: At the individual, family, and social levels. In essence, anthropologists and historians could do a great deal of good for extinct and endangered cultures by recording and publishing their decision-making processes. ■ While it may seem casual or even superficial, the world would likely see a lot more transmission about these cultures if thoughtful people would write books like "The ___ Approach to Leadership" or "The ___ Way of Making Choices" than by packing academic libraries with dry, unread journal articles and graduate theses. In return, perhaps some of the many "stateless nations" of the world might at least stand a chance of being remembered, even as much of the world converges on globally-shared cultures.

September 4, 2024

Don't mine sympathy for clicks

A fair number of news outlets that once were owned mainly by small ownership groups but now belong to sprawling national media "groups" have sought to bump their online traffic figures by posting clickbait in the form of articles drawn from their "sister" stations. These stories are often gut-wrenching stories about calamitous events taking the lives of sympathetic characters like children or fire fighters or police officers -- stories that have always made it hard to look away. ■ And that's the point, of course. Posted along with a snapshot of an attractive adult in their prime or of a cherubic little person, sometimes the social-media editors involved add nothing more than a comment like "Tragic." or "Rest in peace.", with no further context. ■ This is misleading, of course, because a "local" news outlet is intuitively expected to be focused on local events. We humans only have so much attention we can pay to tragedies, and it's inescapable that we take more interest in those that happen close to home (where it is at least somewhat possible that we might know, or be within a few degrees of separation of, the victim) than in those happening far away. ■ There is something especially ghoulish about profiting off stories of distant tragedies in this way -- it's misleading, if not outright deceptive, for those stories to be mined for local attention when they are not actually local. It's a form of mining human sympathy for clicks. ■ It's a particularly despicable practice when the story doesn't actually advance anything new worth knowing. Sometimes there actually are new and real dangers that demand widespread attention. But those instances are few and far between; more often, the clickbait is merely there to report on a freak incident -- one-in-a-million events that, statistically, are unavoidable in a country of 330 million people. ■ The practice should be discouraged, if not widely disclaimed altogether. It's not journalistically novel nor productive, and it probably depletes the reservoirs of attention that people can afford to expend on tragic stories without having to tune out altogether. That can be a real danger when there are very big and very troubling problems that also demand attention, especially because they are matters that human beings can and should try to change. Times are tough for local media, to be sure. But they shouldn't undermine public expectations of context, balance, and local newsworthiness along the way.

September 2, 2024

Labor and capital

Given the history of Labor Day, the holiday engenders no shortage of acknowledgments for organized labor unions, particularly as politicians looking toward November seek to drum up both donations and volunteer support. Companies post messages (sometimes platitudes) thanking their employees, and individuals pen thoughts on the evolving nature of work. ■ But what usually goes missing is a broader discussion of how "labor" isn't always an adversary to "capital" within a market economy. There certainly can be confrontation between the two, and sometimes even hostility. But with union membership down to 10% of the US workforce (half of what that rate was in 1983), seeing things through old prisms may no longer be valid. ■ Labor Day would be a very good day to celebrate co-ops, mutual firms, and credit unions alike, not to mention employee-owned companies like ESOPs and solopreneurs. There are lots of ways in which competitive firms can be started and sustained under a free-market framework, and it's short-sighted to pay attention only to the ones that are publicly traded or have an obvious individual "owner". ■ It's good for an economy to have a mix of firm structures, including those that are owned either by member/customers or by the employees themselves. That kind of diversity helps to bring about innovation in the way products and services are developed, to be sure, but perhaps more importantly, they stimulate new developments in areas like operations and management, not to mention finance and R&D. Company governance is undoubtedly different for, say, a large co-op than for a company with a single controlling shareholder. ■ Like technological tools, company structures are neither inherently good nor bad. They depend upon the contexts in which they are put to work, and the character of the people using them. It doesn't have to stop there, but Labor Day should be a jumping-off point to discuss the many ways in which a bigger vision for how ownership can work may pay dividends more broadly.

August 31, 2024

We can do it

The advent of college football season takes on epic proportions in much of the United States. It does so more than ever, now that the Big Ten Conference literally stretches from sea to shining sea. The cultural touchstones are many, from tailgates to team colors at work on Fridays. ■ This, though, may be the first college football season of a new era -- for nothing directly to do with football. It is the first season to follow a year in which the biggest names in sports belonged at least as often to women as to men. It's a tidal shift. ■ Thanks in part to their proportional over-performance at the Summer Olympics, but also to other striking moments in the spotlight, it's no longer the "women's sports" enthusiast but rather the ordinary fan who recognizes names like Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Caitlin Clark, and Sha'Carri Richardson. Not just one of them, but all of them. ■ Forty years ago, women were outnumbered two-to-one by men on the US Olympic team. Women were barely an asterisk in Congress at the time and headed just two Fortune 500 companies. Neither of those statistics has yet balanced out quite like the Olympic medal count, but indisputable progress has been made. ■ The genuine surge in popular enthusiasm for women's sports may prove to be a sort of vanguard for helping to knock down the resistance that remains in the way of recognizing women's eligibility for other high-performance activities. For now, that's only an effect we can really detect in equality-committed countries like the United States. The ultimate goal, though, would be to see those effects carried over elsewhere around a world that often remains unequal and explicitly sexist.

August 30, 2024

Rules, not gentlemen's agreements

One way or another, the United States and China will have to coexist as major global powers. It is certain to be a rocky relationship from time to time, but occasional diplomatic encounters -- like the US National Security Advisor's meeting with the Chinese president -- are likely to be fruitful on the whole if they help to keep avenues of communication open between the countries. But what is actually said still matters. ■ In his campaign book for the 1988 Presidential election, George H. W. Bush wrote, "One of the lessons I'd learned in two diplomatic assignments, at the United Nations and in China, was never to underestimate the importance of symbolism. Not image -- that's something else entirely. Image has to do with appearance, how you look to the world. Symbolism has to do with messages, what you want to tell the world." ■ Xi Jinping's words at the meeting went like this: "In this changing and turbulent world, countries need solidarity and coordination instead of division or confrontation." At a glance, that sounds unobjectionable; who wants "division or confrontation"? ■ But it's the kind of platitudinous nonsense one might say when they really mean, "Stay out of our sphere of influence". And that's clearly how China's rulers see matters. The Soviet Union liked that "spheres of influence" idea, too, and for the same reason: If rivalrous great powers can agree to split up the world and stay out of one another's claims, that looks a lot like "coordination" and prevents "confrontation". ■ That's not how a world order based upon rules is supposed to work, though. Different nations agree on rules by mutual consent, and stand behind those rules everywhere. ■ And differences of opinion about the implementation and consequences of those rules can easily lead to "confrontation" -- much more of it than if powerful countries merely "coordinate" and agree to let one another force "solidarity" upon weaker neighbors. But the observance of rules, even if it's sometimes messier and less immediately satisfying to the expansive ambitions of the powerful, is a more just way to regard self-determination for all. ■ Conflict within rules-based boundaries can be contained. It's when a power insists that "coordination" looks like absorbing a neighbor, muscling out another's naval claims, and making incursions into another's airspace that we come to realize what's really being said behind the symbols.

It's not a work "family"

A man who went hiking up a 14,000' mountain on a Colorado company retreat got separated from his group and lost off the trail. He ended up stuck, lost and alone, overnight, and was "lucky to be alive" when found by a search-and-rescue team. ■ It isn't uncommon to hear cheery marketing and recruitment materials alike using phrases like "work family". But the fact plainly is that a work team isn't a family, and it never will be. Even real families that work together have to consciously address the differences between work and familial bonds, if they want to remain healthy at either. ■ Words matter, and using "family" language for non-family activities can set misleading expectations about things like duties of care. Even Cub Scouts are taught to practice the buddy system when out on a hike. Any company outing to a mountain should have come with the same expectations. ■ As awful as it would be to find oneself left behind on a mountain, it's probably less tragic than what happened to the Wells Fargo employee who died at her desk in Tempe, Arizona, not to be found for four days. ■ A freak incident, perhaps. Regardless, it should come as an emphatic reminder that you can work with friends, you can work with family, and your friends can ultimately become like family -- but at no time should any of us be seduced by the spin that work and love are to be judged by the same standards. Even when love isn't involved, we owe one another duties of basic responsibility that neither a nanny state -- nor a corporate "parent" -- can ever supply.

August 28, 2024

Bad training kills valuable time

David Burbach, who is an associate professor at the Naval War College, notes that his career requires him to welcome the new school year with a "1.5 hour active shooter training video for a transcript that takes 10 min to read in full". Different people learn via different modes, of course, but it should enter at least someone's consideration that most college graduates -- especially those with post-graduate degrees -- have, almost by definition, learned how to digest lots of information from written texts. Thus, if required to undergo 90 minutes of training that can be read in ten minutes, members of that audience are likely to be so bored by the low information density of the recorded training that they might actually end up resisting the content they are supposed to be learning. ■ The excruciatingly low quality of training for adults in low-stakes learning environments (like workplace safety training and required continuing-education programs) is practically a crime. Online videos -- especially when clumsily animated, as so many are -- mostly take bad teaching habits and make them worse through low information density. ■ A fast talker can reach sustained rates of about 150 to 200 words per minute, though when those words are delivered for an audience, they are often imperfectly chosen. This rate is safely below even the conservative estimates of up to 300 words per minute that adults can generally read, which itself is much lower than what a college-practiced "skimmer" can generally glean. ■ Not all written content is of the same quality, of course. Some is garbage (even when it wasn't written by artificial intelligence). Some is sublime. But with careful thought and editing, it's rare to find content that can't be delivered at least as well in text form as can be delivered in a video -- after all, what is the transcript of a video but a text? ■ 90% of online training videos would be better as carefully-scripted, spokesperson-direct-to-camera recordings, interspersed when necessary with pictures and videos. And 90% of those would be better if the scripts were just converted to attractive printed pamphlets, laid out thoughtfully for optimal knowledge transfer (for instance, in the Edward Tufte format). ■ Alas, low-stakes learning is all too often treated as nothing more than an afterthought or a chore to be grudgingly completed by all parties involved, even when it involves matters of life and death, like airline safety briefings. If we were to really embrace "lifelong learning", as well we should, perhaps we would invest better in delivering better content for people to absorb once they're outside of conventional classroom settings. Assuming that most people graduate sometime in their twenties and work for around forty years, wouldn't it make sense to put at least twice the thought into that full-life-cycle education as we put into "school" education?

August 26, 2024

Brand-name nonsense is still nonsense

An article in Investor's Business Daily -- a nominally reputable news outlet -- screams out the headline "Warren Buffett's panic sale of Apple stock cost $6.2 billion". ■ Anyone is free to write a story like this in pursuit of clicks. But that analysis is so wide of the mark that it betrays a total unfamiliarity with how Buffett makes investment decisions. ■ The IBD writer notes that Apple's stock price rose after Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, sold off about half of its Apple stock holdings. Factual enough, perhaps. But Buffett's approach doesn't depend upon timing future events (like changes in stock prices). ■ Fundamentally, it's an investing philosophy based upon doing the work and taking the preponderance of the risk up-front; buying when the intrinsic value of a company is meaningfully greater than the market price. A Buffett sale is generally an indication that the market price exceeds his estimation of intrinsic value by so much that it's time to let go. ■ Dwelling on stock price performance after selling is a bit like speculating on the outcome of a baseball game if the starting pitcher had stayed through nine innings. Sure, plenty of things are possible -- but a manager goes into a game expecting to get something like five innings out of a starter. On a bad day, he might get replaced sooner. Once in a while, you might see a shutout. At the extremes, you might even get a perfect game. ■ But the "intrinsic value" of the starting pitcher is generally found in those first five or so innings, and anything far beyond that is great good fortune. Knowing when you've already gotten far more than you deserved to expect and walking away while you're ahead doesn't make you a sucker for not squeezing every last strike out of a pitcher or every last dollar out of a stock price. That's not "panic". It's prudence.

Ukrainian machine gun vs. Russian missile

(Video) Put it on the sizzle reel for Ukraine's NATO application. A large Russian air attack against civilians in Ukraine has once again disrupted the lives of millions of people who weren't doing anything wrong. This isn't the behavior of an aggressor that will contain its ambitions; it's the behavior of barbarians who won't stop until they are forced to do so. Send Ukraine whatever it needs to make that happen.

A century of progress

You dump the gold standard, quit relying on tariffs, and jettison highly restrictive immigration quotas, and what do you get? The progress made by American free enterprise since the 1920s.

Call animal control

A water buffalo got loose in suburban Des Moines. Someone call Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.

August 25, 2024

Cats aren't the only curious ones

In 1965, the government of Manitoba decided to lean into the Space Age theme by stationing spherical, Sputnik-like trash cans along highways around the province. It was a clever idea fed by a whole program of highway signs and other promotion. ■ Something as humble as a trash can may not seem worthy of extra design attention -- but that's only because we take the idea of trash disposal too easily for granted. We shouldn't do that. ■ Civilization depends on a whole mesh of effective modern sanitation programs, for conventional solid waste, recycling, composting, and hazardous wastes, as well as sanitary sewage, storm sewage, non-point-source water pollution, and all forms of air pollution. Fail to deliver any one of those, and the quality of life suffers. Drop the ball on some of them and things start to fall apart instantly. ■ A little bit of human-friendly design can help to keep these infrastructure services -- the backbone of modern living -- in the forefront of public attention. It doesn't have to happen all the time, but relegating these services to the shadows is an unforced mistake. ■ In places where resources are constrained, clever ideas pop up easily; that's why land-scarce Amsterdam has a clean and appealing system of underground trash collection. But even in places with lots of space (like Manitoba), the public deserves clever, well-designed contributions to their infrastructure. ■ People deserve to be excited (or at least delighted) by the ordinary, and clever ideas like the Orbit shouldn't belong only to the past. Curiosity gets us to do useful things, like putting trash in its place. It's a resource worth cultivating.

August 24, 2024

From the India Desk

The Economist magazine is advertising for a South Asia bureau chief, to be based in Delhi. It's not a new beat for the magazine to cover; there is already a Mumbai bureau and frequent coverage of India in the publication, generally. But it's unusual among its peers in the English-language news media. ■ Few US news outlets bother to staff bureaus in India. NBC has a shared bureau in New Delhi, while ABC and CBS have no such offices. The New York Times has a New Delhi bureau and CNN anchors its South Asia coverage from there as well, but by and large the foreign bureau is a rare find, including in India. ■ As a consequence of the sparse coverage, even a news junkie in America hears very little from day to day about India. Yet it's so big (India has eclipsed China as the world's most populous country) and so important to power relations that its absence is problematic. Is India, for instance, on the side of Ukraine or Russia in their current conflict? India is America's second-largest source of immigrants and one of our top-tier trading partners. ■ It's hard for important knowledge to break through if news isn't being covered, and India is becoming no less important to the balance of power and the future of the world generally than it was before. It's good to see a major outlet like The Economist sustaining its commitment to coverage of the subcontinent, but it would be good for others to follow their lead.

August 23, 2024

A time for quiet

Something peculiar about human psychology makes most of us tend to find most matters easier to learn when it seems like the subject is being presented playfully or without consequences. The cognitive load of a college lecture seems high, while the same content presented as a reenactment on the History Channel seems easy to digest. It's not the content so much as the context that triggers a response. ■ This can lead to serious misguidance, of course: Just because something is presented engagingly doesn't mean that it is right. Lots of cues cause people to believe more than they should: A presenter with a booming baritone voice seems arbitrarily credible, which is why Dennis Haysbert makes for a great insurance spokesperson. Accents can do the same thing; Americans will believe just about anything delivered with Britain's Received Pronunciation. ■ Another cue that can mislead is a brand name. People like to be awed by celebrity. And one of the most spectacular hijackings of a brand name has come to a close with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. withdrawing from the Presidential race. Kennedy inherited one of the most valuable brand names of all time -- enough to launch him to double digits in the polls (as high as perhaps 20% at the beginning), without having meaningful electoral experience or coherent policy ideas. ■ The reputational effect of his candidacy was bad enough that his siblings used the word "betrayal". It may not have been fair for his ambitious parents to saddle him with the weight of a "junior" name, but he made his own choices to bring disinformation and crackpottery to the spotlight of American political life. The civic dialogue is better off without his voice.

August 22, 2024

False certainty

Outlets like Five Thirty-Eight and The Economist are firing up their predictive models for the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election, especially as the anticipation of the major party conventions is giving way to the mythical shift in public attention that supposedly takes place every Labor Day. But even though the polls and models are nothing more than statistical projections, people want certainty. ■ Matt Glassman of Georgetown's Government Affairs Institute laments, "People keep asking me who's going to win the election and I keep saying it's a coin flip and then they say 'yeah, but who do you *think* is going to win' and I thought about explaining the coin flip prices in what I think but I've decided to just randomize saying Trump or Harris." ■ Americans generally loathe statistical thinking anywhere but in the realm of sports betting. Everywhere else, we congenitally expect certainty (even if it's false certainty) and assume (often correctly) that we'll find an ad-hoc way out of every situation. It's certainly not a new development: Look at how completely unprepared our forebears were for WWII. Our standing military was tiny, even as it was clear the world was burning. But after fundamentally ignoring the risk all the way through bedtime on Dec. 6, 1941, the issue was forced and America mobilized in a way that led to crushing industrial dominance. ■ Similar things could be said even dating back to the Revolutionary War. It's been well-documented that George Washington was anguished by the desperate lack of resources his Continentals faced in trying to defeat the British. We have always tended to believe more in destiny than in odds. ■ To this day, people want investment funds that guarantee a specific retirement age, weather forecasts that are precise to their neighborhoods, and products that never require maintenance. And even though it has quite often worked out for us in the end, it's worth pondering whether we would be a better country if we kept the optimism but squared ourselves better with uncertainty. There's a reason Eagle Scouts often stand out well into adulthood: "Be Prepared" is effectively a countercultural motto. Were we to do a better job of hoping for the best but weighting the odds in case of the worst, perhaps we'd be even better-off than we are today.

August 21, 2024

Echoes of Bob

Bob Newhart may have passed away a month ago, but his voice echoed loudly at the Democratic National Convention. Not in words or political meaning, but in the influence he left on delivery. ■ Newhart's style was powerful in its restraint -- his deadpan delivery was killer, his signature joke was in the silent moment of half a phone call, and one of his finest sketches hinged entirely on a quiet buildup to the words "Stop it!". But because Newhart was so restrained, he had to strategically employ a stammer to create comedic tension; he would have sounded too polished and unreal without it. ■ Audiences could hear Newhart's stammer echoed by former President Barack Obama in his speech to the DNC. Obama's tendency towards linguistic precision and polish is legendary, and it's been documented since at least his Harvard Law School days. But, like Newhart, he inserted a stammer to build tension where his natural inclination would have been to glide smoothly from one word to the next. ■ For Obama, it's an adopted affectation, not a natural expression. It's funny to see an imperfection borrowed from comedy put to work by a former President as a political tool, but such was the expansive impression Bob Newhart left on the culture. He gave the world decades of comedy, but even 94 years of life seems like it was too short.

August 16, 2024

Energy to heal the water

An Irish swimmer may have been the last Olympic victim of the dirty water in the Seine, going to the hospital after competing in a 10-kilometer open water swim -- instead of getting to be a flag bearer at the closing ceremonies. He certainly didn't want anything to do with the river again. ■ The whole Seine debacle highlights the enormous role that energy plays in water quality. Would it be theoretically possible to treat all of the water that flows down the Seine? Perhaps. The same could plausibly be done with any river; it's all a matter of scale. ■ But there's no getting around this: Healing polluted water takes a large amount of energy. Water is dense: A single cubic foot of water contains just shy of 7.5 gallons, and every gallon weighs 8.34 pounds. That means a cubic foot of water weighs more than 62 lbs. ■ Every time water is lifted, pumped, clarified, filtered, or aerated, at least some of it has to be displaced. That comes at a high cost of mechanical energy, and that almost entirely involves passing energy through electric motors. ■ In the long term, the best thing that can be done for the good of reducing water pollution (other than preventing that pollution in the first place) is to generate enormous quantities of cheap, non-polluting electricity. With enough of that energy, almost any sick water can be healed. And healing the water is preferable to healing humans who get sick because of it.

August 14, 2024

The most important nearly-thankless job

Duty is performed in many and varied ways, from the adult child caring for an aging parent to the reliable precinct poll worker to the soldier defending a forward operating base far from home. We Americans live in a political system that celebrates liberties, but which depends far more upon the tug of duty than it's comfortable to admit. ■ One of the highest duties in the entire country is carried out almost thanklessly in plain sight. The members of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee, particularly the Chair, execute quite nearly the most important work short of commanding the armed forces. ■ Excitement over the fresh good news about inflation (it's at long last below 3%) will undoubtedly echo much louder than any thanks for the dutiful members of the Fed. That may be a mistake. An independent central bank is essential to the welfare of our enormous economy. But it only remains independent in part because it earns legitimacy through performance. ■ The temptation politicians feel to challenge Fed independence is a strong as it is predictable. Most of the benefits of capturing control over the money supply are felt up-front, while the pain takes longer to sink in. ■ That's why selfish and shortsighted politicians so commonly threaten to take over the Federal Reserve's central job of managing the money supply. One of the key duties of the Federal Reserve is to be responsible when politicians are not, even if it brings them scorn. ■ It's not as though Fed leaders have nothing better to do. It's hard to imagine a group of people who who could fill their time with highly-paid work (if they wanted it) than those economic gurus. ■ But, mainly, they serve dutifully, and our political and economic systems rely heavily on that sense of duty. We should far more often and far more vocally be grateful for their service, but we probably won't. We would all be quite literally poorer without their efforts.

QR codes to help those in need

The plan adopted by the City of Des Moines to post signs prohibiting panhandling at intersections is probably prudent. Notwithstanding the protests of groups like the ACLU, it is plainly a first-order hazard to the panhandler to stand in close proximity to speedy traffic. ■ But even if we could do more to make street-adjacent areas safer for pedestrians of all kinds (and there's ample reason to do just that), panhandling also creates a second-order problem for motorists by creating an intimidation hazard. Try to spot the difference between a panhandler and a potential carjacker: Can you really be quite sure? ■ Above all, panhandling is simply not a good way to deliver welfare. Not everything needs to be institutionalized or turned into a program, to be sure, but just as it can often be more effective to donate cash to a food bank (which can then take advantage of bulk pricing) than to donate food directly, so too can well-managed organizations actually deliver direct assistance to those in need through accountable programs, and do so more efficiently than the individual may be able to help themselves. ■ Cities should put up signs in known panhandling hot spots, offering a QR code to permit motorists to easily donate to an assistance fund for those in need, rather than handing cash through the window. That would allow people of goodwill to take instant action when conscience moves them, while simultaneously discouraging people from putting themselves in physical danger by standing near the street.

August 13, 2024

Hit the trail

A short segment of pedestrian and biking trail in a rural area best known for a sauerkraut festival is about to open to a great deal more fanfare than would seem proportional to the size of the trail itself. But the enthusiasm is high because the stretch of trail is all that's left to complete a loop connecting the High Trestle Trail with the Raccoon River Valley Trail in Central Iowa. ■ The result is a continuous loop of trails that can be ridden for loops of 72, 86, or 118 miles at a time -- all on dedicated pathways. It's a great boost to the quality of life in Iowa, giving people good reasons to be active outdoors, enhancing the profile of the state's natural conservation programs, and bringing intentional (but low-impact) visitor traffic through small communities. ■ America's infatuation with cars has been exhaustively documented, and nothing is likely ever to eclipse the allure of the Great American Road Trip. It's hard to exaggerate just how vast and comparatively wide-open most of the United States remains to this day, particularly by comparison with the familiar allies and friendly countries of Europe. ■ It is a good turn of events that local and regional efforts to build trail networks have earned respect in some of the same ways that four-lane highways have long accrued it: As important features that are generally expected in forward-looking communities. There is still considerable room for growth, but the initiatives in Iowa have gathered a momentum of their own.

August 12, 2024

WCBS to be killed off

Audacy, the large radio operator that owns the license to broadcast WCBS on 880 AM in New York City, has announced the end of the station as it has been known for almost 60 years. The landmark all-news format and the network-flagship call letters are both to be retired as the signal is turned over to an all-sports format. ■ Many, if not most, of the extremely large radio station operators have been ruthless in their approach to the medium over the quarter-century since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ripped the lid off of old limits on the number of stations any single operator could license. The biggest players engaged in the equivalent of a land rush, often paying irrational, debt-fueled prices to get big before their rivals could. ■ How irrational were those prices? Consider that the largest operator in the country has run at an operating loss of $944 million so far this year on revenues of $1.7 billion -- and that's before coughing up $191 million in interest payments. Interest costs have dwarfed any operating profits for at least three years straight. Audacy, which comes in second by revenues, has had such a bad run that it "reorganized" out of Chapter 11 earlier this year. ■ The fundamental problem is the debt burden, which in turn has caused managers (and owners) to treat radio stations like an extractive industry -- like mines to be stripped -- rather than as renewable, sustainable operations -- like farms to be tended. To be sure, technology has ushered in radical changes in audience listening patterns, but enlightened management could have leveraged heritage station identities (like WCBS) to capitalize on those changes, rather than torching the storied names and leaving hard-working people unemployed. ■ Choices were made that got us here. And "here", far more than it should be, is a place where a public in dire need of dependable and trustworthy sources of news and information no longer know which outlets to trust, because so many of the names they used to know have been cast off like garbage.

August 11, 2024

Up with prudent skepticism, down with chronic cynicism

Microsoft has come right out and said it: "[G]roups connected with the Iranian government have [...] laid the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election-related topics and [...] launched operations that Microsoft assesses are designed to gain intelligence on political campaigns and help enable them to influence the elections in the future". A lot of Americans have resisted the notion that foreign governments might have tried to influence elections in the past, and by extension have implicitly rejected the notion that it might happen again. ■ Psychologically, something about American triumphalism has converged with some deeply unhealthy electoral self-interests to produce a kind of cynicism about anything that others might try to achieve via influence campaigns. Thus, words like "hoax" get thrown about without enough people truly taking the threat seriously. ■ But the fact is that the foreign interference campaigns are already well underway. The Trump campaign got maliciously hacked for spicy confidential materials. Russia previously did the same thing to the Clinton campaign. ■ We have to take our heads out of the sand on ____ counts: First, ordinary people need to get on board with a cybersecurity mindset that acknowledges that the front lines in these battles are everywhere. It's happening right now, and it will never relent. Second, VIPs need to observe a much higher level of security practices -- to the point where following them actually starts to hurt a little bit. Anything less will leave them vulnerable. ■ Third, we need to set a cultural standard of expectations that we will shun those who share ill-gotten secrets and adopt a prudent skepticism of anything we see reported online -- more skeptical of established names than we may have been in the past, and ten times more skeptical of those names that don't have a track record. ■ Iran and Russia both have been creating "pop-up" outlets claiming to report American news and opinion. Of course they will continue to do the same, as will other state actors -- and they will openly appeal to Americans' worst instincts to confirm our own existing biases. We have to demonstrate the media literacy to know that (a) not all content is authentic, and (b) even some authentic content is worth avoiding if it was obtained wrongfully.

August 10, 2024

On bended knee

Upon finishing in record time for a European runner and fourth place overall in the 3000-meter steeplechase, French Olympian Alice Finot found her boyfriend, dropped to one knee, and proposed marriage with a symbolic Olympic pin. ■ Predictably, a certain breed of Internet commentator emerged to decry the move as emasculating and unacceptably non-traditional. Where cheers are in order, they have nothing of merit to offer. ■ The Olympics are, at very long last, half-female, as they long ago ought to have been. And just as the sports world has long had some catching-up to do, so does love. ■ Setting the European record was Finot's victory, and she chose to share the moment with the person she loves most. There are those who would object under any circumstances to any marriage proposal performed in front of a crowd, but proposee Bruno Martinez Bargiela, too, is an established competitive athlete, so it wasn't out of line for their relationship. ■ As for the charge of emasculation, he's had nine years to decide if the relationship is right for him (and to get out if it's not). So has she. We, as onlookers, should be much happier to live in a world where a woman feels free to propose marriage than one in which she has no right to decline an arranged or forced marriage. What people do freely and voluntarily should be theirs to choose. ■ It's a feel-good moment among many at the Olympics, and anyone looking in ought to be happy to cheer them on. If love is love, and if everyone has a right to it, then proposals should be for everyone, too.

August 9, 2024

Modern barbarity

Sometimes, we become so used to the syntax of professionally-written, objective journalistic headlines that we have to re-read them to really digest what's happening. The viewpoint neutrality so highly valued can create a smokescreen for sinister motivations that are worth revealing. ■ For example, today we have this headline from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: "Death Toll In Ukraine Supermarket Strike Rises To 14 As Rescue Effort Suspended". RFE/RL is a respectable, reputable source of news, and this headline would pass scrutiny as being factual without lending moral judgment. ■ But when drained of that moral judgment, the headline also loses a critical component of its humanity. The real story behind the headline is encapsulated in this alternative: "Russia launched a missile to blow up a supermarket in Ukraine and kill the innocent people inside. 14 of them are now dead." ■ Still factual, but projected through a lens of moral expectations. And what that latter headline would say is scathing.

August 7, 2024

Give une hoot

France's folly with the River Seine continues, with another river swim being cancelled over high levels of bacteria in the water. On one hand, the distant observer has to admire the ambition of the Olympic organizers who thought they could clean up the river in time. On the other hand, it's hard not to wonder how they managed to so severely underestimate the scale of the problem. ■ The best way to keep water clean is to keep contaminants out in the first place. It's much better to prevent pollution at the source -- which often means addressing what we know as non-point-source pollution, which mostly consists of runoff from agricultural and other diffuse sources. ■ Non-point-source pollution is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons; while it's easy to point to a factory discharging polluted water from a pipe into a sewer or a nearby creek and order them to clean up their act, it's much harder to tell lots of farmers, ranchers, homeowners, and businesses to stop doing damage by the acre. ■ Thus, the farmer who over-applies some fertilizer over here, the homeowner who blows some grass clippings into the street over there, and the store that over-salts its parking lot in the wintertime down the way each contributes a little bit to a pollution problem which, in the aggregate, devastates the water quality in the next river downstream. ■ The Seine could, in theory, be cleaned through the state-of-the-art technologies already widely known to the field of civil engineering. But the flow rate of the river is considerable -- at some times, higher than 500 cubic meters per second. That's almost half a billion gallons of water per hour -- or 11.4 billion gallons per day. ■ To clean all of it to a swimmable standard would mean treating something like 38 times the typical daily flow through the water reclamation facility that serves Washington, DC, which is one of the largest in the US, or about eight times the peak flow through Chicago's Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, which is widely regarded as the largest in the world. ■ For many years, the prevailing belief was summed up in the phrase, "Dilution is the solution to pollution". That was short-sighted and incomplete. In the long run, even diluted pollutants have a way of becoming concentrated (see, for instance, the problem with mercury levels found in tuna). Taking pollutants out is possible -- but it requires an enormous scale of investment and energy. It's far better to keep out the unwanted stuff in the first place.

August 5, 2024

The risk is digested when you buy

The panicked state of global stock markets has made for some real turbulence as cliche-addicted financial writers fill their column-inches with predictable phrases like "flight to safety" and filler about "risk". It's all a rather silly way of looking at things, since any one-day decline of 3% in a stock-market index projects out on an annualized basis to the market zeroing-out completely, which is an obviously impossible proposition. ■ Even the phrase "sell-off" is awfully misleading, since by definition, every stock sale by one party was a stock purchase by another. It's easier, though, to make a big story out of emotional reactions rather than cool logic. ■ In 2015, Warren Buffett told the assembled shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, "We've been very cautious about what we've done because of the people among our families and friends who are invested in the company. We could have played harder at times, but I'd rather be 100 times too cautious than 1% too incautious. People looking at our past would say we've missed plenty of good opportunities." ■ People who think that "safety" is found in selling stocks -- especially when they're in a tizzy -- get it completely backwards. The time to make "safety" a priority is when you buy an asset: If you're quite positive that you've paid a price that is less than (or, at least, no more than equal to) the intrinsic value of that asset, then you can sleep soundly, no matter what everyone else does around you. ■ That's the kind of caution Buffett was talking about: Letting anxiety prevail before a purchase (sometimes to the point it keeps one from "playing harder" and taking a chance on what might turn out to be profitable later), so that there's no cause for panic after the purchase. Everyone is liable to make mistakes in that process, but people who look first to the intrinsic value of all investments -- from stocks to real estate to even education -- and only secondly at price have no need to be alarmed.

Unwell water

The polluted condition of the Seine has been bad enough to cause some physical distress for Olympic athletes who came into contact with the river for their competitive events. That, in turn, has been the cause of some loss of face for the French, who are otherwise viewed as a wealthy and advanced country. ■ While the French situation is a matter of pride over a choice to use a river (when alternatives could have been available -- Toyko built all-new, man-made venues for the 2020 Games), there are still 1.5 billion people on this planet who don't have access to basic sanitation services, like toilets or latrines. That's unconscionable in this day and age. ■ As many as 4 million people suffer from cholera every year, of whom as many as 143,000 may die. Meanwhile, an estimated 1.7 billion cases of dysentery are suffered each year. ■ These are thoroughly preventable diseases; the basic technologies to rehabilitate polluted water and to purify raw water in order to make it drinkable have been proven for well over a century. So while France is losing face over its polluted river, much greater real suffering takes place outside of the spotlight every day because basic sanitation and potable water services are not yet universal.

Part of our world

A meme that circulates on Facebook groups with names like "Baby Boomer Fun Events" proposes that "Younger Americans will have trouble believing this," but "there was once this guy named Walter Cronkite, who would read the news on television every weeknight. He didn't seem to have an agenda [...] He would just read the news, and then we would all just make up our own minds about what we thought." ■ It's a charmingly sentimental statement -- and the claim isn't all that far from what Cronkite himself probably would have said about his own coverage. Cronkite seems to have authentically thought of himself as a neutral, unbiased source of news and information. ■ But even if Cronkite did a respectable job of trying to report without fear or favor, it's misleading to believe that he was as neutral as the ideal might have suggested. ■ When Cronkite decided the running order of the stories to be covered on his evening news broadcast, or used his authority as managing editor of the broadcast to devote more or less time to a story, or chose to quote one source rather than another, he applied a set of values and made a judgment. ■ Inevitably, those judgments reflected values and opinions. And they were subject to the constraints of a newscast constrained by time and resources: News tends to be covered more thoroughly by television when there's a camera nearby. When Cronkite would sign off by saying, "And that's the way it is", it gave a false impression of comprehensiveness. Whatever one might think of Dan Rather's other faults, his use of the much more restrained "That's part of our world tonight" actually did a better job of reflecting the limits of reality to the audience. ■ Media literacy in Cronkite's day, as well as our own, requires the audience to realize that no tale of the day is complete, no single perspective is definitive, no report can hope to uncover all of the motivations behind events, and no journalist (no matter how aspirational or high-minded) can be completely without bias. ■ Reporters generally can and should strive to be both thorough and fair, and reasonable efforts should be devoted to earning the trust and goodwill of a fair-minded public. But audiences, too, need to realize that even Walter Cronkite wasn't really "just reading the news".

August 4, 2024

The wrong kind of unconditional love

In an utterly dismaying twist, two of the "prisoners" swapped back to Russia in exchange for Western hostages like Evan Gershkovich were children who didn't even know they were Russians. Their parents had been posing as Argentines living in Slovenia, and the children themselves were actually born in Argentina. ■ It's a story that closely tracks with the "deep cover" story told in "The Americans". But these are real lives being affected -- not a couple of fictional characters on a television show. Now uprooted from not only the homeland of their birth but also of the country where they had been residing, they are now semi-public figures in a country to which they had no realized connection until they boarded an airplane days ago. ■ Consider the cruelty in that: Their parents, the only people with whom the children have any unsevered connection in the world, had them as unwitting accomplices in a spy game. And even though the one thing every child deserves to believe is that their parents love them unconditionally and above anything else, these children already know that their parents love the Russian state more than them. ■ Some of the people welcomed home in the prisoner exchange earned a hero's welcome by enduring punishment for doing the right thing. These two children, not yet even teenagers, are only now beginning a punishment for the crimes of their parents. No child should ever have to wonder about the authenticity of their parents' love.

August 3, 2024

Schooling far away from home

A recent episode of the "Drum Tower" podcast from The Economist addresses the phenomenon of official Chinese government-run boarding schools in Tibet. The place of Tibet within the modern state of China is a fraught question already -- Tibet has many of the marks of a distinct "nation", in the sense of having a recognizable culture, with religious and linguistic characteristics that are different from their neighbors. But Tibet isn't a nation-state, since it doesn't get to govern itself (as anyone familiar with the rallying cry "Free Tibet" is already aware). ■ As the podcast reports, the Chinese government has been engaged in a campaign to build boarding schools in Tibet and to fill them using coercive techniques. The schools, notably, are taught in Mandarin rather than Tibetan. ■ Children are enrolled in the boarding schools from kindergarten age -- which means that in many cases, they begin immersion in a language other than the one spoken at home from the very beginning of their literate ages. A charitable argument would suggest that learning Mandarin is a key way to unlock future economic potential within the broader Chinese state. ■ The less charitable interpretation is that by displacing and undermining the children's home language from a tender young age, the Chinese government is pursuing an agenda to cleave the children away from their family and ethnic identities. It's a familiar model: The American and Canadian governments are being held to account for the culturally devastating practice of sending American Indian/First Nations children to boarding schools in order to force them to undergo assimilation. ■ Parents have a strong instinct to consent to whatever appears to be in the long-term best interests of their children, even when that is in tension with what appears to be in the interests of the family unit. That's what makes the practice so sinister, in effectively forcing families to choose a practice to surrender their links to their children in exchange for the likely best hope for their children to have economic opportunities in the future. It's a cruel way to subjugate a people.

August 1, 2024

Practicing friends

It's almost ritualistic how often news coverage of the Olympics zeroes in on stories of friendship -- of teammates with extraordinary bonds, of bonding in defiance of doubters, of friends who travel the globe to support their Olympians. Friendships formed in the midst of great challenges take on a special character, of course, since friendship is quite nearly always the result of shared experiences. The more extraordinary the experience, the more unusual the stories can be. ■ But this ritual ought to give the rest of us pause to consider whether sub-Olympian friendship gets the elite attention it deserves. Friendship is a skill, after all: It may feel effortless to be in a friend's company, but it takes at least some measure of effort to keep a friendship alive. ■ Perhaps we could start by helping people to recognize their own friendship typologies early on. We subject young people to all kinds of tests -- college-entrance exams, physical-fitness tests, career-finder aptitude surveys, and more. And few things are stronger clickbait than quizzes that promise some kind of self-knowledge at the end. ■ Where, then, are the tests to help people authentically figure out for themselves which of their friendship skills are weak, strong, pronounced, or hidden? Some people are great at loyalty. Others are terrific listeners. Some bring life to every party. Others always know the right way to help when it's needed. Some people will go anywhere they are invited. Others recruit new friends into existing groups. ■ Too often, though, we don't know how to leverage our strengths and overcome our weaknesses. For instance: Some people are natural ringleaders, but may not realize how much others unwittingly depend upon them to do the leading and may misinterpret that dependency as others not fully reciprocating their efforts. Others may engage constantly over phone calls, chats, or social-media posts, but not realize that others aren't always comfortable sharing personal news other than face-to-face. ■ A great deal has been said and done to discourage bullying and to place high social status on kindness. These are good marks of a society trying to become healthier. Practically all of us are born wanting to be liked by at least some others -- but we should also recognize that although human interaction may come instinctively, friendship is a life skill at which most people can (and should) try to grow.

July 30, 2024

Closing a church

Ryan Burge, a political scence professor at Eastern Illinois University, has written a poignant reflection on a turning point in his other job. On weekends, he has served as the pastor of a small American Baptist church in a nearby town. ■ But, as has been the case across nearly the entire religious landscape in America, attendance has been in chronic decline. And in Burge's case, the community has shrunk enough to have forced the church to close. ■ American culture faces a real tension, not fully understood: We've effectively crushed material want, achieving a massive level of measurable prosperity entirely unimaginable to generations that came before us. But we've done next to nothing to achieve progress towards addressing immaterial wants. ■ Therein lies a crushing problem: You can go to Walmart and satisfy practically every material need you have -- filling shopping carts full of goods that are safer, more dependable, and more advanced than anything found in the past, for a fraction of what comparable goods cost anyone in real terms (like hours worked) in the past. ■ Yet at seemingly everywhere turn, more symptoms of inadequacy in the quest to deliver on non-material needs: "Deaths of despair", a "loneliness epidemic", political and cultural figures elevated to god-like status while their biggest fans choose labels like "spiritual but not religious". ■ Religion may not be the tonic for those non-material wants, but it would take a radical departure from human nature for us to have somehow evolved past the age-old appetite for something serving up behavior, belief, and belonging -- the three characteristics of organized religion. These particularly matter in their relation to big questions about meaning and morality, and big life events like birth, marriage, and death. ■ One of the two likeliest outcomes is that organized religions will learn to adapt to changing expectations (and, probably, learning to shed some of the flaws that have discouraged or turned away so many former adherents). The other is that new forms of cultural and philosophical groups will emerge to occupy some of that social space once dominated by churches. There are already examples of people who, to varying degrees of seriousness and earnestness, have adopted Harry Potter, the Jedi from Star Wars, and the Big Lebowski as the inspirations for organizing philosophies of life. ■ A vacuum of this type cannot last forever; human nature compels people to search for big answers to important questions. And individuals cannot "belong" on their own, so the attraction to some form of group behavior is inevitable. The matters in question may be transcendent, but the changes (whether existing institutions will evolve or be replaced by others) will be made by people.

July 29, 2024

Google is promoting its artificial-intelligence offerings with an ad about sending an AI-generated fan letter to an Olympic hero. The ad seems harmless at first. But, like the output from an AI tool, it should have been checked by a human being for tone as much as for substance. ■ Few companies have done more to make high technology widely accessible than Google. Search tools, Gmail, YouTube, and many other features are available practically worldwide at no direct consumer cost. ■ But there's a problem with the perception that artificial intelligence is a field where fast dominance is the most important thing. We're in territory so new that we've hardly seen most of the perils yet, and the technology is advancing seemingly by the minute. It's a time to have both human hands on the wheel. ■ The Google ad, though, says nothing of the sort. Every business can be expected to hype its own products, but there has to be room for reason. ■ People should feel free to ask AI for algorithms and step-by-step guides to fill the gaps in their personal knowledge (e.g., "What are the elements of a great fan letter?"). But nobody should ask AI to have human experiences for them (e.g., "Write a fan letter to Simone Biles telling her how much I look up to her"). No matter what stage we occupy in the hype cycle, it's too soon to give up on basic, deeply humane matters.

July 28, 2024

Admitting defeat

It's close to an iron law of human affairs that the more appalling the behavior of a strongman regime while in power, the harder they will cling to power. And the more desperately they cling to power, the more dreadful onlookers should assume their behavior has been. ■ Venezuela's regime -- a continuation of the Hugo Chavez bloc that took power in 1999 -- is politically illiberal and economically incompetent. It takes some remarkable mismanagement to chase 7.7 million people out of a country of 31.2 million, and to take the world's largest oil reserves and turn them into an economy that has contracted by 70% in about a decade. ■ But that regime is claiming it has won a presidential election, even though things look so corrupt that nearby countries like Costa Rica and Chile are effectively disputing the claimed results. Pre-election opinion polls made it fairly clear the opposition would win. ■ People get tired even of good governments after a while. (Even Winston Churchill got the boot shortly after victory in World War II.) Bad ones last for even shorter. The known truth about Venezuela's government is atrocious. What the regime is trying to keep from being held accountable for doing is likely even worse.

July 27, 2024

Watching the Olympic Games

The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games drew huge ratings for NBC: About 29 million viewers. That's a big increase over the Tokyo Games, which undoubtedly pleases the company's executives -- but a huge audience is really a statement of legitimization. ■ The Olympic Games as we know them only matter because we agree that they matter -- it's not automatic; it's a choice. There are other global competitions -- world championships, World Cups, even X Games. There were athletes well before the first modern Olympics in 1896, and something else could conceivably be bigger than the Olympics someday. ■ That the Olympics are treated as the pinnacle is entirely a function of the consent of audiences and athletes alike. And in that is a lesson for the rest of life that is much bigger than any story about sports. It's a lesson that abstract concepts have to take real forms, and those real forms have to be legitimized by choice. ■ A flaming piano floating down the Seine isn't peace; it's a performance. But kicking Russia out of the Olympics for barbarically invading Ukraine is a concrete step in the name of peace that accrues to the credit of the International Olympic Committee. ■ The Games have a decidedly imperfect history of taking concrete actions on ideals like peace. But the more they do, the more they earn the legitimacy of a watching world.

July 26, 2024

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.

The paradox of digital publication

Compared with at some prior generations, Americans today enjoy a spectacular amount of free time: An average of more than five hours per day. Among teenagers, almost five hours per day are spent on social media alone. If adolescence is (as commonly believed) a time of long-term habit formation, it seems likely that we should brace for a long-term future in which social media influences "adult" culture nearly as much as it influences "youth" culture. ■ Only a few centuries ago, information was produced in small volumes and moved slowly. The renowned Great Library of Alexandria, accidentally burned by Julius Caesar's army in 48 BC, may have contained around 400,000 manuscripts. In the time when every manuscript had to be copied by hand, that made it (probably) the world's largest collection. Hand-copying was extremely slow and the labor involved placed a severe constraint on the amount of work that could be printed. ■ Along came Gutenberg's printing press in 1448, and suddenly both the speed of dissemination and the quantity of it could be vastly expanded. Today, the Des Moines Public Library contains 365,000 printed books -- about the same as the Great Library of Alexandria. ■ Digital publication effectively destroys all of the previous barriers to both speed and reach -- digital publications can be distributed instantaneously and infinitely. There are 70,000 copyright-free books just on Project Gutenberg, and another 41.8 million scanned print items available on the Internet Archive. And those are just the libraries, counting none of the billions trillions of items published to the various platforms of the Internet. ■ While that liberation from material constraints probably is mostly for good, society will regret it if we don't reflect thoughtfully on that rapidly escalating share of time spent on social media (the content value of which will tend to start low and quickly fall to nearly zero) and how it could displace the attention paid to higher-value work (like what might be worth curating for a library collection or editing for publication in a periodical). It's especially problematic because the incentives in place now reward producing even more content even faster, with the biggest rewards often accruing to those who mercilessly exploit the phenomenon of the "curiosity gap" rather than directly enlightening the audience.

July 25, 2024

Substantial layoffs at John Deere's plants in Iowa

After issuing a preview warning just over a week ago, John Deere has announced layoffs at three important Iowa locations -- Waterloo, Johnston, and Dubuque. A total of 170 workers are being severed from the company, only weeks after hundreds more were let go from the plants at Waterloo, Dubuque, and Davenport. ■ The company's last annual report looked strong -- sales were up, net income was up, and net equity had grown generously. But John Deere says that it's seeing "a 20 percent decline in sales from 2023 to 2024", and it warned employees at the tail end of May that layoffs were coming. ■ Something structural must be hidden inside the figures; the reported sales figures are down (more dramatically for the latest quarter than for the one before it), but when a company goes well beyond the front-line production floor and gets rid of staff functions, then management is signalling that it thinks hard times are going to stay. ■ "Layoff" remains an undesirable euphemism; it generally tends to suggest that the fault lies with the employer rather than the employee, but that's hardly any comfort to someone stuck looking for a job. And while Waterloo, for instance, isn't exactly the company town it once was (even bigger layoffs in the 1980s saw to that), it's still a place where Deere accounts for 8.4% of all jobs in the county -- even more than the local hospitals, the public schools, or the University of Northern Iowa. ■ If those jobs really aren't coming back anytime soon, what is terrible news today for the laid-off employees and their families also represents an ugly warning to the community at large.

July 24, 2024

Not-war is not peace

President Joe Biden offered something of a valedictory address to the American public, explaining his extra-ordinary decision to voluntarily step aside from seeking re-election. The wisdom of that decision, and in not making it much sooner, will remain for history to ultimately judge. ■ In his speech, the President claimed that "I'm the first President of this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world." If measured by the strict standard of being engaged in a declared state of war, the claim is true. But words matter, and they matter in no small degree when they are used to obfuscate reality. ■ Someone, probably with state backing, has been assaulting the computer networks of utility systems on American soil. Ships of the US Navy are shooting down missiles in the Red Sea and attempting to provide cover for cargo vessels in a hot zone. Russian and Chinese aircraft have just conducted what appears to be a joint maneuver perilously close to Alaskan arspace. ■ In the strictest of terms, we are not "at war". But for the short-term and intermediate-term future, at least, we should expect to remain engaged in a lot of conflicts that may fall short of the definition of war. But they're definitely not peace, either, and we need to resolve not to use language to obscure the facts. ■ We would deal differently with peace, if we could have it, but others seem bent on keeping us from enjoying that. Their determination to cause trouble will have to be matched by our resolution not to lie to ourselves about the condition of reality.

July 23, 2024

After CrowdStrike

As efforts continue to fix computer systems broken by a faulty update pushed by CrowdStrike, recognition seems to be spreading that our computer technology may be more fragile than the popular imagination has heretofore believed. Microsoft says that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected, though the impact was amplified by the fact that many of those machines were doing critical work in sectors like air transportation. It's been so traumatizing that members of Congress have already requested a hearing with CrowdStrike's CEO. ■ Mistakes will happen, but so will deliberate attacks. That this event was the result of the former should still compel some serious thinking about the potential for the latter. Cyberwarfare is a whole new domain, and America has well-equipped adversaries who are determined to make asymmetric use of their tools, to cause damage and inflict pain. ■ What makes the cyber domain especially challenging is that everywhere is on the front line. It both flattens and scrambles geography, so that an attack may come from anywhere and cause trouble anywhere else. ■ Yet it is often geographically attributable: The US has, for instance, identified specific buildings in China that are used for cyberwarfare, and Russia is known to send attackers abroad to conduct on-site attacks. The scale of the trouble is hard to exaggerate, and adversaries will be tempted to use ever more of the cyber weapons they develop. ■ It is also possible (perhaps even likely) that some Americans may decide to engage in cyberwarfare for themselves, possibly even for patriotic motives. And that raises a problem from the past. In his 1906 annual message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt warned that when Americans mistreated foreigners, "The mob of a single city may at any time perform acts of lawless violence against some class of foreigners which would plunge us into war. That city by itself would be powerless to make defense against the foreign power thus assaulted", and that "The entire power and the whole duty to protect the offending city or the offending community lies in the hands of the United States Government." ■ Applying Roosevelt's question to modern claims, what happens if a group of computer science students at an American university decides to apply their skills against the Russian army to hamper an attack against Ukraine? Or against China as retaliation for a provocation against the Philippines in the South China Sea? Or against Israel as a protest against a military action in Gaza? Or against Hungary for mistreating asylum-seekers? ■ The targets may be allies or adversaries. The causes may be righteous or unjust. But the tools are now available everywhere to do damage almost anywhere -- so it's much easier to step over the line from private behavior to international incident, and while we have some legal framework for handling such cases, it's hardly complete. We need a holistic understanding of cybersecurity to take root -- encompassing questions of defensive and offensive behaviors, civil and criminal legal boundaries, military reach, and more. Thus far, we have little of the above, and the CrowdStrike incident should serve only to highlight the scale of what could be the grim consequences if the next incident is intentional.

July 22, 2024

Shortest primary in history

CNN estimates that it took a single day for Vice President Kamala Harris to lock up the Democratic nomination for President. It helps to start on the ticket.

America needs an NTSB clone for deaths involving police

An Illinois woman was shot and killed by a police officer in her own home after calling 911 to report suspicions of a prowler. She seems to have alarmed the officer after moving towards a pot of boiling water on a stovetop. ■ The sheriff's deputy who shot and killed the woman is facing murder charges and has been fired by his department. But entirely beyond the criminal trial process that is taking shape, some institution needs to be responsible for assessing the circumstances that led up to the incident and making clear recommendations for avoiding similar circumstances in the future. ■ The US needs an agency modeled after the NTSB, with a charge to investigate the causes and circumstances of civilian deaths when in contact with police and to supply recommendations to reduce the number of those incidents. Like the NTSB, it needs to be separate from and independent of any other regulatory or law-enforcement agencies, so that it can furnish thorough and objective advice to the public and to policy-makers -- not to prosecute, but to avoid unnecessary repeat failures.. ■ If we don't like an outcome, it's up to us as a society to study and measure the causes, and then to take deliberate action to change the course of events. Failure to do so only ensures that more undesirable events will occur. The deaths of people in their own homes after they have called for help surely must rank high on the list of undesirable events worthy of concerted effort toward a correction.

July 21, 2024

Which generation claims the Vice President?

The Democratic Party appears to be coalescing around Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of the widely predicted but still surprising wake of President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw from his run for re-election. As is so often the curse of Vice Presidents, she has been close to the spotlight for the last four years -- but remains in many ways unknown to the mainstream voter. ■ It is obvious that age, in the relative sense, will be a central issue in her likely head-to-head campaign against an opponent nearly 20 years older. That will be especially likely considering that age is the central factor behind President Biden's withdrawal. ■ Aside from the comparison in individual ages, there will also be an inescapable generational component to the contest. Vice President Harris was born in October 1964, technically making her one of the very last Baby Boomers. The standard definition places the crossover point from Boomers to Generation X the year following her birth, in 1965. But just as there is some fuzziness around the margins of Generation X and the Millennials (sometimes called a "micro-generation" of "Xennials"), the same is true of the Boomer-to-Xer crossover. ■ President Obama may have been seen as cooler than the average Boomer, but having been born in 1961, he was solidly in that generational cohort. With her own campaign to shape -- and potentially her own White House to run -- it will be quite a sociological study to see whether Vice President Harris takes on more of the style of her near-seniors (like President Obama) or her near-juniors, like former House Speaker Paul Ryan (born in 1970), Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (born in 1971), or former Senator Ben Sasse (born in 1972). ■ Generational distinctions are often softer in reality than they are made out to be on paper, but there are certain characteristics about the younger cohort into which she might fit that reveal themselves both on the campaign trail and in office. Which personality emerges and prevails under the conditions of a significantly accelerated campaign?

July 20, 2024

Sage advice

Every year around the beginning of May, tens of thousands of people head to Omaha, Nebraska, to spend hours in an arena listening to a nonagenarian respond to an unscripted Q&A session. Warren Buffett is no ordinary old man, of course, and it is nothing short of astonishing that he remains mentally sharp and physically energetic enough to remain at the head of one of the world's largest companies. ■ But more of the questions he answers tend to be about matters either only indirectly related to the business or unrelated to it altogether. Audience members recognize not just that he is smart, but that he is unusually wise. And it is his sagacity they value. The questions tend to begin with the words "How would you..." or "What would you do...", because the inquirers want the benefit of hard-earned advice. Even if he were to relinquish all control of the company tomorrow, people would still plan to come next year -- because he is viewed less as a manager than as a masterful source of advice. ■ It has been pointed out that Bill Clinton, who finished his second term as President nearly a quarter of a century ago, is still younger than both of the major-party candidates expected to run for President in the fall. Bill Gates, having accumulated nearly unfathomable wealth and still barely old enough to qualify for full Social Security retirement benefits, is now free to spend his time studying whatever interests him -- advising, marshalling resources, or convening experts wherever he can. Gates is the same age as Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the framework of the World Wide Web, and merely one year younger than Ruby Bridges, through whom the schools of New Orleans were desegregated. ■ These individuals are notable because they, and many others like them, are still living and should be seen as sources of sage advice even though their individual moments in the spotlight are long over. And they are relatively young enough that, if they were to live as long as Warren Buffett, they could be resources for society perhaps into the middle of this century. ■ Yet we, as a society, are terrible about convening them in forums where they can be queried by generations younger than them. Perhaps as a result of that failure, altogether too many American leaders try to remain in the center of the action for far too long. ■ The median age in the United States Senate is in the mid-60s -- meaning that former President Barack Obama, who is just about to turn 63, would be in the younger half of the age bracket if he were to return to the Senate. That Dianne Feinstein died while still in office at age 90 reflects poorly on how we select for leaders while retaining the counsel of our seniors. ■ If there were any perfect answers, they would be obvious already. But the problem is clear enough: It should not be extraordinary for someone like Mitt Romney to voluntarily step aside and move into consultative roles before time takes them out. We ought to look for social models that treat wisdom as a valuable and renewable resource -- not as something to be extracted from individuals who keep working full-time until dying at their posts. ■ Perhaps we could start by convening a few of our wiser elders someplace for an annual Buffett-style Q&A. We as a society shouldn't turn our backs on what they have to tell us -- but we shouldn't behave as though they have to remain in the starring roles long after others should have begun moving into the spotlight.

July 19, 2024

Rebooted off

A snafu on a Microsoft cloud computing platform forced the country's major airlines to ground flights, attracting undesirable consumer and regulatory attention to the airlines -- and at least some attention to Microsoft itself. The real culprit was a faulty backend update from CrowdStrike. ■ As cloud computing continues to expand the number of online activities that people can do while on the move, there's no end in sight to the increase in demand for that computing power. Especially for things that people need to do while on the move -- like retrieving information about airline reservations -- cloud computing is the logical place to turn. ■ But we overlook at our own peril the fact that "cloud" doesn't mean "trouble-free". One of the selling points for cloud computing services is that the vendor has to do the work to keep the conputer infrastructure functioning, while the customer rests easy. Sometimes, that goes wrong. And when the systems involved are critical to lots of different systems, the damage can be widespread. ■ Chances seem very good that the cloud computing infrastructure in the United States will become a hot target for an adversarial government to attack sometime in the foreseeable future. What consequences that will have, we can't know. But they are likely to be troubling and expensive. Incidents like this one ought to be taken seriously as previews of much larger things that can go wrong.

July 18, 2024

No place like an affordable home

The Economist notes an abrupt change in one of the most significant ways American households deal with what is (for most) their biggest expense: Housing. In 2020, homeownership was cheaper than renting for 84% of the country. Today, renting would be cheaper than buying, they estimate, for 89%. ■ It's a large change in both magnitude and speed. A variety of inflationary pressures along with rising interest rates and a reluctance on the part of existing homeowners to sell (when they're sitting on cheap 30-year mortgages) make up the recipe for the effect. ■ A good definition of "home" might be: A place where one can be incapacitated safely. When a person is sick, impaired, or merely asleep, they need to be somewhere they can be reasonably sure of their own safety. If we're in a condition when it's overwhelmingly likely to be cheaper for "home" to be a place that is no more secure than a 6- or 12-month lease, then we ought to take that as a good indication that we are not producing enough new housing stock. ■ Thomas Jefferson left an imprint on American culture that favored land ownership as a means of national well-being and security: "[S]mall land holders are the most precious part of a state". But fixating too much on the land and too little on the simple conditions of "home" may have deprived us of housing solutions that cover more of the gap between rented places and big suburban tracts with giant lawns that don't do much good. ■ For some, rented homes will always make sense, either for economic reasons or for other causes. But we as an interested public shouldn't be satisfied with a state of affairs that leaves ownership of a home farther out of reach than renting.

July 15, 2024

If a belief in human agency goes any farther than pure lip service, then everyone who possesses ordinary mental faculties faces a common challenge: To come up with some form of belief system by which to make the important decisions in life. The process is usually messy, since a belief system will ordinarily touch on aspects of life ranging from politics to religion and spirituality to family life to civic notions of duty and justice. ■ The process isn't even laid out in a straightforward way: Americans nominally obtain legal adulthood at the age of 18, whether they've wrestled with any of those questions or not. Religions and cultural institutions choose a range of ages upon which to confer adulthood. The tax collector, meanwhile, can start dipping into paychecks early on, putting a spin on the alert youth's understanding of fairness quite early on. ■ Some people then go on to achieve notoriety or even fame for their choice of belief system. This attention doesn't often seem to follow those who arrived at their belief systems slowly and organically. We seem to have far more stories resembling Saul on the road to Damascus. The phrase, after all, is "zeal of the convert". ■ Even though a person may sincerely hold beliefs -- new or old -- it doesn't necessarily follow that other people need to defer to the seriousness of those beliefs. Zeal and sincerity don't necessarily make a belief right or wrong. ■ That seems important to recall in times when emphatic opinions are never beyond arm's reach. Real honesty about a belief comes with an obligation to paint a boundary around its limitations. Just as people need to recognize their individual circles of competence, we need to recognize the boundaries around belief systems. Nobody should be trusted with their belief in a thing until they also know what tempers their belief in that same thing.

July 12, 2024

We're still learning about inflation

Anyone who learned economics prior to the turn of the century may be forgiven for anchoring their expectations of certain variables in places that may no longer make sense. For instance, the prevailing wisdom of the time -- even among those authoring then-contemporary textbooks -- was that the natural rate of unemployment was probably around 6%, and that lower rates would trigger inflation. It seems like that figure may be closer to 4% today. ■ We're experiencing inflation, but more likely due to the shocking things done to expand the money supply in and following the pandemic of 2020 than the rate of unemployment. And there's evidence to believe that we're still processing some of the lingering side effects of massive interventions conducted in the 2008 financial panic. Lots of people and institutions pulled way back from old, more excitable habits: Things got weird around 2008 and then stayed that way. ■ Economist Greg Mankiw makes a pretty compelling case that there is still a relationship between unemployment and inflation, but that it's very hard to make much use of either side of the trade-off in time to make monetary policy respond usefully: "The problem is that because we don't know the natural rate of unemployment with much precision, it is hard to disentangle supply and demand. That is true even with the benefit of hindsight, but the task is even more formidable in real time when data are preliminary and incomplete." A lot of this may sound like inside baseball to people who don't follow economics in detail, but perceptions of inflation are casting a huge shadow over the 2024 Presidential election. ■ Prudent management of the money supply is the chief job of the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to be managed apolitically and in the best interests of the country as a whole (which generally seems to be the case). But when people exhibit strong feelings about forces they don't fully understand and mostly cannot control, it's a subject worth lots of study.

July 11, 2024

That's what friends are for

The leaders of the NATO member countries gathered for a group photo at the White House to mark the opening of their summit meeting, and it has been remarked that even if some partners in the alliance still lag behind the expectation that they should spend 2% of GDP on defense (Luxembourg, Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, and Canada are the farthest behind), the fact remains that the persistence of a voluntary alliance among so many countries is itself a good thing. ■ Too many people try to judge the world by fixed points when what always matters is the direction of travel. There is no perfect destination, no Utopia, no end state of human affairs. And to fixate on the hope of arriving at one is a guaranteed way to end up frustrated and dissatisfied forever. ■ In particular, there is no end state for international security, no matter how attractive the mirage of a permanent peace might be. There is no such thing as security-as-destination. There is only the difference between growing more secure and becoming less secure. ■ An alliance isn't about an unchanging end state: The trends are what matter. The NATO alliance is a tool for growing more secure, and people who don't appreciate that direction of travel are likely to make grave mistakes about what to value and which strategies to embrace.

Putting out the neighbor's fire

Unsurprisingly, the NATO summit has involved discussion about furnishing support to Ukraine in its time of need. Even if you could snap your fingers and end the war and occupation tonight, Russia and Ukraine would still share a land border more than a thousand miles long. That's greater than the distance from Chicago to Denver. Ukraine's survival even after the war will depend on strength.

July 10, 2024

Learn from the past without living there

In a poem predating Confucius, an ancient Chinese author wrote, "In the old capital they wore / T'ae hats and black caps small; / And ladies, who famed surnames bore, / Their own thick hair let fall. / Such simple ways are seen no more, / And the changed manners I deplore." ■ Poetry is invariably hard to reproduce in a new language since something of the original is always -- quite literally -- lost in translation. But the recurring theme of "In Praise of By-Gone Simplicity" is a familiar one: The poet longs for the good old days, romanticizing how much simpler they were. ■ That sentiment seems pretty quaint, considering those "good old days" must have been more than 2,500 years ago. Literally everything about those times is certain to appear simpler than today. But that perspective also illustrates the intrinsic fallacy of mistaking simplicity for virtue. Life was less complex 100 years ago, much less 2,500 years ago, yet no sensible person would trade places with the occupants of the past just to escape complexity if they truly realized what else they were giving up. ■ Reflexive, unthinking nostalgia is a mistake. Yes, things get more complex with the passage of time, but they also tend to get much better, even if there are setbacks and obstacles along the way. We have to recognize plainly that it's nothing new to imagine that the past was better than it actually was. Nor is it new that some people will long for that past even in the face of reason and evidence. ■ Nostalgia is nothing new in human nature. As time marches on, it's always up to the present generation to appreciate the present, learn honestly from the past, and aspire with intentionality to a better future. Plenty of lessons can be extracted from the past without us having to take up residence there.

July 8, 2024

Puzzles and the AI future

Countless breathless commentators have opined about either the unlimited potential or the unspeakable dangers of artificial intelligence. So far, the evidence is entirely mixed: Some examples of AI, like using machine learning to assist in complex scientific problems like protein folding, weigh on the good side of the scale. Others, like some of the bizarre hallucinations served up as authentic search results, weigh heavily on the bad. ■ As with all technologies, the extent to which AI is good or bad depends upon the values of the people using it. And it's being used badly by many, to be sure -- the evidence points to widespread abuse by people submitting partially or completely AI-generated, nonsense-stuffed papers to academic journals, just for example. But there is a wide scope of possibility for it to be used well, particularly if it's put to use as an aid to human thinking (rather than as a substitute for it). ■ Human minds are wired to try to solve puzzles. It's why we see shapes in the clouds and form superstitions -- our brains are very good at making connections, even when they are not justified. Artificial intelligence tools could be put to extremely good use in breaking complex problems into human-friendly pieces. ■ Small puzzles are attractive -- millions of people play Sudoku or Wordle or Jumble or the New York Times Crossword. It's when problems seem too big or lack obvious constituent parts that people shy away. ■ That's where AI should be asked to step in. It's probably not ready yet, either in terms of sophistication or data and human safety. Lots of problems are complicated specifically because there is no existing path to a solution, and others bear heavily enough on personal choices that we need to be wary of turning over too much intimate detail to systems with insufficient safeguards. ■ But AI is likely not too far removed from the stage when it could analyze large problems and recommend bite-sized component pieces -- puzzles, really -- that could appeal to our natural instincts. These puzzles could make work seem more interesting and big personal questions seem less daunting. That would be a highly human-centered way to put high technology to use.

July 7, 2024

A big year for better maps

2024 is a cartographically interesting year for two reasons: The Summer Olympics and the record-breaking number of people choosing elected leaders -- more than half of the world's population. For both reasons, this deserves to be the year of the cartogram. ■ Conventionally, we display maps according to physical shapes and political boundaries. When we do it with the entire globe, this tends to create substantial distortions that make places near the poles appear disproportionately large. (The Mercator projection is famously the most egregious violator, but even "good" projections still create distortions.) ■ But even when we find ways to mitigate the physical distortions, another huge distortion remains. When we illustrate political boundaries (around countries or individual states or provinces within countries), we end up prioritizing the margins. Margins, though, are just that -- edge cases. ■ The margin between Montana and Idaho is relatively recognizable, for example, but if we're representing people and what they do, it's not very important. What's important is to see where people are concentrated. Population clusters are important and density is important -- not the arbitrary boundaries drawn by things like rivers and longitudinal meridians. ■ Cartograms solve this by representing populations in equivalent units, then roughly placing them in proximity to one another. Thus, a cartogram of the United Kingdom represents London much larger than it appears on a geographical map -- because that's where all the people are. Similarly, a cartogram of the United States makes New England and the East Coast much bigger than Montana and Idaho, because that's where the population is weighted. ■ It's obvious how this makes election returns easier to process and understand, but it also makes global events like the Olympics more comprehensible. Land masses like Siberia don't win gold medals; the people who live in individual countries do. And what a lesson it would likely be for many people to realize that, contrary to most physical projections on the world map, countries like Nigeria and Indonesia and Pakistan are members of the top-ten club for population. ■ Even the finest, most balanced Winkel tripel projection showing their physical boundaries can't reveal how big they are in terms of human lives: The metric that should matter most. Given the scale and scope of events taking place this year, 2024 ought to be the year when cartograms make a splash onto television, computer, and smartphone screens everywhere.

July 5, 2024

Voters may be right to get bored

After controlling the government there for 14 years, the UK's Conservative Party has been stomped by its rival, the Labour Party, in the election of a new Parliament. It's the kind of hard turn away from the status quo that the Conservatives will undoubtedly have to undergo some kind of process of reflection -- probably one involving a "post-mortem" report to "chart a new course forward", or something similar. ■ The people of every country are entitled to self-determination; it isn't for outsiders looking in to decide what government is right or wrong for them to freely elect. (Unfree states may be a different matter entirely.) But we can certainly look at them with interest, and perhaps take lessons from them. ■ A lesson worth taking from the British election is that voters are prone to bouts of restlessness. It doesn't seem likely that the fundamental philosophical expectations of the British people changed in a landslide -- public opinion can and often does change rapidly on particular issues, but people's basic temperamental expectations of their leaders do so far less often. ■ That restlessness is probably, on balance, a good check on power. If free people can be reliably counted upon to just want change for its own sake from time to time, that not only helps to discourage abuses of power but also to encourage periodic waves of reform, both within parties and across aisles. ■ It often requires some real sclerosis for a party to take the kind of beating that British voters just gave the Conservatives, but the basic mechanism of voter restlessness is useful in any democracy for placing a check on power, even when that power is exercised well.

July 4, 2024

The luckiest child

It was in the context of an annual meeting of shareholders during which Warren Buffett was asked about his confidence in the American economy in light of the "CNBC" threats: Chemical, nuclear, biological, and cyber. The question was raised in 2015, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks and a few years after Mitt Romney had been mocked for pointing at Russia's government as a leading source of threat. ■ Buffett's response, though it was offered as business analysis rather than a patriotic rallying cry, remains applicable today, almost a decade later: "The economic system is enormously powerful; there will be fits and starts, but imagine what a flyover tour of the country would have looked like in 1776. Everything that's been developed since that time is profit." ■ "People fret about a 2% economic growth rate," continued Buffett, "but with a 1% population growth rate that still results in major growth over time. But great growth can be negated by the work of madmen, and we need an extremely vigilant security operation in the US. The country will do extraordinarily well if we ward off those threats or at least minimize their impact." He's been proven right economically: Despite incredible setbacks like the Covid-19 pandemic, the US economy is 16% larger on a per-person basis than when Buffett was asked. ■ But economic growth isn't the only measure that counts. It's a massive contributor to human welfare, of course, but so are factors like personal liberty, cultural development, and the capacity for individuals to flourish to the greatest extent their own gifts and abilities will allow. ■ And on that measure, Buffett offered words that are about as patriotic as anything ever said on American soil: "The luckiest person in history on a probabilistic basis is the baby born in the US today." The challenge to all of us who are heirs to the American experiment is to ensure that the trend continues -- so that the baby born in 2024 is luckier than the baby born in 2015, and that the baby born in 2033 is luckier still. ■ None of it is assured; that speaks to a process of self-improvement, not an inflexible outcome. Every Independence Day should be a reminder to strive to overcome imperfections -- "God mend thine every flaw" -- and to apply our own self-control in the pursuit of becoming better.

July 3, 2024

Beryl lands on Jamaica

It can be difficult to imagine an event like a hurricane as much more than an abstraction on a map or a dramatic video clip of wind and waves. But Hurricane Beryl's collision with Jamaica will almost certainly shine a light on a more complicated scale. ■ A hard-hitting natural disaster, like a hurricane depositing rainfall amounts of 12" or more, places a heavy burden on the basic infrastructure upon which everything else is built: Roads, power supplies, drinking water, and sanitation. ■ Much of the western shore of Jamaica, for instance, is bound together by a two-lane highway, the A1. It is vital, but it is also vulnerable: Narrow, and often just a few feet away and feet above the sea. There are river crossings where a flash flood could undermine or wipe out a narrow bridge and disrupt access for months. ■ As with so many economic problems, it is a matter of the chicken and the egg: It's hard to pay for infrastructure without economic growth, and it's hard to get economic growth without good infrastructure. Jamaica's per-capita GDP after inflation hasn't really changed since the mid-1990s. And the strength of the country's tourism sector could become a liability if visitors simply cannot make it to vacation destinations. ■ We should always worry about the first-order effects of a natural disaster -- the immediate human impact, in terms of lives lost and lives affected. But we should also take note of the second-order effects: How much capacity is required to bounce back from a major hit, and how resilient the reconstructed infrastructure will be in anticipation of future disasters.

July 2, 2024

Changing fortunes

As of late March, just a little more than three months ago, more than 80% of the state of Iowa was rated at some level of moderate drought or worse. In October, that value was greater than 95%. ■ A few places in the state are still "abnormally dry", but the drought has been erased statewide. Drought, though, has been replaced by catastrophic flooding; Spencer, Iowa, lost 1,000 homes to a flood that evolved basically out of nowhere. Not far away, places like Correctionville, Iowa, North Sioux City, South Dakota, and Mankato, Minnesota experienced comparable levels of devastation. The drought-to-flood reversal wasn't literally overnight, but it was fast enough to defy normal human expectations. (For an even faster deterioration of conditions, see the record-smashing intensification of Hurricane Beryl. ■ These are climatological manifestations of a maxim worth remembering in lots of other areas of life: Things are rarely as bad as they seem, but they can get much worse much faster than we can imagine. As humans, we seem predisposed to over-estimating how bad things are in the moment right before our eyes, and to under-estimating how much preparatory work needs to be done from day to day to keep the worst from happening. ■ There are plenty of people who take those preparations too far, but usually only in isolation: Think of climate catastrophists, doomsday preppers, and death-of-democracy keyboard warriors. The problem with a singular fixation is that it tends to result in blindered thinking, like that of the climate activist who wants economic "de-growth" or an intentional decline in the population, but who won't entertain the possibility of advanced nuclear power generation. ■ The drama of a "solution" isn't a good measure of its sensibility. Figuring that out and intentionally finding ways to build constructively, iteratively, and persistently toward the more prudent long-term solutions that bear fruit with less fanfare.

June 30, 2024

Living in a material world

The last two hundred years or so have seen a radical improvement in the economic conditions of most of the human race. It was only around 1830 when the first steam locomotives began to displace horses as the power hauling trains on tracks. Everything else we would consider "modern" in the world has arrived since that time, from telecommunications to electricity to potable water to penicillin. It's all been part of a two-century explosion in economic growth, attributable to technology, trade, ingenuity, and human will. ■ Two hundred years really isn't that long in the scale of human history. John Quincy Adams was elected in 1824 and lived until 1848 (when he was still in government, serving in the House of Representatives). That meant his life overlapped with that of Grover Cleveland (born in 1837), whose own life lasted until 1908 -- the same year Lyndon Johnson was born. And every President alive today possesses memories of Johnson's Presidential era. ■ Whether we measure political "generations" or simply the genealogical ones, we only need single digits to reach back to a conclusively pre-modern time. Yet the truly radical improvement in humanity's ability to satisfy material needs almost unfathomably well (compared with those pre-modern times) hasn't been matched by a concomitant improvement in our ability to satisfy other vital dimensions of human life, and that creates an unmistakable but often-overlooked tension in life experience. ■ We and our relatively recent forebears have, for instance, effectively decimated the rate of child mortality -- a spectacular human achievement by any standard. Yet while there have been considerable improvements in child-rearing since that time, it would be hard to argue that we've made comparable progress in knowing how to raise children to be well-rounded, self-confident, and prepared to live fulfilling lives. Much progress has been made, of course, but lots of parents still hit their kids, the Surgeon General has campaigned against a "loneliness epidemic", and extremely alarming indicators of fragile mental wellness among adolescents and teenagers must not be overlooked. ■ While those are only a few examples, many other such gaps can be found between the spectacular improvement in material circumstances and less-impressive improvement in sociological and psychological measures of wellness. We should acknowledge that the gaps are often disorienting. ■ Yet we also have to recognize that improvements in both material and non-material conditions are mostly iterative; they build on what came before, and have to be maintained with intentionality and discipline if they are to be passed along. We shouldn't so much despair that our progress on matters other than material conditions has lagged as we should take confidence from the astonishing economic and technological progress of the last two centuries that enormous improvements in other human affairs are possible -- and aspire to achieve them.

June 28, 2024

A time for hard thinking

The European Union is on the verge of selecting Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas as its new High Representative for Foreign Affairs, a role whose closest American counterpart is the Secretary of State. It's a major office even in ordinary times, and these times are not ordinary. ■ Lots of news coverage defaults to calling Prime Minister Kallas a "hard-liner", but that phrase ought to come under further scrutiny. First and foremost, compared to what? ■ She leads a small country with a transformative modern history, with a large and obviously belligerent neighbor literally across the fence. What alternative is there? Estonia has about 1.2 million people (fewer people than Maine), and a little less land area than West Virginia. Russia is bigger by orders of magnitude. ■ Instead of "hard-liner", it seems like "steadfast and serious" is a better description. She lived under Soviet occupation, so clarity about standing with strength against her troublesome neighbor is a virtue, not a vice. ■ Based on her record and rhetorical history, this looks like one of the best moves the EU has made in recent memory. It has begun looking at absorbing Ukraine into its membership, and only a firm stance in defense of every frontier will suffice. Pejoratives like "hard-liner" may be easy to grasp, but they run the risk of implying that a softer alternative is available or even preferable.

June 27, 2024

Everyone's got an opinion

In the scheme of human development, the First Amendment is a triumph. It wasn't obvious to the world then that humans possessed an intrinsic right to air their thoughts in the forms of speech, print, or protest. Nor is it sufficiently obvious to the world now; some reputable indicators have shown the balance of freedom in retreat for two decades worldwide. ■ Yet even James Madison, contributing author of and advocate for the Constitution, recognized that good things could often be imperfect: "[T]he purest of human blessings must have a portion of alloy in them; that the choice must always be made, if not of the lesser evil, at least of the greater, not the perfect, good; and that in every political institution, a power to advance the public happiness involves a discretion which may be misapplied and abused." ■ One "alloy" of the First Amendment is that it artificially subsidizes a surplus of speech: Particularly, it encourages the over-production of speech about politics. Not about ideas, per se, but about contests and figures -- the "horse race", above all. ■ Other subjects are often even more important. Science and technology, economics, international relations, and many others can be far more important. But they are complex and require expertise. They rarely lend themselves to the kinds of "team" alignments without which it can be hard to get audiences interested. ■ Meanwhile, there are often small but intensely interested parties who have strong incentives to constrain the boundaries of discussion. Experts, gatekeepers, public relations representatives, activists, and others are ready to pounce in the name of accuracy, fairness, or simple self-interest. Some even get litigious. ■ With horse-race politics, though, we recognize and respect a nearly unassailable right to speculate, criticize, and even fabricate. Everyone can have an opinion, nearly any opinion is legally safe to declare, and no special knowledge is required to either start the discussion or to join it. Public figures make for easy caricatures and the aspect of team rivalry is easy to spur. ■ That second-order consequence of over-supplying mostly meaningless content is not an argument for diminishing the First Amendment, of course. But it's vital to notice the consequences. A tendency towards maximum freedom for political speech can leave the public square overstuffed with the discoursive equivalent of empty calories -- and a bit light on the "vegetables" of issues away from politics.

June 25, 2024

No debate about it

No small number of students still apply for college admissions or for scholarships via written essays. As with any sorting test, the written essay has its imperfections and its drawbacks. Yet it also offers a reasonably fair set of conditions under which the applicant can demonstrate their clarity of thought. ■ Writing isn't the only skill that matters, but it is almost universally demanded of people in the professional class. In part, we expect writing because we expect to have our time respected: Most people read much faster than anyone can naturally speak (or listen). ■ Whereas even a gifted speaker can stumble, meander, or misquote when called upon for an extemporaneous reply to a question, writing offers the respondent an opportunity to think through a persuasive case and otherwise organize their thoughts before subjecting them to scrutiny. ■ While it will be a welcome development to have a Presidential debate without a noisy audience to tip the scales of public perception, it remains the case that the best alternative to televised Presidential debates would be to demand live-written responses to important questions (maybe even the same ones as get asked aloud during debates). ■ We typically conduct televised debates with the gravitas of a game show, when instead they ought to be treated as the most consequential job interviews on Earth. From time to time, maybe we need the comic relief of a "youth and inexperience" moment to serve as a cultural bond. ■ But if we really wanted to plumb the minds of our candidates, we'd do better to hand them some blue composition books and a set of sharpened No. 2 pencils. No aides, no ghostwriters, no pollsters. Just the candidates and their own ideas.

June 23, 2024

Stopping HIV transmission with a drug

When Magic Johnson revealed his HIV diagnosis to the world in 1991, even he thought it was a death sentence. For many people, it already had been, and there was no certainty at all about the future treatment of the virus. It had been headline-grabbing news just two years prior for Princess Diana to have hugged a young AIDS patient. ■ Pharmaceuticals have done amazing things in the years since -- Magic Johnson is still alive and tweeting to this day. Television commercials even advertise to a market for people living with HIV, which suggests that it's a demographic with at least some degree of critical mass. ■ But even with all that progress in mind, it is stunning to encounter the news that a drug trial was prematurely cut short because the drug had proven so overwhelmingly effective that it became unethical to keep anyone in the placebo group. A randomized trial of more than 5,000 women and girls in South Africa and Uganda came back with zero cases of HIV infection among more than 2,100 women receiving the drug. ■ The doses only need to be taken semiannually, so it's basically in vaccine territory. It's not exactly a vaccine in the normal sense, but since it's a shot that prevents the transmission of the virus, it has effectively the same result. The old wisdom about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure is as true today as ever, so this news is profoundly good.

June 22, 2024

Unbending, unflinching purpose

Theodore Roosevelt only got to deliver one inaugural address as President. In that sole inaugural, Roosevelt urged on his fellow Americans: "There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright." ■ Political apocalypticism is cheap and easy. It's the common root of "Burn it all down" and "This is the most important election in our lifetime", not to mention any number of other unhinged and unrestrained views. But it's neither new nor novel, nor are the conditions that some people believe offer justification for their extreme views. ■ Uncertainty is nothing new. Roosevelt served two terms, but had only one inaugural -- because his predecessor was assassinated. In fact, though he was only 42 when he became President, Roosevelt had lived through the assassinations of three Presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. ■ Rapid technological change is nothing new. We think that smartphones, electric cars, and reusable rockets are examples of dramatic change (and they are), but young President Roosevelt lived through the invention of the telephone (patented in 1876), the automobile (built in 1885), and the airplane (proven in 1903). Whatever the breakneck pace of change we experience today, it doesn't actually exceed what was happening then. Roosevelt even witnessed the introduction of municipal electricity (in 1882). ■ Economic change is nothing new. We've seen global financial panics and stock-market bubbles, but Roosevelt lived through a five-year great depression starting in 1873, long before the one we treat as the singular Great Depression today. And he'd lived through three other economic depressions, in 1884, 1890, and 1893. And all of those were worsened by a weak social safety net and the complete absence of a Federal Reserve System (founded in 1913). ■ Nor is dramatic cultural change anything new, either. We may have Spotify and Netflix at our disposal, but Roosevelt had lived to see the first recording devices for music and speech (1877) and the very first movies (1894). And that is to say nothing of the enormous social consequences of the long-overdue end of slavery in the South. ■ And yet, within 40 years of his inaugural address, the America over which Roosevelt presided would go on to victory in two world wars, unfathomable economic growth, and head-spinning technological change. That's what happens when you refuse to fear the future and face problems seriously, with an "unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright". There was no room for despair then, and there's no room for it now: Only a serious sense of resolve will do.

June 21, 2024

Commerce Department says drop Kaspersky immediately

The Commerce Department is shutting down Kaspersky's antivirus and cybersecurity software and service sales in the US. The government says the company is too closely tied to the Russian military and Russian government to be trusted -- even the US-based wing of the company. It all goes into effect within a hundred days. ■ It's an extreme move. The Commerce Department even acknowledges that, noting that its investigation "found that the company's continued operations in the United States presented a national security risk -- due to the Russian Government's offensive cyber capabilities and capacity to influence or direct Kaspersky's operations". ■ The company, unsurprisingly, denies that it's a threat, but what else would they be expected to do? ■ It's a disappointment, strictly from a technical perspective: Kaspersky used to be the best antivirus maker around. For a long time, its software was the fastest and most effective on the market. ■ But by its nature, cybersecurity software has to be trustworthy above and beyond any technological merits. The more access software or a service has to the inner workings of a computer system, the more important trust becomes. A total ban may seem ham-fisted (and it may even be an overreach of legal authority; the whole act is groundbreaking), but the threat is very real and the consequences of leaving our soft underbelly exposed could be grave.

Half of US auto dealers affected by cyberattack

The attack went after a company that provides backend services to half of the country's auto dealerships

Red Sea remains in crisis

The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been ordered to leave the area, a cargo ship has been sunk by an explosive floating drone, and the crisis imposed by the Houthis is costing the whole world real money.

An alternative to posting the Ten Commandments

"America" editor Rev. James Martin poses a challenge: If religious rules are going to be posted in public, why not the Beatitudes?

Flash flooding in northern Iowa

Forecast anticipates up to 7" of rainfall across big portions of northern Iowa, southern Minnesota, and reaches of Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

June 20, 2024

June 19, 2024

Keep running

It's nothing more than a meme, but the advice it delivers is solid: "Stop chasing your dreams! Humans are persistence predators. Follow your dreams at a sustainable pace until they get tired and lie down." There's humor inside the advice, but it's wrapped in a shell of truth. ■ Perhaps it's because so much of our country's founding story is tired up in the word "revolution", but America has a chronic under-appreciation for the value of persistence. Not the big, sparkling reveal, but the long-term maintenance of what was unveiled. Not the launch of a new app or a splashy IPO, but the quiet and often nearly invisible incremental growth that keeps things going. ■ We need to tell our kids -- and ourselves -- that it's important to find the right path, but also to endure long hikes on it. There need to be waypoints along the trail, but looking forward to something distant is a vital skill. It really is a biologically human thing to keep hunting after a reward for a long, long time. ■ The Summer Olympics will shine a spotlight on many tales of long pursuits. The ones most suitable to television coverage will include hardships and emotional trials. Viewers will be invited again and again to "Meet the Athletes". ■ But we need to see beyond sports and beyond tragic and heroic tales. We have to see beyond them in order to value the long climbs everywhere in life, with uncertain rewards and feats of endurance. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "Think of three things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account." ■ Revolution and overnight success are both overrated. Be sure you're on the right course, then be relentless.

June 18, 2024

A dirty dozen

Fake working caught up with more than a dozen employees of Wells Fargo, who were fired for "simulating" activity on their computers in order to look like they were working when they were not. It's the kind of situation that isn't exactly new in its own right, but is much more widespread now that working from home -- at least in a hybrid format -- is now a post-pandemic normal in many companies, both large and small. ■ "Many foxes grow grey, but few grow good", wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1749. That was a long time before anyone worked from a laptop at home, but deception and laziness were nothing new even then. ■ It's possible to have substantial unease about an employer using panopticon-like tricks to watch their employees, while also having contempt for those who would take a paycheck in exchange for the mere illusion of activity. Two things can be bad at the same time. Bossware is creepy and cheating is wrong; both/and, not either/or. ■ There is a good chance, though, that the problem had even more to do with the particular tools being used to simulate activity -- Amazon is happy to sell the would-be un-worker a mouse jiggler for as little as $5.09. ■ But what else is that USB-enabled device capable of carrying? The very same kind of company that would openly sell a device for someone who would cheat for a paycheck is most certainly also the kind of company that might well be open to delivering a malicious payload onto the customer's (work) computer. ■ This is how black-hat hacking happens: Get people to insert dodgy USB devices in their computers without considering the consequences of the hidden payloads that might be on board. If a device is capable of standing in for your keyboard or your mouse, it's certainly also capable of being turned into a keystroke logger, in the perfect spot to record passwords, proprietary information, and other things that insiders shouldn't be giving away. ■ It's easy to make the story about lazy workers or Big Brother at the office. But it's an opening to much more than that: Everyone has a role to play in cybersecurity, and the Wells Fargo incident makes for a very good time to shine a light on that fact.

June 17, 2024

Freedom of navigation

Having long ago made antagonistic and legally indefensible territorial claims to nearly the entire South China Sea, the ruling regime in China uses provocative claims against its neighbors to test those potential adversaries. This most lately includes a claim of a collision between a Philippine vessel and one of their own, a claim which the Philippines rejects as "deceptive and misleading". ■ Though it is not part of NATO, the Philippines is an ally of the United States under the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. The United States has behaved imperfectly towards the Philippines in the past, but the treaty alliance looks stable -- particularly because both countries share strong self-interests. ■ Other countries, even distant ones like Sweden, recognize the situation too. China has newly declared intentions to detain foreigners who "trespass" into their claims. Given the size of the claims and the obvious interference with rivalrous legal claims by other countries -- including freedom of navigation, in which the United States is profoundly interested -- it's setting up a potentially explosive environment. ■ Nobody who possesses any sense wants to see an escalation of hostilities in the South China Sea, nor anywhere else in the broader Pacific. It's not the kind of situation that ends well for anyone. But how we best prevent that escalation depends on the reactions of our counterparts. ■ In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt told Congress in his State of the Union, "The strong arm of the Government in enforcing respect for its just rights in international matters is the Navy of the United States. I most earnestly recommend that there be no halt in the work of upbuilding the American Navy. There is no more patriotic duty before us a people than to keep the Navy adequate to the needs of this country's position." ■ No small number of experts on the matter are concerned that we are, 120 years later, falling short of Roosevelt's call to duty. It's the kind of matter to which attention should have been given in earnest 20 years ago. But the next-best time to "yesterday" is "right now".

June 16, 2024

Dissolving a small school district

The board of a small Iowa school district has voted to initiate a process to dissolve the district next year, subject to voter approval at a public referendum. The Orient-Macksburg school board acknowledged that it was a "difficult and emotional decision to make", but the vote was unanimous. ■ It's not uncommon for educational policy to be discussed in dull, over-broad terms. The public hears endlessly about "small class sizes" and the need to "pay teachers more", but the broad terms are rarely enough to address what's really optimal for students and their well-being. Sometimes, for instance, scale becomes a limiting factor. Rural Iowa school districts have been consolidating for decades because the smallest ones found themselves economically unsustainable -- no matter how much their local communities wanted to keep them around, whether for travel convenience, sentimental reasons, or local identity. ■ In 2020, America was abruptly forced to reassess what goes into schools and what we expect out of them. And to some extent, we've begun to reckon with certain important truths. Among them: Most kids very much need to be in social environments with their peers, most learning can be individuated to some degree (especially with the aid of thoughtfully-applied technology), and in some cases, class size doesn't matter one iota (see, for instance, the infinitely scalable coursework delivered by MIT OpenCourseware or the Khan Academy. Sometimes a great recorded lecture is vastly preferable to a poorly-prepared small-group lesson. ■ Consolidation isn't going away for rural places: America was on an urbanization trend even from the beginning, and it's still taking place today. The changes won't always be comfortable, but that doesn't make them any less important to address thoughtfully. Catchy slogans aren't often going to do much to help.

June 15, 2024

Hospital lockdowns

A number of "major London hospitals", as the BBC called them, were targeted in a significant cyberattack thought to be the work of a Russian criminal group. It went beyond a case of ransomware, where data was held hostage, and escalated instead to a case where the actual operation of the hospitals' computer systems themselves were held hostage. ■ Hundreds of appointments and even operations were cancelled. The attackers took aim at a pathology services group, which brings vital services like blood tests to a screeching halt. ■ Cyberattacks exist in a domain that is uncomfortable for the existing frameworks of law: The same attack can be a crime (they're after money), it can be terroristic (what else would you call it if armed gangs took over the blood labs at a hospital?), and under some circumstances it can be viewed as warfare. In this case, the attackers are thought to be in Russia -- where cyberattacks are not just performed for criminal gain, but also to advance malignant state interests. ■ The need for informed policy-making -- with increased awareness and comprehension among elected officials, civil servants, and voters, too -- is extremely high, and growing higher by the day. There is no use in standing by and hoping that the problem resolves itself or goes away.

June 13, 2024

Payday for one

The shareholders of Tesla have ratified an unfathomably large compensation package for Elon Musk -- one, in the words of the company's proxy statement, "equivalent to 12% of the total number of shares of our common stock". In dollar terms, NBC News calls it a $56 billion reward. ■ Warren Buffett has thought about executive compensation probably more thoroughly than anyone alive today. And for at least two decades, he has argued (as did his partner, Charlie Munger) that stock options should be expensed when used as tools of executive compensation (as shareholders have consented to doing for Musk). And there is no escaping the knowledge that $56 billion is an inconceivably large sum for an individual. ■ Musk has been one of the most dynamic figures on the world business scene in at least a lifetime, if not in a century or longer. But if one adopts the Buffett view of compensation -- that it should all be counted as expense, no matter what form it takes -- then the plain question that must be asked by the rational owner is this: By comparison with compensating one person $56 billion, how much would the company have benefited from hiring 56,000 engineers at $1 million each over the same period of time? Or 5,600 elite professionals at $10 million each? 560 at a still-eye-watering $100 million apiece? ■ If options are properly viewed as a real expense (as they should be), then one of the very first rules of economics applies: The real cost of something is what you give up in order to get it. And a titanic compensation package granted to an individual must always be weighed against the value of using the same total sum to compensate a larger number of people with smaller increments. Not small, but simply smaller. ■ Shareholders are free to consent to whatever compensation packages they see as necessary to achieve their desired results as company owners. But as a matter of intellectual rigor, they shouldn't unwittingly assume that they've gotten a better deal by rewarding one rather than 5,600 or 56,000.

June 11, 2024

When is a frankfurter not a hot dog?

Joey Chestnut, the world's most renowned competitive eater of hot dogs, has been told he is not welcome to attend the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest this year unless he repents of his endorsement deal with Impossible Foods. ■ Chestnut, who is in a position as a perennial favorite and double-digit-year champion of the event to throw his weight around a bit, says his absence "will deprive the great fans of the holiday's usual joy and entertainment". It will still be Independence Day, after all, but the contest would certainly look different without him. ■ Not that it's anything but an entirely commercial endeavor, anyway. The holiday is rightly celebrated by re-reading at least a few lines of the Declaration of Independence; the hot dogs are just garnish on the day. But other than opening the door wide for Impossible Foods to get some free publicity for their plant-based frankfurters, the decision as reported may unintentionally elevate the meatless hot dogs. ■ If you're a sports-car company and a popular driver wants to endorse a motorcycle brand, you can openly say, "Motorcycles are totally different from sports cars, and there's lots of room for both!" But if you consider motorcycles peers or even rivals for a category like "The experience of driving fast", then you might actually be giving yourself a harder time in the long run by saying that there's a conflict between competing in one and being a spokesperson for the other. ■ The entire thing may be a self-serving fabricated controversy anyway -- that much remains to be seen. But it seems like the most prudent move for the incumbent makers of beef-based dogs is to "otherize" the vegan alternative as much as possible, rather than implying that they are competitors in the same class.

June 10, 2024

Your private data

Elon Musk is threatening to ban iPhones from his companies if Apple goes through with plans to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT into the best-known Apple devices. It is one of many prominent artificial-intelligence-related headlines capturing a disproportionate share of public and news media attention right now. ■ Musk points at privacy concerns as the root of his reaction, and his ventures do indeed depend heavily upon proprietary information and processes. Apple says that almost everything new that it intends to enable in its devices will be computed on the device itself, essentially answering those privacy concerns from the very start. If little or nothing is submitted to or processed by cloud computing, then the device might arguably be seen as little more than a private extension of the user's own mind. ■ But what the controversy cannot really address is a more fundamental question: What is the ultimate calling for these technologies? We call the whole basket of them "artificial intelligence tools", but to a considerable degree, the large-language models aren't really generating new ideas. In many cases, they are being used to draw useful connections -- to some extent, even to synthesize the questions that human users ought to be asking. ■ Ultimately, though, as with human creators, the lasting merit will be found in generating thoroughly novel ideas. We will know something new and different is happening when artificial intelligence can come up with an eighth basic narrative plot that hasn't been previously explored. Until that time, it will mostly function to reassemble the information that humans have already cast into the world -- which will be of little comfort to those who, like Musk, believe their information is too valuable to let leak.

June 9, 2024

Intimidation by association

When the president of a nuclear power goes about smugly saying of Europe, "They are more or less defenseless" against such weapons (as Vladimir Putin has just done), then it is high time to be sure of two things. ■ The first is to be entirely clear in mind -- and in resolve -- to put to use every prudent tool of deterrence or detection available against such weapons. From the moment that a second country in the world had developed nuclear weapons, the deployment of those weapons has been a gamble. And in the context of any gamble, the actions of counterparties affects the overall calculation of risk. For the now-mostly allied nations of Europe, there is no real substitute for unapologetically finding ways to decrease the offensive value of a potential adversary's nuclear weapons. ■ The second is to be sure that it becomes uncomfortable to be voluntarily in the aggressor's orbit -- and welcoming in ours. Putin's thinly-veiled threats were made at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an event at which a BBC reporter "saw delegations from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America". ■ Russia is actively engaged in a plainly unprovoked war of aggression and invasion against Ukraine, and now its president is pleased to threaten the remainder of Europe. No country should find itself comfortable sending a delegation to an economic conference there. It should be clear that until it withdraws from Ukraine and ceases to menace its neighbors, it is a pariah state, and its poor standing should be considered contagious. ■ That requires, though, a carrot to balance out the stick: Just as the US and the USSR raced each other to align other countries with themselves during the Cold War, we should be eager to use trade, engagement, and diplomacy to make it much more comfortable to be in our orbit than to be showing up to make deals in St. Petersburg. Until they can throw a conference and have nobody show up, there's a lot of strategic work to be done.

June 8, 2024

Throw the book at 'em

An employee at an airport shop in Fort Lauderdale is charged with grand theft after a passenger tracked her luggage to his house after it went missing from the baggage carousel. This incident would be an excellent one out of which to make a very big example: Throw the book at the thief, and make sure that airport employees nationwide hear about it. ■ In particular, the victim's method of tracking down the luggage needs to be part of the story. She tracked an Apple Watch that was inside the suitcase. ■ Deterrence needs to be credible in order to be effective. Appropriate deterrence in this case requires that airport employees know and believe that there is both (a) a significant chance that anything they steal can and will be tracked, and (b) a high probability that they will face extremely unpleasant penalties if caught stealing. ■ The odds that the accused thief was working alone seem slim. Travelers are stripped of many of their normal defense mechanisms when they enter airports -- having to trust any number of unseen baggage handlers, security screeners, and other individuals along the way, all while themselves having to jump through many hoops to accommodate what oftentimes feels like little more than security theater. A single stolen suitcase may not seem like much, but if the authorities don't drop the hammer on all of the culprits involved, they risk undermining the essential trust that travelers must have in their handlers.

June 7, 2024

The right support

A woman is in a dispute with the city of Chariton, Iowa, over her intention to keep a goose as an "emotional-support animal". At other times, from other places, we've heard of emotional-support boa constrictors, emotional-support pigs, and emotional-support alligators. ■ The idea of emotional bonding with certain familiar species of animals -- dogs, cats, horses, perhaps the occasional parakeet -- is nothing new. Dogs have been our pets for tens of thousands of years. And it's entirely possible that some people achieve satisfying attachments to animals of far-flung breeds. ■ But the claims to "emotional support" from far-flung members of the animal kingdom, known neither for their intelligence nor their warmth, strains credulity. There is, for instance, an entire Facebook group devoted to the titular claim that Canada Geese Are Jerks. ■ Modern life is indeed more complex than lift at any time in the past. We have to navigate many questions and challenges daily just in order to survive, and that can tax people whose mental composition isn't optimal for that complexity. ■ Perhaps, though, that should indicate to us something about the need to equip ourselves, both as individuals and as a society, with the tools to adapt and endure the struggles and hard times that come our way, rather than retreating into the imagined "emotional support" of species for which indifference to humans would be an improvement over their natural instincts. ■ Everyone needs mental tools to persist through especially troubling times, and sometimes just to get through ordinary days. But those tools are ultimately internal in nature, not things we can project onto other creatures and then relay back to ourselves, certainly not upon pains of losing access to housing.

June 5, 2024

History isn't just for the victors

The aphorism goes, "History is written by the victors". That's adjacent to the truth, but it's not quite right. History is, in fact, written by those who endure. ■ In the case of D-Day, history really has been written by the victors -- and for good cause. 80 years ago on June 6th, the Allies ignited the beginning of the end for the Axis powers. Once rightly vanquished, the Nazis had nothing to contribute to the writing of that history. But modern Germany takes a part in continuing to write and acknowledge the history of that day. ■ There are plenty of other historical victors, though, from whom we hear little or nothing. Genghis Khan exists mainly in hazy myth today, and his Mongol Empire left behind little of its own impression on the literary history of the world. ■ In times closer to our own, the Communist Party won the struggle for control of China. But what happened 35 years ago, at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, can't be expunged from history. The protests were real, the Tank Man was real, and the instinct to believe that individual human beings matter and that their liberties are inherent isn't erasable. ■ Even if the regime (the side of the apparent victors) seeks to purge its own history even from AI chatbots, the attempts to write history-minus-the-truth only end up highlighting the gaps. Human resistance to oppression will endure -- and those who endure will ultimately have the say in what history records.

June 4, 2024

This used to be a much more dangerous country

There exists a class of viral videos best described as "People in lesser-developed countries doing eye-wateringly dangerous work". Thanks to the social-media algorithms that reward intensity of reaction rather than intrinsic quality, videos like "Excavator operator on completely unstable slope tries to free giant boulder at enormous personal risk" are rewarded with millions of views and priority placement in the news feeds of ordinary users. ■ Above all, we should not reward the creators of these videos. Just because an activity is recorded doesn't mean it needs to be shared. And just because the subject of a video manages not to get killed or gravely injured while, for instance, building a path along a sheer mountain cliff, doesn't mean that it should get clicks, likes, or views. Those only encourage the production of more such videos. ■ Just about the only good that can come of circulating those videos among people in countries with more advanced economies (and better protections for worker health and safety) is, perhaps, an appreciation for just how dangerous life was even for the people of our own countries -- and families -- just a couple of generations ago. It is not OSHA, per se, that make American workplaces safer than they were in the past, but rather the conditions of measurement, reporting, public pressure, and viable workplace alternatives, among others. ■ In 1931 (less than a century ago), 17,000 American workers died on the job. In 2022, that number was 5,486 -- less than a third of the earlier figure, despite a near-tripling of the total population. Today's number is still too high, but prosperity, technological advancements, and public pressure on legislators and regulators have served to reduce the rate by a great deal. ■ Similar changes are essentially inevitable elsewhere, as economic standards rise, choices expand, and, critically, public demands are taken more seriously by government leaders. America used to be a vastly more dangerous place in ordinary life, but highly meritorious improvements have changed that. We should avoid danger voyeurism, no matter how often the algorithms try to serve it up.

June 3, 2024

Maximize housing production now

The concept of home has a powerful hold on the American mind. The objective of our national pastime is to arrive at home plate. A majority of the states have some version of the castle doctrine enshrined in state law. Americans spend upwards of $11 billion a year on motorhomes. ■ Perhaps this effect is especially pronounced in America because so many people are either actively or vestigially aware that they descend from refugees or other immigrants driven from their homes somewhere else. Half a dozen generations removed from the Great Famine, some Irish Americans can still be found invoke holy protection of their homes with St. Brigid's crosses. Many other cultures behave similarly. ■ With rising mortgage interest rates appearing to have real consequences for homeownership rates, we should reckon with the range of factors that tend to drive up the cost of homeownership. We don't do very well at laying out high-density transportation options near high-density living options. Our predominant zoning patterns discourage innovations in the "missing middle" of housing. Financing conventions have long penalized economical options like manufactured housing. ■ Many of the problems come down to local choices and regulations, which in turn are often driven by inertia, fear of policy innovation, and a general lack of imagination. But maximizing the supply of safe, dignified, and affordable housing isn't just consistent with a sort of atmospheric Americanism; it's also well-established that stable housing contributes meaningfully to a number of important health measures. ■ Stories like profiles of the homeless high school valedictorian should urge us to a greater awareness of the need to press hard for the policies that would maximize the supply of housing options that provide security, safety, and stability -- even if they start from a modest base. If the sod house can have a place in American myth, surely we can find ways to open up wider paths to suitable options for the modern world.

June 1, 2024

Beyond a reasonable doubt

An arrest is not a conviction. The recent case of golfer Scottie Scheffler is a fair reminder that an arrest is an action undertaken, in the moment, by a law-enforcement officer. And sometimes, arresting police officers make mistakes, get carried away, or simply lie about what they witness. ■ Prosecutorial standards can be inconsistent. The movement to pardon or commute sentences over non-violent drug-related offenses is a reflection of growing acknowledgment that some communities have faced harsher penalties than others for the same offenses. ■ People can go on to be law-abiding, constructive citizens after spending time in the correctional system. Martha Stewart did hard time after a felony conviction, but she seems not to have pickpocketed or otherwise bilked close friends like Snoop Dogg in the nearly two decades since. ■ We are equal under the law. Besides a deadly Civil War to resolve the question, America has enshrined that standard of equal protection in the 14th Amendment and in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Equality means plainly that no citizen is without the protection of the law, nor is anyone above it. ■ The right to a trial by jury is a fundamental one. Americans can request the decision of a jury, screen the jurors for objectionable outlooks, and tailor arguments to try to appeal to their individual biases and predispositions. ■ Juries can be wrong. They can be unsophisticated. They can be imperfect in any of the ways that any collection of a dozen people might be. But juries selected at random from voter registration lists are structurally about as consistent with the principle of self-government as anything else we do in practical civic life. If the ordinary juror can understand the facts, the law, and the testimony presented, and emerge convinced of a defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, then that conviction is just about the most honest assessment a community can possibly give to the behavior of the accused.

May 31, 2024

Math is good for you

If a recent survey is truly representative of the broader population, then more than half of America's high school math teachers are making up their own worksheets and other supporting materials, rather than using content furnished by their districts. This is an important problem to cite for a number of reasons. ■ First and foremost, it most likely reflects a chronic problem with math education in the United States: There seems to be very little consensus about how to approach it most effectively, particularly when students don't see how content really applies to then and many of their parents still suffer from lingering resentment over how they themselves were taught. It's no surprise that nobody is proud of American students' math performance on the world stage. ■ The heavy use of non-standard content supplements also represents a non-trivial waste of time and effort. Many, if not most, other subjects have at least some context dependency -- there are local topics to explore in government class, foreign languages may reflect the accents and dialects that the instructors themselves learned, and a deep dive into biology may explore things differently in Alaska than in Florida. But math, for the most part, is the same everywhere: Trigonometry doesn't have a dialect. ■ While efforts to nationalize virtually any school curricula are bound to run up against justifiable criticism, it seems clear that we are chronic offenders when it comes to math education. Not only ought there to be some considerable economies of scale to exploit (really, can't we all learn Cartesian planes and conditional probabilities from the same worksheets?), we should also be able to leverage more from the gap between those who are really gifted math teachers and those who are not. ■ It may seem dismissive to single out the high-performers, but it's really not a matter of dispute: A good teacher doesn't just have content knowledge, they also have to master pedagogy -- the process of conveying information to the students. It may be plainly more effective to identify the very best math lecturers in a school and have them focus on lesson planning to be delivered to all of the math students together, while the other teachers attend to one-on-one interventions with students as they need them.

May 30, 2024

More power to the people

In 2023, about one out of every five watts of electricity generated in the United States came from nuclear power generation. On the whole, that's a good thing: Nuclear fission power is, for now at least, the only tool we have for baseline electric generation that doesn't burn a fossil fuel. Natural gas makes up 43% of the generation mix, and coal continues its decline, down now to about 16%. ■ Renewables are on the ascent, of course, accelerated by developments like the rather stunning decline in the cost of photovoltaic power. But they, like nature, remain inconsistent and until we get the problem of truly massive storage figured out, some kind of weather-independent generation is necessary to achieve a blend that meets demand. Meeting 100% of net demand with renewable generation is possible (it's already been done in Iowa), but on-demand generation remains a necessity. ■ This is why plans to support nuclear-plant development are worthy of attention. New nuclear plants are a colossal rarity in America: New reactors recently brought online in Georgia took years of construction time and billions of dollars more than anticipated, and those were the first new ones in almost a decade. ■ We aren't about to turn into the Springfield of "Simpsons" myth, with its unflattering nuclear plant. But getting closer to a reliable, modular, budget-friendly, and perhaps even community-scale nuclear generators would be a big win for society as we continue to steer aggressively towards a de-carbonized future.

May 29, 2024

Not because they are easy

The most important words spoken by John F. Kennedy as President had nothing to do with what you can do for your country or being a Berliner. What were probably his most important words came when, asking the country to embrace the Apollo missions and related tasks, he urged, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." ■ From a basic material standpoint, things generally have never been easier for the vast majority of Americans. Real per-capita GDP has never been higher. Inflation arrests much of the attention, but unemployment is low, basic quality-of-life goods have never been more prevalent, and new technological tools are being introduced at a breakneck pace. ■ Why, then, is so much of public opinion so sour (Gallup says that 74% of us think America's on the wrong track)? Why are so many people quick to express listlessness, dissatisfaction, or ennui? Grown adults insist on presenting themselves to all the world like angsty teenagers. ■ Perhaps we have stewed too long in a cultural broth that improbably blends the prosperity Gospel, a toxic "YOLO" fixation on perpetual self-care, and a generalized sort of impatience. And in committing so much energy to making things easier (or at least in making them feel that way) that we've gotten away from equipping people with the tools to grapple with what's hard. ■ We need more voices, respected ones, willing to challenge us to do hard things because the process of doing hard things is good for us, as individuals and as a country. It does us no good to be both soft and agitated, simultaneously restless and unfocused, looking always for the escape rather than the path through the difficulty. ■ It doesn't need to be the work of a President, necessarily, but someone needs to revive a sense of intrinsic appreciation for challenge. There's no shortage of tasks to be undertaken.

May 28, 2024

More than a number

The National Weather Service initially identified the tornado that struck Greenfield, Iowa, as "at least" an EF-3. Subsequent investigation found evidence sufficient to escalate that rating to EF-4. No small number of online commenters saw fit to second-guess the preliminary rating, and many more have vocally criticized and mindlessly second-guessed the upgraded rating, as well -- enough that they came right out and addressed the early critics. ■ The problem we face is that the intensity ratings are based upon evidence and are bounded by specific criteria. Those don't fit well within a public space that craves conflict and extremity. ■ Things are made even more complicated by the modern storm-chasing environment. We are blessed to live at a time when portable Doppler radar systems operated by scientists are capturing valuable data that will undoubtedly have scientific merit down the road. And we will likely find considerable benefit from the emerging field of drone-based tornado surveillance. Radar can pinpoint only so well; live video tracking may be available sooner than we think. ■ But there are also some live-streamers who are best characterized along a spectrum ranging from "adrenaline junkies" to "disaster pornographers". They profit from hype, by turning audiences into cheering sections. Cheering for what, though? Bigger disasters? ■ The human toll from a tornado isn't neatly contained within a number. Meteorologists need to classify what they see in a scientific way so they can make better models in the future; after all, the value of a model is measured by the quality of its predictions. ■ The rest of us don't have to observe scientific classifications to have natural, empathetic responses to events. While the EF Scale attempts to estimate peak wind speeds, it does so on the basis of observable damage. And that damage, even lower on the scale, can be hard to grasp even if it doesn't quite qualify as "incredible". Perhaps instead of clamoring for higher ratings, we should level-up our realization of how bad even lower-scale tornadoes can be for the individuals affected.

May 27, 2024

The popularity of home work

In a considerable increase over the times a decade or more ago, 29% of American workers are working from home at least once a week. Some states have substantially higher rates even than the national average -- Maryland's workforce is 40% remote, Colorado's is 39%, and Masschusetts is at 38%. Minnesota has the high in the Midwest at 34%. ■ Nationwide, 14% of the workforce is fully remote. While that number is the real sea change in terms of perceptions, more net good almost certainly comes from the substantial share of workers who can operate from home part of the time. Some work has always required an on-site presence -- a plumber can't replace your kitchen faucet via Microsoft Teams. ■

May 26, 2024

Good fences

A warning from the Lithuanian interior minister: "The entire region is facing similar threats coordinated by Russia and Belarus -- instrumentalization of migration, cyberattacks, disinformation, sabotage of critical infrastructure and other hybrid threats." In many ways, the United States still enjoys the protection of two very large oceans. But we should be alert not to let complacency creep in. What the Lithuanian minister adds is really quite heart-stopping: "First of all, we have to think about the evacuation of the population on a regional scale". ■ That concept is hard to comprehend, but it could easily be true: Lithuania is only about 25,000 square miles in all, or about the size of West Virginia. That's not very large, and that fact certainly animates concerns about the need for a population-scale evacuation (for a country of 2.6 million people). ■ Russia has already occupied about that amount of territory in Ukraine, and has lately shown willingness to bomb civilians shopping at hardware stores. The alarm in the Baltics is entirely warranted. ■ Contingency planning for a possible invasion is a lamentable thing to have to make a budgetary and policy priority, though it's a good thing the threat is being taken seriously. Demonstrations that America's allies are taking the threat to their own sovereignty seriously ought to have an impact on American leaders and voters alike. Our intrinsic geographic security shouldn't keep us from recognizing that others are far less removed from peril.

May 24, 2024

The drone of war

Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Finland, and Norway have agreed to cooperate on the creation of a "drone wall" to keep track of "unfriendly countries", in the words of Lithuania's interior minister. ■ Diplomatic circumspection aside, there's only one country with which all six of the cooperating countries share borders, and it's the one that's still conducting an invasion against Ukraine, Poland's neighbor to the southeast. It's the same country that's instigating trouble along Estonia's border waters and jamming GPS signals for airplanes in the region. ■ Technology, broadly speaking, has always been attractive in defense and warfare for its usefulness as a force multiplier. Unfortunately, it does not replace the considerable investment that must be made in uninspiring stuff like border fortification upgrades. ■ Dwight Eisenhower once lamented, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." ■ It is good that those countries are cooperating, because their cooperation compounds the deterrent effect of any one country's defenses. It is very bad, though, that they (quite rationally) recognize the need to commit their precious resources to such defensive activity. We shouldn't even for a minute forget that tensions have risen due to the actions of only a single government, and that all the costs the world bears are consequences of those actions.

May 23, 2024

A prudent skepticism

Many Americans are familiar with George H.W. Bush's infamous line, "Read my lips: No new taxes", but it's far from the most significant clause he uttered while in high office. Bush 41 often struggled to communicate with the effectiveness of his predecessor, but he was an exceptionally well-qualified public servant, and an individual well-equipped to see with some clarity the truly epic changes taking place around him. ■ In his 1988 nomination acceptance speech, the same address that gave us "Read my lips", Bush articulated a recognition of the facts that have an eerie resonance 35 years later. ■ Said the nominee: "The tremors in the Soviet world continue. The hard earth there has not yet settled. Perhaps what is happening will change our world forever. Perhaps not. A prudent skepticism is in order. And so is hope. Either way, we're in an unprecedented position to change the nature of our relationship. Not by preemptive concession -- but by keeping our strength. Not by yielding up defense systems with nothing won in return -- but by hard, cool engagement in the tug and pull of diplomacy." ■ Those "tremors" ultimately came to a crescendo when the Soviet Union fell forever at the end of 1991. The "war" part of the Cold War may have been won, but it is evident now that the peace wasn't, neither permanently nor completely. ■ If we had truly secured the peace, Russia's government today wouldn't invade some of its neighbors, menace others, or conduct unconventional warfare against the United States. In our eagerness to cash in the "peace dividend", America ignored Bush's call to "prudent skepticism" -- and not just in the afterglow of Cold War victory. Long after it should have been obvious that "keeping our strength" needed to mean more than just having weapons, a sitting President glibly mocked the very idea of recognizing that the peace was incomplete. ■ In his own way, Bush was telling the American voter that we couldn't anticipate having dessert without eating our vegetables, too. It's rarely a popular message to tell people that temperance, sacrifice, and skepticism will be required of them. Even great leaders have a hard time cultivating what isn't already in the makeup of their people (even if those character traits are dormant and need re-awakening). But if we don't habituate ourselves to those characteristics, history has a way of forcing us to reckon with their absence sooner or later.

May 18, 2024

You couldn't pay enough

There are plenty of honest jobs that already come under the umbrella of "You couldn't pay me enough to do that", even with the benefit of proper person protective equipment, safety regulations, and training systems. But some efforts to make a dollar don't respect the law and are even more dangerous as a result: Like the person who probably electrocuted themselves in Omaha while apparently trying to cut into live power lines to salvage the copper inside. Sometimes we under-appreciate just how dangerous normal life used to be -- but habits, norms, and practices all make a difference. Seeing what happens when people disregard all of the rules because they think no one is watching.

Fly-through view of new Des Moines airport terminal

(Video) Everything always looks better in the computer renderings than in reality, but the planned design looks like it heavily emphasizes high ceilings and ample natural light

Wildfire smoke damages air quality in Iowa

Even though the wildfires involved are in Canada

Putting the forgotten to rest

A funeral home in the Des Moines area has coordinated an event to provide a dignified memorial and interment service for three dozen babies who were miscarried or stillborn -- in some cases, 70 or 80 years ago. Their cremains have been stored at a number of local facilities for all that time without having been claimed. ■ The origins of the story are sad, but the decision to do something honorable for the deceased reflects well on our humanity. Treating death with dignity is a way to honor life. Mourners deserve an opportunity to gather and grieve; where mourners cannot be found, the dead still deserve to be treated with respect for their humanity. ■ That is no less the case for the unclaimed baby than it is for the unclaimed veteran. One doesn't have to subscribe to the formally ritualized aspects of religious funeral practice to recognize the importance of dignity and consistency in these practices. Rectifying the shame-ridden practices of the past to afford dignity in the future is a sign that we (as a species) are becoming better than we were in the past.

One-paragraph book review: "In Praise of Public Life"

An inoffensive but not especially memorable tribute to service in public office

May 17, 2024

The virtue of continuity

After a transformational season culminating in a record-setting championship game, the University of Iowa's head women's basketball coach, Lisa Bluder, has announced her retirement. Having helped to expand the profile of the sport behind a phenomenal player, Bluder exits into a smooth transition: Seeing her long-time assistant elevated to head coach. ■ Lots of organizations -- businesses, universities, non-profits, school districts, teams, and others -- are enamored with conducting big, splashy recruitment searches. Even police departments do it. Performing a baton pass to an obvious successor is often viewed as being too dull a step to make the kind of splash that stakeholders may want. ■ But grooming a logical successor is exactly the mark of a good leader -- one who is confident enough to say that the institution will survive their departure. It's what Warren Buffett has conspicuously done in business, and what Johnny Carson erroneously thought he was doing with the "Tonight Show". ■ To groom a successor is to acknowledge one's own limitations (including, but not limited to, mortality) and to implicitly promise that their work will focus not just on what brings credit and praise to the person in the spotlight, but on what perpetuates the good of the institution. That takes a convergence of humility and self-confidence, as well as a sincere belief in the process. ■ Outside of a monarchy, it often isn't splashy to cultivate and elevate an heir apparent. But if institutions matter (and they do), then continuity ought to be the goal far more often than not.

May 16, 2024

Tastefully put

Words go in and out of fashion for a variety of social reasons. But one word that's overdue for a revival is "tasteful". ■ Taylor Swift's song "Down Bad", which peaked at #2 in the Billboard Hot 100, manages to make use of the oft-forbidden "F" word 17 times in just over four minutes of airplay. Pornography and brain worms are at the center of the political universe. The world's third-richest person is reveling in the joys of stirring up trouble. ■ Tasteful behavior may be hard to define precisely, but it generally consists of doing things that won't seem regrettable later on. How much later? How regrettable? That may vary. In general, though, tastefulness is really just voluntary restraint from the maximalist approach in all things. ■ But it's silly to reject the idea that we can think far enough ahead to demonstrate tasteful restraint. People make long-term decisions all the time. Suppose we were to apply seven years as a standard: Could people reasonably hold themselves to a standard of behavior that would reflect well on them after seven years of time passes? ■ Seven years seems like a lot until it is compared to other guideposts. A seven-year-old child is generally in first grade. The average passenger vehicle has been on the road for 12 years. The median stay in an owner-occupied home is 13 years. ■ Thus it really isn't that great a stretch to ask people to think ahead, particularly if they're in the practice of doing so. And that comes back to the question of whether there is a social expectation to behave in tasteful ways. If tastefulness is a standard matter of habit, then it becomes self-perpetuating. If it falls away, then perhaps its only ticket back is for people to grow tired of the regrets and push the expectation back into place.

May 14, 2024

Write more

Writer and surgeon Atul Gawande offers a thought-provoking perspective on the value of writing in his book, "Better": "An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community and also of a willingness to contribute something meaningful to it. So choose your audience. Write something." ■ Gawande is right on more than just the merits he noted. Committing a thought to writing (when that writing is intended for reading by others) also implicitly requires the author to spend time refining the thoughts and words -- almost nobody generates a perfectly grammatical stream of consciousness. Thus, the act of writing inherently demands that the honest writer attempt to save the audience's time by finding the right words to make the right point. ■ Our species has been around for some 300,000 years, but writing has only been around for some 5,200 of them. That means 98% of the entire history of human life up until the present went entirely without the written word. ■ And the best available data suggests that up until the 1960s, the majority of the world's population was illiterate. The written word existed, but was of little direct use to a majority of humanity until only about six decades ago. ■ It's nearly inconceivable that our species, with our giant, energy-hungry, problem-solving brains, had no real way to reliably store hard knowledge or complex thoughts outside of our fragile memories up until practically yesterday in evolutionary terms, or that a majority of people on Earth weren't able to read or write until about the time astronauts first landed on the Moon. ■ Gawande's admonition seems almost old-fashioned in a time of fast-paced social media, but it's incumbent on us to realize that the gift of shared written language is basically new in historical terms. We've likely uncovered only a scarce amount of the unrealized potential of not just near-universal human literacy but of near-universal ability to instantly transmit our own writing anywhere else on the planet (and even to effortlessly translate what has been written in languages other than our own). It shouldn't go without appreciation.

Better narratives wanted

Too many children's stories still rely on antiquated stereotypes. If you're writing something that includes narrative filler about princesses changing costumes, perhaps it's time to reconsider priorities.

Fathers, hug your sons

If you don't contribute to their healthy development early on, they may grow up to espouse complete nonsense about human values with boundless unjustified self-confidence. A truly flabbergasting number of "influencer" types are engaged in little more than thinly-veiled and desperate bids to gain male approval and affection.

May 12, 2024

Old and immature

An octogenarian pair has made an embarrassment of themselves by attempting to smash a copy of the Magna Carta in a purported effort to put attention on climate-change issues. ■ The document is fine and the perpetrators will likely pay some kind of penalty for their crimes. But this style of activity isn't a meaningful act of protest; it's a tantrum, just as it is when people throw food at the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh's "Sunflowers". ■ Throwing and breaking things to seek attention is immature tantrum behavior, no matter how old the subjects committing the vandalism. It neither makes a meaningful symbolic claim (the Magna Carta well predates anything resembling the Industrial Revolution, for instance), nor gives any sound-minded onlooker any reasonable cause to think differently about a controversy. ■ Moreover, it is an act of profound narcissism to think that your pet issue is more important than a work widely considered a civilizational treasure. The Magna Carta dates to 1215. To attempt to damage it for the sake of a political issue -- even assuming the issue was a valid one -- is to implicitly declare that you think your troubles exceed those of anyone who has lived for the past 800 years. ■ Whether it's a tangible object (like a painting, a sculpture, or a document) or an abstraction (like an institution or a norm), there is rarely a justification for setting out to destroy it wholesale. There are indeed times when blowing up a symbol is a prudent act. But causing damage to cultural artifacts in pursuit of "making a point" or "drawing attention" is generally no more than mere petulance.

May 11, 2024

A grand light show

An extraordinary solar storm has pushed the reach of the Northern Lights far beyond normal borders -- giving people even in Alabama and Florida a potentially once-in-a-lifetime view of what's typically reserved for people living much closer to the poles. ■ It's nearly unheard-of for an event to be visible to so many people around the world at the same time merely by looking out their own windows: No matter how large a weather system might be, it's not simultaneously-visible-in-North-America-and-Europe-and-Oceania large. We can share common experiences through our technologies, of course, but almost never can so many people share the same experience just by looking skyward. And it's a phenomenal sight. ■ The people who watch "space weather" note that the geomagnetic storm responsbile for the aurora is the product of a "complex sunspot cluster that is 17 times the diameter of Earth." Our very planet is dwarfed by the conditions causing the special event. ■ The "Serenity Prayer" widely popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous (but celebrated far beyond it) pleads, "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." ■ Nothing we know how to accomplish on a human scale lights even a candle by comparison with the scale of the natural show going on now. A coronal mass ejection can take up a quarter of the space between the Earth and the Sun. That's too big to comprehend on a human scale, much less to influence. ■ So an extraordinary aurora is a good trigger for some epistemic modesty: We can only know so much and we can act on even less. There are many things we can do, but sometimes nature imposes forces on us far beyond our capacities. That shouldn't be cause for despair, only for humility.

May 10, 2024

A Scout first

As of February 2025, the Boy Scouts of America will be known as Scouting America. The name change has elicited no small number of reactionary responses from those who see the change as part of some broadly nefarious plot. ■ The reality is that the programs formerly reserved only to boys are now open at both the elementary school ages and middle/high school ranges to both boys and girls, and they have been for a few years. ■ The change reflected a response to some unpleasant institutional realities about membership trends. But opening up to girls' participation also reflected a long-overdue social change: The recognition that the same experiences and expectations that are good for young boys are almost always equally good for young girls. ■ Changing the name of the organization to remove the obsolete gendering doesn't diminish the organization; what matters is the "Scouting" part, not the "Boy" part. It's not an organization in which girls aspire to be like boys, but one in which boys and girls aspire to be the best versions of themselves. What about virtues like trustworthiness, helpfulness, courtesy, or bravery belong to one gender more than another?

May 9, 2024

Deterrence and correction

With legal proceedings occupying so much of the news, it's a fair time to consider how well we distinguish between two very different tracks followed by the justice system. There is a significant difference between them, though the difference is far too often overlooked. ■ The first track is the instinctive one: The use of punishment to penalize those whose deviance causes trouble for society. Sometimes the punishment is aimed at deterring the offender at hand, as when a criminal defendant is held in contempt of court. Other times, the punishment of one criminal is intended as a deterrent to others, as when conspirators are threatened with decades of prison time. ■ The other track is taken when society would rather reform the individual's behavior and return a "corrected" whole person back to society. Some 640,000 people each year return to American society after a period of incarceration -- more than the entire population of Wyoming. The needs of society are only really met when these people are truly engaged in a process of reform. Getting probation, work release, and inmate rehabilitation right are important tasks, just on the sheer numbers alone. ■ Parents often need to consider the difference between the tracks even within household affairs: Not every punishment corrects, and not every correction should be punishment. In fact, the vast majority of the time, parents should seek to correct in ways that are expressly different from punishment: Kids do "wrong" things quite often because they simply haven't learned enough yet about what's right. ■ Drawing the distinction is important because those who are chronic, willful, or contemptuous offenders of social orders and abusers of public trust impose real costs on their fellow citizens. For that set, correction is unlikely and punishment as deterrence may be the only sound approach. ■ The costs don't always show up immediately, but Theodore Roosevelt framed the costs of cumulative public malfeasance well: "Nothing so pleases the dishonest man in public life as to have an honest man falsely accused, for the result of innumerable accusations finally is to produce a habit of mind in the public which accepts each accusation as having something true in it and none as being all true; so that, finally, they believe that the honest man is a little crooked and that the crooked man is not much more dishonest than the rest."

May 8, 2024

Have a drink

A variety of organizations, most of which have enormous reach but very little share of the public mind, celebrate Drinking Water Week each year. Public proclamations from governors and mayors are often issued, and the broad-based value of public drinking water is cited in approving terms. ■ Lest the acknowledgment become too squishy and sanguine, we should do more to note that 90% of Americans are served by public drinking water systems regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which turns 50 this year. That's roughly 300 million people out of a population of some 335 million, all of whom can be satisfied with high confidence that whatever comes out of the tap is safe -- and that the people providing it are required to keep it safe under penalty of law. ■ You might quibble about differences in taste. You might find bottled water more convenient than tap water when you're on the road. You might even make the reasonable case that there's even more we as a society could do to continue advancing drinking water safety and quality (and of course there is -- just like there's more that medical science can do to keep us healthy, or that computer science can do to prevent malicious hacking). ■ But the fact is that a person can go literally almost anywhere in this gigantic country (third-largest in the world by land area) and know that what comes out of the tap won't make them sick. It's been tested and monitored, and someone is accountable for keeping it safe without you, the ordinary person, having to give it a second thought. ■ And it's not just what you drink -- it's the water washing the dishes where you go out to eat, what your surgeon uses to wash his or her hands, and what's ready to pour out of the sprinkler system over your head in a high-rise building. Almost everywhere you go, it's been tested, treated (where necessary), and delivered to a very high level of quality, typically at a cost so negligible that customers are billed in increments of hundreds or thousands of gallons per month. ■ If you've ever traveled to a country -- or even a campsite -- where the purity of your drinking water wasn't quite so assured, pause for a moment and consider just how much time you save simply by knowing that tap water is safe. Consider how much water reliability undergirds everything that happens in the economy. Consider how much better is your quality of life because you never give a second thought to waterborne diseases like cholera or typhoid fever. ■ Living without reliable sources of safe drinking water literally leaves people sick and tired. Drinking Water Week, as mundane as it may seem, celebrates the one thing that certifiably holds all the rest of civilization upright.

May 7, 2024

Persuasion in the face of danger

In an interview with The Economist, French president Emmanuel Macron has warned that Europe faces security risks, economic risks, and social risks to its traditions of liberal democracy. "Things can fall apart very quickly," he warns. ■ Macron is right to be alarmed. As a general rule in life, things are rarely as bad as they seem but they can get much worse much faster than we realize. We tend to over-estimate present pain while discounting too heavily the possible rate of deterioration. It's a rule just as applicable to human affairs as it is to the maintenance of working equipment. ■ Reasonable people can hope that Macron is wrong about Europe's condition, but level-headedness requires taking him seriously. Macron can be provocative from time to time (after all, he once called NATO "brain-dead"), but he also sensed the mood of his own country well enough to revolutionize the entire party order when he was first elected. Macron may be labeled many things, but "smart" needs to be near the top. ■ That intelligence makes two other interview comments stand out. The first is his blunt assessment of Europe's challenge in confronting Russian lawlessness on its eastern borders. Macron doesn't hesitate to use language like "war crimes" and "war of aggression" -- blunt language that confronts the reality. ■ Nor does he mince words when he says "Deterrence is at the heart of sovereignty." It's why Finland embraces the "porcupine" strategy of national defense, and why it's so important for defense commitments to be credible. ■ Macron's other noteworthy comments are enduring in nature: "Politics isn't about reading polls, it's a fight, it's about ideas, it's about convictions". The populist moment has punched hard against ideas, seeking to replace them with personalities -- so it's reassuring that someone with power sees the matter otherwise.

May 5, 2024

What do you really believe?

One benefit of the Internet age is that philosophies and perspectives that might have escaped widespread attention before can get a fair chance at exposure. The person who wants to explore ancient philosophies more deeply than the page or two of treatment they might have received in a school textbook can find active (and often passionate) advocates for a variety of worldviews: Twitter streams for Epicureanism, podcasts about Stoicism, and YouTube channels dedicated to Platonism. ■ The existence of modern tools to breathe life into ancient philosophies (and not just the Greek ones) is a net good for society, and quite a large one. But just as is the case with living religions, there are hazards: Hucksters who use the quest for meaning as a vehicle for self-enrichment, and fundamentalists who come to believe that only one way will do. ■ Everyone has to come to their own conclusions about what is meaningful, important, and worth pursuing in life. Even if they make the choice to follow a path charted by others, there is still an element of choice involved in every adult's system of values. ■ A person's formative process -- through both schooling and guidance from their elders -- ought to include a heavy dose of encouragement not to adhere only to one way of thinking, whether it's old or new. We've recorded enough human history to know with high confidence that no one way has a monopoly on answers to how to live the best possible life. An eclectic approach really is the only way. ■ That's where the good fortune of the Internet age comes in. A person doesn't have to spend months exhausting the shelves of a public library to find answers. The choices now come as easily as subscription to a Substack newsletter. The only problem is that nobody really has an incentive to tell people to sample broadly. Hard-line philosophies sell desk calendars. Heterodoxy does not.

Retiring with Pac-Man

Video games are now about fifty years old, which means that people now nearing age 60 can plausibly claim to have "grown up with them". Surely anyone whose youth coincided with the 1977 introduction of the Atari 2600 and the 1980-81 launch of Pac-Man may be credibly considered a video-gaming native. ■ Those people are mostly still in the workforce -- but some of the elders of the generation are closing in on retirement. This makes it reasonable to forecast that we are no more than a few years away from the first arcade-themed retirement living communities. ■ Think about it: One of the main complaints lodged against retirement communities today is a shortage of engaging programming and a perception that they are places to slow down. Yet a census of just about any casino floor will reveal an almost limitless supply of retired adults playing video slot machines -- which are nothing more than low-skill video games. ■ Casinos actually furnish a model well worth studying for those who will someday soon try to recruit Generation X retirees: They've developed games, sound effects, lighting, and even fragrances to keep people voluntarily captive for as long as possible. It's a wonder that retirement communities and assisted-living facilities, which often coordinate casino outings, haven't really sprouted any facilities that model themselves on a casino theme. If they take away the winning and losing of actual money, what harm would really be done? ■ Arcade-themed retirement environments are basically an inevitability, even if that hasn't really dawned on anyone yet. Appeals to nostalgia basically ensure that will be the case. But more to the point, it's a great environment in which to put good practices into effect. ■ Arcade gaming is an individual activity, but it takes place in a community environment. It can be done in ways that encourage memory and test reflexes. And all it really has to do is follow a casino-resort model in all but the winning and losing of money. It's an idea whose time has not quite come yet -- but which will be here before you know it.

May 4, 2024

When Charlie Munger made his final appearance at a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in 2023, he and Warren Buffett took an audience question asking them to identify some of their own biggest mistakes. Without responding directly to the question, Munger offered a succinct formula for avoiding regret in life. ■ His advice: Spend less than you earn. Invest frugally. Avoid toxic people. Avoid toxic behaviors. Learn continuously. ■ That final point stands out. At the time he delivered it, Munger was 99 years old. Yet he remained a fanatical learner, notoriously devouring far more books than most people and learning from as many practical directions as he could. ■ At age 99, one could be forgiven for choosing to take the easy route at just about anything. A rational analyst might note that a 99-year-old man has two years of actuarial life expectancy remaining. Any time spent learning anything new is surely subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns. ■ But there's another way to look at it, and Munger embodied this alternative viewpoint: Someone who has spent the better part of 99 years accumulating wisdom like a squirrel gathering nuts for a hard winter has put him- or herself in a position whereby any incremental unit of knowledge is unusually likely to yield a truly extraordinary result. ■ This is to say that after many years of accumulating raw information, the truly worldly scholar is positioned unusually well to synthesize new observations or conclusions that are likely to escape the less-experienced. ■ Society often shakes its collective head at the follies of senior citizens who are stuck in their ways or who find themselves unable to adapt to new and changing conditions. But that mockery would be better channeled into an active eppreciation for those who really do try to remain vibrant learners, considering how much some of them still have remaining to contribute. ■ Not every 99-year-old (or even 69-year-old) will have as many thoughts remaining to synthesize as a Charlie Munger. But what a world if we expected more of them to do so, and if many of them rose to the occasion.

May 3, 2024

History acknowledges George Washington Carver as one of the greatest innovators in the history of food and agriculture. We still benefit from many of his creations, not least from the humble jar of peanut butter, which remains one of the easiest, cheapest, and most easily stored sources of protein available in the world today. ■ When aid reaches people in the midst of famine, one of the key means of bringing relief is a special peanut-butter paste. And in millions of homes facing no such dire distress, the lunch of choice for many children (and more than a few adults) is a peanut butter sandwich accompanied by anything from jelly to pickles. Peanut butter is easy to master and it dependably resolves hunger pangs in a jiffy. ■ Perhaps most of the low-hanging fruit in food science has already been plucked, but it's hard to imagine that we've truly exhausted all of the good ideas for providing ample nutrition at low cost to the world. The current fight over synthetically-grown meat points to the fact that new technological progress is still being made. ■ Just as it isn't intuitively obvious that crushing a ground nut and mashing it into a paste is a great way to deliver high-density protein, there are undoubtedly unexplored ways to make valuable progress with other foodstuffs. A world of good could be done for public health in America if someone could do for selected vegetables what Carver did for peanuts -- so much of our cuisine depends on transforming them in unhealthy ways (converting potatoes into french fries, for instance) or treating them merely as vectors for dips and dressings. ■ Fruits have gotten at least some of this treatment, which is why we have strawberry preserves to spread on the other half of a sandwich and applesauce in single-serving packets. But aside from notable exceptions like tomato sauce and pickles, there just aren't many foods found in American diets that put vegetables to use as good things in their own right -- centerpiece foods that are just as easy to indulge as a scoop of peanut butter straight from the jar. Riches may not await their innovators, but the thanks of an over-fed but under-nutrified world might.

April 30, 2024

Proportions beat categorical imperatives

If you return home one day to find that a bird has built a nest in the way of your front door, you face a choice. You could get rid of the nest or move it to a less inconvenient spot. Or you might decide to use a different door until the eggs in the nest hatch and the baby birds fly away. That choice isn't an obligation, but it might be considered the act of a mensch -- a person of honor worth emulating in the world. ■ To wait for the natural cycle of hatchlings from one nest might be good. But ten nests would be too many. And abandoning the front door forever just to permit an endless cycle of birds to nest there would likewise be going too far. Besides the inconvenience of surrendering your own door, you might come to create dependency for the birds and a nuisance for the neighbors. ■ Nearly every good thing is a matter of proportions. Patience and forbearance are good; becoming a doormat is not. Generosity is good; giving to the point of self-impoverishment is not. Vitamin supplements can be good for health; but even vitamins can become toxic in excessive doses. ■ Too many people subscribe to an assumption that all things are subject to categorical imperatives. This leads to a troubling habit of escalation, as people try to apply their absolute certainty over rights and wrongs, using whatever means they find necessary. ■ Fundamentalism or absolutism of almost any stripe is incompatible with an understanding that goodness is virtually always a matter of proportions. There are boundaries around both our understanding of the facts and our capacity to make unconditional rules. ■ Political fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, ethical or moral fundamentalism -- any approach that requires an abandonment of scale and the adoption of fixed, immutable rules -- collides with the reality that conditions matter, even if they make our human choices messier. "It depends" tends to be a much less implicitly satisfying answer than a categorical imperative, but in the overwhelming preponderance of circumstances, "It depends" is right.

April 29, 2024

The case for more teamwork

The American Enterprise Institute has published a paper which estimates that China is spending much more on its military than the country publicly reports, and even more than the intelligence community serving the United States has openly estimated. The estimated amount is very similar to what the US itself devotes to military spending, and far more than Russia, which has the world's third-largest defense budget. ■ Spending alone doesn't amount to a guarantee of results; the Soviet Union spent prodigiously on its military and all it got in the end was bankruptcy and collapse. But seeing a country run by a regime with hostile habits and intentions raise the stakes like that should be enough to alert the United States that now is an essential time to build and keep good alliances. ■ In so many ways, the US is capable of unilateral action. That's what having a quarter of the entire planet's GDP will buy. But capability isn't the same as strategy. ■ Strategically, we need mutual commitments. Not deals that merely reward us for having the upper hand or that hold a sword of Damocles over our counterparties, like China's government has been so fond of implementing. Contrary to the empty-headed hostility to cooperative action expressed by some isolationists, our best hopes lie in engaging with friendly countries on win-win terms. ■ And where we can advance the rule of law, individual liberty, and a decent respect for human rights by making new or deeper diplomatic friendships, we should. The deeper the global reservoirs of goodwill and commitment to liberal values, the higher the costs to adversaries who would try to harm the order which those values sustain.

April 27, 2024

Long memories

China's efforts to demolish the structure of individual rights in Hong Kong is a naked display of power being used to stifle dissent. But it may not just be a reaction to contemporary conditions on the ground: It turns out that nearly a century ago, the Communist partisans trying to subvert the existing republic in China used Hong Kong as a key point for getting resources to their forces inside the mainland. ■ The strategic choice to try to muzzle Hong Kong entirely seems from the outside like a colossal waste. As a special territory whose embrace of a liberal regime of laws had made it exceptionally wealthy by comparison with the rest of the country (and the world), it seemed like Hong Kong was a jewel worthy of preservation. ■ But perhaps those intergenerational memories were enough to convince China's regime that they didn't want anyone trying to get away with the things their predecessors had already done as revolutionaries themselves. That wouldn't reveal strategic foresight so much as an age-old instinct to pull up the ladder behind yourself. Regrettably, 7 million people are forced to live with the consequences.

April 26, 2024

A priesthood of electronics

Few reactions are more reliable about flying right in the face of the evidence than the assumption that technological progress will lead to widespread and chronic unemployment for human beings. Technology will always bring about employment changes at the margins, but it also invariably scratches new itches and reveals brand-new preferences. ■ When tractors displaced horses, some losses were felt among oat farmers and farriers, but a great deal of work was created in factories, service and repair shops, implement dealerships, and countless other directly related industries, not to mention vast numbers of second-order industries. ■ Despite its many intriguing promises, artificial intelligence has no hope of permanently displacing as many jobs as it will ultimately create. Take, for instance, the case of "Justin", the "virtual Catholic apologist". ■ As an experiment in artificial intelligence, it's an interesting one: A chatbot programmed to answer questions about religious faith. After some initial missteps in how it was rolled out, the "Justin" persona has been changed from that of a priest to a lay theologian. ■ Aside from the many questions that might be asked about theology delivered by artificial intelligence, it should be noted that the technology itself probably reveals or even generates more questions than it could begin to answer. Can an artificial intelligence engine have a soul? Is it permissible to represent the thoughts of a real person using an artificial technology? If a novel claim is pronounced by an artificial intelligence, what would signal whether it was divinely inspired? Is there a literal deus ex machina? ■ The questions are certain to become vastly more numerous than they were before the technology existed: In effect, a make-work program for theologians. No matter how technology reconfigures human work, there will always be new puzzles to solve -- many of them generated by the new technologies being used, ostensibly, to save labor. From those puzzles alone, we can be assured that humans will never be made obsolete.

April 24, 2024

"Forethought, shrewdness, self-restraint"

In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a Presidential speech in his home state of New York, in which he pleaded with his fellow Americans to remain worthy of the republic they had so fortunately inherited. "Many qualities are needed by a people which would preserve the power of self-government in fact as well as in name," he encouraged. "Among these qualities are forethought, shrewdness, self-restraint, the courage which refuses to abandon one's own rights, and the disinterested and kindly good sense which enables one to do justice to the rights of others." ■ American history would be worth studying on its own merely for the fascinating story it tells. But it's enormously practical to study, as well. For as much as the country is the product of an idea -- an abstraction about people and self-government that takes shape around a couple of documents from the 1700s -- it's also the product of events that are as much a part of the experiment in self-government as the hypothesis that people can govern themselves. ■ One of the major concerns of Roosevelt's time was the threat of anarchist violence; an anarchist had assassinated William McKinley in 1901. And yet, that anarchist movement instigated Roosevelt to argue that "A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section, it departs from the old American ideal." ■ Those words hardly seem out of place today, particularly not at a moment when mass protests centered on group identities have made some universities tense and even threatening places to be. We're no less subject to those same pressures identified by Roosevelt some twelve decades ago than Americans were at his time. That the country endured through its trouble then is a good sign that we can weather difficulty today. But it doesn't happen without individuals choosing to be better than some of our lesser impulses would try to make us.

April 22, 2024

Good to hear from you again

NASA shares the good news that they have managed to re-establish a data link with Voyager 1. A computer chip on the probe went bad in November, and it's taken until now to implement a solution. ■ Voyager is a fascinating project, having been launched in 1977 and now officially in interstellar space. That the equipment is working at all after more than 40 years of motion and cosmic radiation is pretty amazing. ■ But it should really command some admiration that people on the Voyager team at NASA committed the effort to figure out a way around the hardware problem and re-program the chip from 15 billion miles away. It says something about the natural curiosity of our species that we want to know what's out there, so far away, and that we're willing to try some pretty challenging things to figure it out. Someday those signals will probably be lost for good, but for now, Voyager lives to transmit for another day (whatever that means once you're beyond the reach of your home star).

Stop torturing poets

If we could speak to the animals, nobody would tell the whales to stop singing. Whale song is one of the fascinating aspects of biology that tells us that many of our human instincts are shared by other intelligent animals, which doesn't diminish them as aspects of humanity but rather elevates the other members of the animal kingdom. ■ But back to the whales: If it were possible to communicate with them, Dr. Dolittle-like, surely no human would tell the whales to shut up and wait for an individual to wander off and come back later with a new song to sing. Yet that is approximately how we treat human music. ■ Implicit in the very title of "The Tortured Poets Department" is the widely-accepted myth that creative people must suffer for their art (even if it becomes a smashing commercial success). But what if that is utter balderdash? ■ What if the forces that build anticipation around the debut of an album, a show, a novel, or a painting are in fact entrenching a deeply unhealthy relationship between humans and our artistic instincts? ■ There's no doubt that some creators are at their best when using art to work through difficult times -- it's hard to imagine Fiona Apple minus raw existentialism -- but maybe we unintentionally burden artists with the expectation that they should only release the work that tortured them, and simultaneously deny ordinary people an outlet so natural that whales experience it for free. ■ Perhaps they would tell us that we are ridiculous to expect art to go hand-in-hand with suffering or to confine the creation of art to sporadic releases from a few individuals, rather than engaging in it as a routine rhythm of living. That doesn't mean it can't play a role in struggle (or give rise to it), but maybe we should heed what musicians and writers and cartoonists are able to do when they surrender to speed rather than self-torture.

April 21, 2024

Can Congress really banish TikTok?

It's a question with two different thorny answers. One is legal: The prospect of banishing a particular company by name through legislation isn't exactly an obvious slam-dunk. It's obviously going to be an issue for the courts to decide after much tempest. ■ The other is technical: The whole point of the Internet is that it evades easy control. The lessons of the Napster era, the dark web, and the mass-marketing of virtual private networks (VPNs) demonstrate that evasion of authority is a defining characteristic rather than a niche concern of the digital world. ■ That doesn't mean the application or its owner are benign, nor that they should be trusted or even used. If the parent company isn't demonstrably and actively collecting user information for nefarious purposes, it still most certainly could be. ■ The main problem isn't the content, though there are very good reasons to be concerned about what decentralized mass-scale disinformation campaigns could achieve in adversarial hands. The central problem is the collection and ownership of user data. Chinese agencies have been after American data on the biggest scale possible. We don't have to know why they're collecting the data, how they're storing it, or how they might put it to use. The collection itself is cause enough for suspicion. ■ American authorities would be daffy to ignore the possibility of massive surveillance facilitated by tech companies based in China. That doesn't excuse xenophobic questioning or unconstitutional overreach. But it does demand exceptional scrutiny. ■ Ideally, Americans would heed the warnings voluntarily and cease using the app out of enlightened self-interest. But if that's not to be the case, then perhaps it's inevitable that the imperfect remedy of legislation will be tested. The legal and technical challenges, though, should make it evident that the work is far from over.

April 20, 2024

Apple's iPhone exclusivity isn't the place for the Senate

(Video) Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released a video whose tone might be earnest, but also possibly tongue-in-cheek, decrying Apple's handling of text messages from non-iPhone users to those using iMessage. It is true that Apple uses cues (like a jarring color) to single out those off-brand users. And it's true that some iPhone users are inclined to keep their Android-using friends out of certain chats. ■ But is it the kind of overreach that justifies a United States Senator vowing to "break up Apple's 'monopoly'" over a "stranglehold on the smartphone market", when Apple has a sub-60% market share? That's not a literal monopoly. Its practices may be anti-competitive, but are they really illegally so? ■ It's not as though iMessage has an exclusive hold over the messaging market more generally -- there's Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Snapchat, Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp, and Google Chat, just to name a few. Several of them have more than 25% penetration in the US market. ■ People are free to migrate wherever their preferences take them. And those providers are free to offer exclusive features to attract users. Similar complaints could have been lodged against AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ a couple of decades ago, and look where they are now. ■ For those who truly feel left out of iPhone chats, but who don't want to surrender Androids as their primary phones, a prepaid phone plan for $15 a month and an unlocked, refurbished iPhone can be had for $150 or less. That's not free, but it's also not very much to pay to avoid the fear of missing out. ■ The mystique of government intervention as the way to alleviate even low-grade social conflicts really ought to be avoided. Excessive interference with ordinary market evolution tends to be wasteful and inefficient, slows the work of natural market reactions to consumer demands, and turns society weak and flabby.

Stopping the fire before it spreads

Members of Congress have been dropping hints that they've been told unspeakably bad things about what the Kremlin wants to do in Europe. Considering the incomprehensible barbarity of what his army has already done, unprovoked, to Ukraine, it must have been at once both highly persuasive and deeply astonishing in its depravity. When the Speaker of the House says he'd rather be taken down by rebellious party members than see Putin "continue to march through Europe if he were allowed", that's saying something.

April 18, 2024

Juror identities and secret ballots

While Americans are fairly well-versed in the importance of the secret ballot, it's worth reiterating why individuals have an interest in keeping their own ballots secret, even when they're proud to support a candidate or a party. Ballot secrecy is important, even for the proud, because we cannot distinguish the ballot photo shared out of pride from the ballot photo shared out of coercion. ■ An abusive spouse, a bad boss, or a crooked union steward might compel another person to wear a lapel pin, apply a bumper sticker, or show up at a rally. Those are bad circumstances, to be sure, but if the ballot is always kept completely secret, then the individual's conscience should always be secure to prevail where it ultimately matters the most. Laws can only go so far -- social norms have to play a part, too. ■ Likewise, the anonymity of the jury is a vital public interest, and one that can only be maintained through a combination of laws and habits. Just as it's understandable that individual voters might be excited to show off their ballots, it's understandable that intrepid reporters might be eager to report on the makeup of a "jury of one's peers". ■ But it's just as important for a jury to maintain secrecy as for a ballot to be kept under wraps, and for similar reasons. If a crooked prosecutor, an unhinged defendant, or a compromised witness wanted to influence the outcome of a trial, they could cause trouble in all sorts of ways. But anonymity provides at least some defensive moat against that kind of compulsion. ■ A handful of journalists have already said far too much about the jury pool in the New York trial of a former President. They have revealed information sufficient enough to narrow down individual juror identities to small numbers -- with descriptions that might only apply to a dozen individuals. Those reporters should stop -- not because the law compels them, but because norms should.

April 17, 2024

We don't have the luxury of insignificance

America periodically goes through fits of isolationistic fervor. The present one has made for a strange alignment of interests as the Speaker of the House tries to weather a challenge to his office while pressing for a package to supply military aid to friendly countries under fire. ■ Assuming the best (that is, assuming that opponents of the aid packages are genuine in their disagreement and not willing accomplices of hostile governments), this moment echoes previous instances during which the thought of providing material support to other countries was challenged on the grounds that their problems aren't ours. ■ Yet, time and time again, the United States has been forced to reconcile our innate preference to be left alone (and to stick to matters like our domestic economy) with the reality that we do, in fact, share a place on this planet with a much larger global population -- and that our influence is magnified by our wealth and power. Just 1 out of every 24 Earthlings is an American, but our economy accounts for 1/4th of the entire planet's economic activity. We are similarly over-represented in practically every other metric of influence, from the size of our military to the reach of our cultural outputs. ■ Almost 125 years ago, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the State of the Union to Congress for the first time. In that report, he remarked, "Owing to the rapid growth of our power and our interests on the Pacific, whatever happens in China must be of the keenest national concern to us." ■ At the time, America's "power" and "interests" were still merely a fraction of their size today. And yet Roosevelt, who was addressing China's Boxer Rebellion, still regarded American engagement with the world abroad as a matter worthy of the highest levels of public attention. It may have been self-serving, and it likely reflected undertones of lamentable racial prejudices. But it was also a realistic assessment that even a nascent global power couldn't just look away when matters took place overseas and far away. Our power and interests are vastly greater today. ■ Problems that start abroad often fail to stay there. We have the capacity to make matters better or to make them worse -- only judicious consideration and strategic thinking can decide where we end up. But nobody, especially not those in high public office, should get away with thinking that our inaction or disengagement counts as inert. America doesn't have the luxury of being unimportant, and that means every choice has consequences -- even the choice to take no action.

April 13, 2024

Faulty glasses wreck eclipse viewing

An Ohio village bought 1,500 sets of eclipse-viewing glasses for the community, but they were defective and nobody knew until the big moment arrived. And it's not like, for instance, a snafu at the Fourth of July parade when everyone involved can just say, "We'll make up for it next year". It's going to be a long wait for the next eclipse. ■ The intriguing question is whether the supplier of the faulty glasses had an honest mistake (albeit one which should have been caught during some kind of quality-control process), or whether it was a scam from the start (based on the assumption that the buyers would have no real recourse). ■ This is one of the reasons brand names and reputations are still important, even when it's possible to buy just about anything online from low-cost suppliers. Who are manufacturers like "NoCry" and "Melasa" and "Medical King"? The answer is: Who knows? But they're selling "eclipse glasses" online. ■ The other side of the brand-name coin is that trustworthy brands ought to be able to command a reasonable premium for their products -- but not expect an extortionary one. 20% to 30% seems like a fair premium that most people would be willing to pay, much of the time, for the assurance of a reliable brand name when two products appear to be equivalents. Search costs are real, after all. ■ Sometimes a brand is preserved not in the avoidance of failure, but in how they demonstrate a commitment to repairing the damage. Johnson & Johnson's decisive response to the 1982 Tylenol poisonings in Chicagoland is the gold standard in this area. With infrequently-bought products (like eclipse glasses), it's much harder to search for quality in the absence of strong brand reputations. Regrettably for the people of Orange, Ohio, it's going to be a long time before they get to try again.

April 12, 2024

It's only protest if it's peaceful

After threatening members of the Bakersfield City Council with murder in their own homes, a woman was arrested and tossed into jail. She has entered a plea of "not guilty" in response to 18 felony charges. ■ In polite news coverage, she is being called a "protester". That is a disservice to the language. Protest has a long and honorable history; threats of personal violence do not. ■ There is a strain of behavior in public life that chooses to catastrophize issues at every turn. A little piece of it can be found in every use of warnings like, "This is the most important election of our lifetime." And it routinely escalates from there. ■ The problem with this pattern is twofold: First, the chronic catastrophization of all things political turns some people into antisocial lunatics who think all ends must justify any means. (If it's always the "most important", then compromise, persuasion, and incrementalism have no real hope.) ■ Second, it blurs the line between words and actions. We have to be able to exchange words freely with people so that we can contain even our strongest feelings within civilized boundaries. ■ People who threaten to bring physical harm to city councilmembers, governors, and even Vice Presidents, actively surrender their right to remain in society until they can cool down and find their behavior corrected. Threats of violence aren't protest, they are terrorism.

Aligned with our machines

In 1781, Alexander Hamilton gave us a beautiful line that seems to have perfectly anticipated our technology-saturated world: "Nothing is more common than for men to pass from the abuse of a good thing, to the disuse of it." We find it easy to believe the worst about new technologies because it is easy to imagine how we might abuse them in our own self-interest. But those cases are often oversold. ■ Nobody has much difficulty in imagining how generative artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to make it easier to cheat in high school and college classrooms. A technology made for the purpose of imitating human language has pretty obvious utility for doing things like writing essays. ■ The good news is that artificial intelligence doesn't appear to be increasing rates of cheating. (The bad news is that cheating was already widely self-reported long before AI came into the picture.) ■ But there are prospective dangers ahead that will undoubtedly lurk in the shadows of AI use, which is why the issue of AI alignment is so important. Requiring technology to serve human interests requires developing a lot of rules and definitions around hard questions like the classic, "What does it mean to be human?" ■ It would be a cruel irony if, while we are in the phase of "abuse of a good thing", we were to err on the side of ignorance in our approach to AI alignment, simply because too many people proved too impatient for their own good and failed to study enough of the humanities to become good technologists down the road.

April 11, 2024

Waiting won't help

The Battle of Britain lasted four months, from July to October of 1940. It was this air battle that gave history the memorable words of Winston Churchill: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few". Britain's successful self-defense in the campaign was imperative to preventing Germany from carrying out an invasion, and it ensured that Britain could enlist the aid of the United States, first quietly, then with a roar after Pearl Harbor. ■ Ukraine has been under assault from Russia -- by both land and air -- for more than two years. The US Ambassador there reports that "Last night Russia launched more than 40 drones and 40 missiles into Ukraine. Kharkiv's critical infrastructure alone was struck by 10 missiles, and other cities including Lviv and Zaporizhzhia were impacted. The situation in Ukraine is dire; there is not a moment to lose." ■ It is a different conflict from the propeller-driven dogfights of World War II, yet it's much the same. Terrorism from the skies and unprovoked destruction of essential civilian infrastructure (like the missile attack that just destroyed Kyiv's largest power plant) are barbarous and uncivilized. ■ America's conscience was ultimately stirred by the suffering of the British people, but it still took too much pleading before our allies got the help they needed. Barbarians don't stop fighting out of goodwill; they keep going until it becomes evident that the costs are too high to go on. Ukraine has shown extraordinary willingness to stand for itself -- the missiles have been falling for six times as long as the Battle of Britain, and yet it still fights. ■ The United States could supply vital ammunition and air defense aid, but that requires Congressional action soon. Nothing will get easier or cheaper just by waiting, nor will the barbarians let up until they are repelled. The only way to be confident that the rest of Europe won't come under similar assault is for Ukraine to have a decisive and just defense.

April 10, 2024

Deduct your cash but not your services

Certain problems are vexing because they create plain and evident negative consequences -- but there is no clear evidence that any possible solution for those consequences won't be equally bad. A good example rears its head every tax season. ■ Economists will note that a market-clearing price can be found for most any good or service. It may be high, it may be low. It may come with externalities. But the price exists. And thus our society is prone to financializing most things. We tend to believe that charitable donations are a good thing, so we incentivize them by offering tax deductions. ■ In general, charity and welfare tend to be distributed most efficiently in the form of cash or cash-like transfers. While this isn't universally true (school lunch subsidies are a relatively clear counter-example), most of the time, it's better for recipients to get something they can allocate on their own. That's what makes the Earned Income Tax Credit broadly popular on both the left and the right. ■ But the opposite can be true on the other end: While cash payments are often better than goods for the receiver, it is sometimes (and perhaps even often) better for a donor to give in the form of services rather than cash. People with high-value skills can often do a lot more good by donating those skills "pro bono publico" than they might by earning income and then donating some of it as cash. ■ The tax code, however, rewards cash donations but does not reward the value of in-kind donations of services. This sets up a perverse set of incentives: The higher then value of the in-kind services one might donate, the lower the relative incentive to donate them pro-bono. Thus, an attorney who bills out at $300 an hour and takes home $100 of that $300 would have to work for three hours just to bring home the income to buy her own services on behalf of a charity. If that seems wholly inefficient, it's the fault of the tax code. ■ The lack of deductibility, of course, doesn't preclude accountants, attorneys, architects, engineers, doctors, nurses, dentists, graphic designers, computer programmers, and countless others from donating their high-value services. But the inconsistency of making their cash donations tax-deductible while offering no such incentive for their pro-bono services is counterproductive -- especially in an economy substantially dominated by the production of services. ■ The obvious case against permitting the value of in-kind service donations to be deducted is that it could open the door to considerable abuse. This is particularly vexatious because elite service providers are often well worth the price, and disincentivizing them from donating pro-bono services sets the entire charitable sector behind. Sometimes the sector gets access to those elite services anyway, but oftentimes it does not.

April 8, 2024

Securing power from the wind

In response to an unbelievable wind forecast, Xcel Energy deliberately shut off the power to 55,000 customers in Colorado (especially in the Denver and Boulder areas). At least another 100,000 lost power due to wind damage. ■ The windstorm itself was exceptional: The peak recorded gust was 97 mph, with lots of other gusts recorded well in excess of 70 mph. Nature served up its worst, to be sure. ■ But the decision to actively shut down the power grid is a reflection of the reasonable concern over the fire threat posed by the winds. It was just a little over two years ago that a devastating fire ripped through the Boulder area. That fire was almost certainly caused by a broken power line. ■ The power grid as we know it relies upon a huge amount of above-ground transmission. Burial would self-evidently reduce the risk of damage from wind events, but it's a tremendously expensive undertaking and may be entirely infeasible for high-voltage transmission. Air is a resistor, while the ground is a conductor. The job can be done, but it can't be done on the cheap. ■ Society is going to have to figure out whether it's worth expecting utility companies to bear the much higher cost of prevention: They won't bear those costs alone, and the implicit social contract between regulated utilities and the public requires that the public's demands not come at the expense of bankrupting the energy companies. Wildfires caused by power lines are a cost, too, and simply shutting down the electricity when winds are strong seems like an inelegant long-term solution to the problem.

April 7, 2024

Big game energy

For the entire history of mass media up until now, the default order has always been to report men's sports first and women's sports second (if at all). With the exceptional popularity of the University of Iowa's women's basketball team, we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of that order. ■ Iowa's tournament games have beaten the ratings for almost all professional sports in the past year -- including the World Series and the NBA Finals. That's an exceptional turn of events. ■ It speaks to the indisputably transformative talent on display, of course. Yet it also points to the fact that when we want to see changes in the world, it's not enough to assume that money is the only element that matters. ■ Funding will always matter, but people's willingness to apply and refine their own skills do, too. But there is also the wholly unquantifiable element of human energy: Call it drive, will, momentum, spark, or something else, there's a characteristic that breaks the inertia of inaction and pushes people to do better. ■ Women athletes have been demonstrating terrific skill for decades. But the requisite energy is showing up in unprecedented ways. The world's most dominant individual athlete is the incredible Simone Biles. Women's wrestling is the fastest-growing sport in high schools. And the most-recognized player in college basketball is Iowa's Caitlin Clark (and there are two other women among the top five). The energy is on the side of reshuffling the old order.

Smaller families and tougher care choices

Japan is finding itself in a demographic trouble spot, with a labor market that is almost entirely employed, but a shrinking population of working-age people. The country's overall population is shrinking at a -0.41% annual rate, and the country has roughly one retiree for every two people of working age. ■ The United States is more youthful in many ways (with a ratio of about half as many retirees to working-age people, for example), but we're at risk of some similar hazards. Our birth rate isn't very high, and without our comparatively high rate of incoming migration, we could be facing a pretty alarming set of figures, too. ■ What's worth noting is that while much of the attention to birth and immigration rates tends to focus on the labor market, the consequences are no less important for the basic aspects of old-age care. Large families have traditionally been a source of social security (in the generic sense), and considerably smaller families will have to deal with their elders in different ways than in the past. ■ This could, paradoxically, make extended-family relations more important than when families tended to be much larger. We cannot just assume that there will be enough workers to adequately staff retirement homes, or that the funding will be readily available to outsource that care. ■ One in five families with children are raising lone offspring. That's bound to have consequences down the line, when care decisions (and other choices) have to be made on behalf of elderly relatives. It's not unlikely that nieces and nephews will end up caring for aunts and uncles, or that cousins will need to step in as de-facto brothers and sisters for one another, far more often than was the case when US households used to average nearly 6 people. ■ These are the factors that don't get captured in reports on workforce alone, and they're masked as well when immigration matters so heavily to net population growth. Japan may be well ahead of the United States in the changing tide of big-country population figures, but it's important to note some of the vital ways in which we're already likely to experience parallel trends. There are only so many ways in which robots will be able to "care" for us in the future.

April 5, 2024

A new book has entered circulation with an aggressive take on an old assumption: That country folk are a grave threat to city folk. Some have already undertaken methodical rebuttals of the details, but the premise itself needs to be challenged. ■ Rural and urban interests have sometimes diverged by a great deal; look no further than the history of the Federal Reserve to see a tangible example still around today. The Secretary of Agriculture was one of three members on the committee who set up the districts, because farmers need access to lots of bank credit. The Secretary of Commerce was not on the committee, and there was no HUD Secretary to enlist. ■ But America's geography is considerably more homogenized, socially and economically, than it was a century ago. Every state and every community comes with its own unique features, but the differences in material experience are pretty flat. 75% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Target store, and 90% are within 10 miles of a Walmart. Amazon packages go everywhere, satellite broadband access penetrates where fiber and cable lines do not, and there is no urban/rural divide in Netflix access. ■ But whereas rural and urban places really aren't as presumptively different as they once were, there is a sharp divide among those parts of America that are ascending, those that are stagnant, and those in decline. In those areas that are stagnant or in decline, the resulting feelings of resentment are a real problem -- whether those places are urban, suburban, exurban, or rural. ■ The symptoms are easy to identify, but the root causes can be excruciating to fix. Are houses in decay because of external circumstances or because of household laziness? Are students performing badly in school because the teachers are subpar or because the students lack motivation? Are Main Street storefronts empty because the shopowners ran into a tough economy or because the owners didn't try to keep up with the times? The uncertainties can make it distinctly hard to find responsive policies. But making prejudicial assumptions doesn't get us any closer.

April 3, 2024

Lost and found

A metal seal once used to mark a Papal decree has been discovered in Poland, more than 650 years after it was lost in transit. It is a fair assumption that the matter contained under the seal was thought to be important in its time; after all, it had been issued by the Pope, who was then (as now) a tremendously influential individual. ■ The decree itself is lost to history, and the artifact so recently discovered is partially missing. It's not even clear who was Pope when it was issued, sometime between 1303 and 1352. On the early end of that window, it could have been Benedict XI -- a full five Popes Benedict before the present day. ■ That should probably give us a lesson in the present, when people obsess over trending news and "going viral". Everyone gets only a limited time on Earth, and even the entire lives of some of the most notable people on the planet are often little more than a historical footnote. It's not nihilism to acknowledge that; it's merely historical literacy. Putting some perspective on the scurrying and attention-seeking of the present is just an application of reasonable humility. ■ And yet, even if much of what appears to be vitally important now is likely to be forgotten some centuries hence, perhaps that makes the thrust of our behavior even more important. What's written in a papal bull may be of no enduring consequence. But whether an individual chooses to treat a child with nurturing patience, a stranger with grace, a friend with timely concern, or a parent with honor really does push the world in the right direction. ■ Those encounters are often remembered -- usually only within one generation, but their consequences multiply as they become the lessons taught to the next generation and the virtues held up as models for emulation. Countless biographies (and eulogies) have pivoted on significant turning points in life brought about by a single person's good works. And many others have hinged on avoidable pain imposed by others as well. Those acts may rarely leave artifacts behind for people to uncover with metal detectors, but in the grand scheme of things, they probably matter a lot more than those that do.

March 30, 2024

Religious detachment

Every year, legions of "Easter Catholics" attend Masses across America on Easter Sunday morning. Easter and Christmas are, like the High Holy Days of Judaism, the times when people who may have lower theological attachment to their religious faith still respond to their feelings of cultural attachment. ■ Religious attendance in the United States has been in long-term decline, and the share of adults with no religious affiliation is now more than 1 in 4. And no small number are former Catholics: 13% of American adults, or about 1 in 8, are ex-Catholics. ■ Outreach to former, lapsed, disaffected, or merely disengaged Catholics -- and to those who identify with that ambiguous identity of "spiritual but not religious" -- would seem to be the most fruitful kind of evangelism the Catholic Church could do. It would require a different approach than traditionalism or ritualism, and it would probably require reaching out via people other than conventional clerics. ■ Yet, at a time when the Pope has been diversifying the highest echelons of church leadership (and has even made some initial moves to elevate women into influential roles), it seems peculiar that the church hasn't responded more directly to the rise of "spiritual but not religious" as a social identity. ■ Even if specific religious affiliation is in retreat, the search for meaning shows no signs of abating. That quest for meaning is a fundamental part of human nature, and someone, somewhere, will fill the voids people feel. Some have observed the rise of political fervor as a substitute for religion, and others note the quasi-religious (or even cult-like) attachment some people feel to the wide range of self-help gurus found today. The problem is that many of these alternative expressions of religious energy end up having unholy consequences. ■ Catholicism is already a church of many spiritual styles; different religious orders emphasize considerably different practices, just for example, and the influence of syncretism has been applied for centuries to harmonize the Roman Catholic church with local customs. How might it look if the church were to treat those "cultural Catholics" (and their friends) as if they were an existing civilization all their own, previously untouched by missionaries and now being contacted for the first time?

March 29, 2024

The missing narrative

To mark the first anniversary of Russia's detention of reporter Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal published a special cover page, consisting mostly of blank space under the headline "His Story Should Be Here". It's a testament to the power of good design, and a statement about the awfulness of authoritarianism. ■ The use of arbitrary imprisonment is one of the sinister ways in which a bad government can impose its will on people: When the rules are ambiguous and the punishments severe, it's natural for rational people to begin to withhold from even approaching them. It's a method of keeping a domestic population subjugated, but it's also used to keep the truth from being reported abroad. ■ Gershkovich has the State Department working for his freedom, and the vocal support of his employer, one of the world's flagship newspapers. It's still an appalling situation, and another American has been held even longer. The attention the Wall Street Journal can devote is significant. ■ The Page One feature also stands out as a lesson in editorial judgment. Every decision to publish or not, to consult sources or not, or to place a story here or there in the running order of a publication or a broadcast, is an editorial decision. It's a choice. A journalistic outlet can always strive for fairness and for balance, but true impartiality is impossible: Whether reporters and editors find a subject worth covering, for how long, to what extent, and in what ways, all matter. ■ Unfortunately, the tools of digital publishing tend to flatten the coverage, leaving everything disordered, as coverage of all stories from vital local news to the latest rehashing of red-carpet highlights is flattened into an undifferentiated stream. ■ But some things still matter more than others, and indeed we hope they will receive different types of attention. "Let facts be submitted to a candid world", in the words of the Declaration of Independence. ■ The dreadful state of human rights in a country that could have been one of the world's great civilizations is high on that list. Russia could be contributing to the world's scientific knowledge, its technological progress, and its cultural growth. In its present form, it does little of that. And the mistreatment of a single American reporter, for now, stands as some of the most indisputable testimony to that failure.

March 28, 2024

Emeralding season

Astronomically, spring doesn't begin until the spring equinox (generally March 19th or 20th), but that's a fairly unsatisfactory definition in meteorological terms. Signs of spring in the Northern Hemisphere usually pick up early enough in the month that meteorological spring begins March 1st. There are often still late-season winter storms, though, that can make the Great Plains look like the tundra, so "spring" has a nebulous definition at best. ■ The English language could use a definition for a very particular season within spring: The time when green becomes evident in the fields, forests, and yards. It's a very short time, but it can be a delightful one. It's when human instincts tell us that the season has changed for the better, no matter what might be falling from the sky. ■ A good name for it might be "Emeralding Season", for the bright green color it evokes, as well as for the subtle nod to Ireland, the Emerald Isle, whose most famous national holiday conveniently falls on March 17th. ■ Names help fix important concepts in our minds, and given the variability in both spring weather and the range over which Easter (the other "spring" holiday) migrates around the calendar, giving a name to the greening period would be a pleasant idea. Let autumn have pumpkin spice season and Oktoberfest. Spring's most visible sign of renewal deserves its due.

March 26, 2024

Cloaking evil intent in a costume of law

In poker, many a player has been betrayed by a "tell" -- some kind of involuntary reflex that reveals the truth despite the player's concerted effort to hide it. Tells aren't limited to gambling, though: One of the chronic tells within a morally rotten system of government is the attempt to put a costume of words that sound like law over motivations that are nothing but hollow exercises in power. ■ Consider the words of the man who holds Hong Kong's title of Secretary for Justice. Speaking about the government's new "security" law, which severely escalates the penalties for a range of offenses that are sufficiently ambiguous that they make for an all-purpose toolkit for striking down opposition groups. ■ In a television interview, the Secretary for Justice declared, "Let's say in extreme situations, if someone repeatedly reposted [overseas criticism] online and showed agreement -- and that they added comments simply to incite other people's hatred towards the Hong Kong and the central government -- then, of course, there would be risk". ■ Words like "extreme situations" and "simply to incite" do a lot of work here, accounting for both a great deal of goalpost-moving and imputation of intent. It sounds like law, but it's really Calvinball. ■ It would be easier to say, "If we are criticized in any way, the critic risks going to prison." But the tell here is that, deep down, even the authoritarians know that what they're doing is fundamentally repugnant. They know that their claim to power is immoral. They know that history will someday eviscerate their memory. ■ But in the short run, they cloak their evil in a costume of law because they're hoping to evade detection. Power that tries to quash criticism instead of adapting to it is ultimately doomed to failure. When it bluffs about its true intentions, nobody should give it a pass.

March 25, 2024

If you can worry when others do as well

Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "If" begins with the words, "If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you", and ends with "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!". It's been parodied for almost a century, which is probably as much a testimony to its enduring value as anything else. ■ But there is a missing corollary to the virtue of keeping calm, which in Kipling's style might go something like "If you can heed a righteous alarm when all around you / Are content to look away in blissful ignorance", then that too will make you a good adult and citizen. ■ In testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, Admiral John Aquilino, the US Navy's Indo-Pacific Commander, sounded just such an alarm. In bold and italic print, he submitted the advice that "[W]e MUST move faster to reduce the risk of conflict in the near and mid-term", because the environment under his command is "the most dangerous I've seen in 40 years in uniform". ■ It is a sobering but unsurprising assessment. The navy under the command of the Chinese Communist Party "has increasingly employed coercive tactics" and isn't just threatening Taiwan, but also countries like the Philippines and Japan, too. The Pacific is very, very big, and power projection takes a lot of effort and consumes a lot of resources. ■ Assistant Secretary of Defense Ely Ratner testified as well, with a concurring alert: "Today, the PRC [China] is pursuing its revisionist goals with increasingly coercive activities in the Taiwan Strait [and] the South and East China seas along the Line of Actual Control with India and beyond". ■ We are free to look away and discount the gravity of the situation only insofar as we are willing to accept the consequences. Inaction, disengagement, and disinterest in the problems of places that seem far away ultimately have costs. It's nothing new; Dwight Eisenhower warned that "[W]eakness will alarm our friends, earn the contempt of others, and virtually eliminate any influence of ours toward peaceful adjustment of world problems." And that was some 75 years ago. ■ When people whose careers have depended upon rationality and temperate judgment use valedictory moments in the spotlight to sound alarms, then it takes good citizens to heed the warning.

March 24, 2024

Was Tetris keeping America sane?

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is credited with defining the state of "flow", in which the individual is so engaged in a task -- challenging but not overwhelming -- that they effectively become lost in the moment. "Flow" is a state of elevated concentration where the act becomes the reward unto itself. ■ Coloring books for adults are only among the latest tools to have been pitched for achieving "mindfulness" and sedating anxiety, but they're really not all that novel: People have been using hobbies, particularly ones that involve repetitive physical motion, to achieve meditative states practically forever -- long before labels like "mindfulness" or "flow" ever came along. ■ Winston Churchill was a prolific painter. Thomas Jefferson was a lifelong violinist. Warren Buffett has played countless games of bridge. ■ It's often hard, though, for people to pick up new hobbies. There's usually an initial phase of embarrassing incompetence, and acquiring a skill often requires attending classes that can compete with precious family time that adults may be (rationally) unwilling to sacrifice. ■ Some computer games, though, offer low barriers to entry -- intuitive enough to learn, easy enough to pick up and put down anytime, and randomized enough that the experience always feels new. ■ Grand champions of the genre include Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Tetris. It's worth wondering: Games like those fell out of favor as desktop computers, and then smartphones, became capable of delivering much richer graphical experiences. Early cellular phones had simple-but-engrossing "Snake". And then it was eclipsed by games that offered better pictures, but a lot less "flow". ■ The decline of that class of games -- and their subsequent revival (as, notably, the New York Times is betting on the attraction of flow games to keep people spending time and money with them) causes one to wonder: If America really did lose its mind sometime around 2012 (as the pop theory goes), was it because easy access to flow had quickly disappeared from millions of computer screens? Was Tetris keeping America sane after all?

March 23, 2024

A diagnosis of hardship

A 42-year-old woman with three young children at home has been diagnosed with cancer and faces a period of recovery ahead. It is, objectively, an unpleasant and unwelcome development that still happens too often, despite many advances in oncology over recent decades. ■ But the 42-year-old woman in question is Catherine, Britain's Princess of Wales, and that means her condition has been the cause of tabloid speculation for weeks and will remain fodder for a considerable time to come. ■ Every person who gets a cancer diagnosis deserves to bring that news forward on their own terms. But being open about it early in the process, rather than late, should be the default strategy for anyone who hasn't intentionally embraced a different path for good reason. ■ In the case of a cancer diagnosis, the patient needs to know that a story will almost certainly be told about them, so it is usually best to grasp the lead in forming that narrative. It helps especially to have an oncologist who will treat you with respect for your intelligence and autonomy and who will engage you as part of your own medical team. ■ Sharing the news with friends enlists them in carrying some of the burden along the way. The problem for the woman set to become the next queen consort of England is that her condition is a matter of inordinate attention even in good times. ■ Oliver Carroll, a correspondent for The Economist, puts it wisely: "I have no right to know this information. I have never had any right to know any of this information. But like all normal people am hoping for her swift and full recovery." ■ Monarchies are problematic like that: They turn entire families into casts of characters in mass-market dramas, and that's really no way for anyone to live. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing social structure, in no small part because the cockamamie theory of the divine right of kings specifically placed monarchs (and their immediate families) in a place not all that different from demigods. (Alas, it is dehumanizing to call other human beings "subjects", too.) ■ By right as a human being, the news of Catherine's cancer diagnosis should be hers to share with whom she wants, when she wants. But that cannot be the case for someone whose life is invariably on center stage and in the spotlight. The physical diagnosis is sad, but the social pathology at play is harmful, too.

March 22, 2024

Boeing CFO admits to an institutional process problem

In an admission related to some troubling and massively embarrassing incidents, Boeing's CFO told an investing conference, "For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right. That's got to change." ■ What he says ought to get the attention of his own company, but it's an admission with some broader ripples, too. One of the most important geopolitical factors now and in the coming years is a nation's ability to have a full roster of highly competent firms that are each capable of building complex systems. ■ The systems themselves -- not the products they put out, but the processes of making them -- have to be both designed and maintained. They have to be profitable and they have to be innovative. The US really pioneered the field of complex systems design (see "Rescuing Prometheus", by the great historian Thomas P. Hughes), but maintenance has been a weakness. And what isn't maintained almost always falls into decay. ■ It takes more than just engineering expertise to build things like aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants, and commercial airliners. It takes really strong management, too, by people who can see the whole chessboard at once. ■ When you see China's efforts to build their own carriers, their own nuclear plants, and their own large passenger jets, look past the products themselves. Look at the learning taking place and the refining of the skills required to build complex systems. ■ America, we need to get our act together. We're really good at the innovation part of complex system-building (our private-sector space race is a great illustration), but we chronically underperform our potential at maintaining those complex systems. Our economy has no real peers for dynamism. But we need to get better at holding on to our phenomenal gains for the long haul.

March 20, 2024

Buffeted about by change

Times of rapid technological and cultural developments have always been disorienting. Imagine being around for the first few decades of the 20th Century in America and witnessing the arrival of automobiles, powered flight, radio, and women's suffrage -- with a world war, to boot. We are naive if we think that our own experience with the whirlwind is entirely novel. ■ It is worth noting, though, that the last few decades have brought about a certain tempo of change that is unusual. The adoption curves for tools like smartphones and the dramatic realignment of public consensus on some once-contentious issues are much faster than their predecessors. The tempo of these changes is not self-evidently bad, but it is not inconsequential, either -- especially if it gives the appearance that more things are changing than truly is the case. ■ Perhaps we haven't reasoned yet with the consequences of our perpetual immersion in a culture awash in ephemeral things. Apps can appear or disappear from a phone without notice. Favorite television shows vanish from streaming services. Songs are pulled off of platforms when artists and licensees run into conflict. Amid planned obsolescence, value engineering, and tightening standards and regulations, even household appliances can end up changing almost as quickly as fashion apparel. ■ When circumstances seem so fleeting, it becomes harder for people to internalize the idea that choices have consequences. If it perpetually feels like even yesterday is a fleeting moment likely to be erased, then the long arc of history doesn't have much of a seat at the table. We see the evidence of how this mass amnesia creates bad incentives as voters and politicians decide to act on what feels good in the moment -- "vibes", some call it -- rather than acting on concepts like duty. ■ Abraham Lincoln implored Congress in 1862 to realize that "In times like the present men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity." That's a weighty expectation -- but is it wrong, even now?

March 19, 2024

Amendments are enough

For more than a century, pockets of America's political left wing have been restlessly agitated with the Constitution. Woodrow Wilson resented its constraints. Franklin Roosevelt famously bent the rules to get the New Deal he wanted. Today, no small number of people can be found making "progressive" arguments to jettison everything from the Electoral College to lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court. ■ Critics from the left today often discount the Constitution on the basis of identity politics. There should be no doubt whatsoever that the Constitutional Convention (and politics of the time more broadly) ought to have included people other than men of exclusively European ancestry. ■ But civilization is always constructed from the "crooked timber" of humanity: Whether an organization, institution, philosophy, or other framework has been assembled by a wholly diverse committee or by a single person working alone, the merit of the outcome depends upon the quality of the underlying ideas on which it was built, not the immutable features of its authors. ■ When a self-described "Constitutional equality enthusiast" today denounces the relative youth of Founders like James Madison and uses that youth as the foundation for a critique like, "The [C]onstitution was basically a Reddit post", it's not rigorous enough to deserve respect. The Constitution could have been drafted by a room full of octogenerians or by the Revolutionary Era equivalent of a high school debate team. What would matter is the validity of the work, not the ages of the people involved. ■ In particular, though, this argument that youth ought to be a disqualification of the authors is patently non-credible. Sometimes age brings wisdom. Sometimes it just brings calcification. Sometimes youth brings vitality. Sometimes youth merely brings fanatical obliviousness. ■ The Constitution is imperfect, and it has always been imperfect. Where it may be most perfect is in its embrace of a process for amendment: The forthright acknowledgment by its authors that they got things wrong, and those things might only be revealed by time and unfortunate experience. ■ Implicitly, the Constitution says, "Please revise and resubmit as often as necessary". But it says that as a substitute for disorder, violence, and revolution. ■ Its flaws aren't veiled behind a purported divine right of kings or the all-consuming power of a Politburo. They are written down, out in the open, with a process for correction built clearly into the original. All it asks in return is a thoughtful, incremental process of reform and correction which depends upon persuading not just some of the country, but an overwhelming majority of it. ■ Neither left nor right should discount the contributions of youth nor of old age to political decisions. We have assessed that, under the law, a person is an adult upon reaching the age of 18 -- free to enjoy adult freedoms, and accountable to adult consequences. ■ Voting is one of those freedoms, and elections have consequences. Every election is itself a referendum on keeping the Constitution. Those whose patience with it runs thin ought to remind themselves that only four full Presidential cycles pass between a person's birth and their first eligibility to vote. Changes can come fast if persuasion is applied early and well to the task.

March 17, 2024

The third meaning of "Closing Time"

The song "Closing Time" has been a familiar anthem for more than 25 years, used countless times since it was released in 1998 to shut down bars and clubs with the familiar refrain, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here". It's a cheery but firm reminder to move along. ■ The song even contains a second meaning; the songwriter intentionally incorporated a birth metaphor ("This room won't be open till your brothers or your sisters come" really was a reference to leaving the womb). Yet it's another line that deserves a second meaning, even if we haven't granted it over all these years. ■ "I know who I want to take me home" has the obvious overtures of finding romance on a night out. And taken with the writer's intended double meaning, it's about parents taking a newborn home. ■ But a third meaning altogether could easily belong to the simple idea that more youthful nights out than not end up going home in the company of friends. Friends are vital to any well-rounded life, and they're especially crucial to formative years of early adulthood. A survey of the cohort of students currently in college found that "nearly one in three students spends no time weekly on extracurriculars and campus events". Unsurprisingly, those disengaged students also had radically lower satisfaction with their school experiences than their peers. ■ The problem of social isolation -- even among the age group one might naturally expect to be socializing the most -- is such that the Surgeon General went on a college campus speaking tour, effectively begging students to make friends with one another. (There's even a deck of cards that tries to describe how to improve the practice of being with friends.) ■ Having friends is a self-evident good throughout all of life, and it's conclusively advantageous in an educational context. Everyone needs friends upon whom one can count to "take me home", in Semisonic's words, neither out of the obligations of family nor the desires of romance, but out of the entirely necessary condition of being a human being freely making connections with other human beings. It ought to hold our attention that so many people living in America today -- especially young ones -- seem to be struggling with the process. Friends are indispensable to health, wellness, and well-being.

March 15, 2024

An e-ink smartphone

A team is trying to raise $500,000 in pledges by the end of March to underwrite a smartphone with an e-ink screen and a physical QWERTY keyboard. They're calling it "Minimal", and they've made it to the prototype stage, with a pitch centering mainly on the human advantages of the phone's inherent limitations -- it's not for streaming video or scrolling through TikTok. ■ It's supposed to be clean, quick, and non-addictive. It's not meant to be a dumb phone (like a flip phone); it's supposed to be smart but constrained. ■ Whether this particular product takes off will depend upon a lot of factors. But the tactile QWERTY keyboard is a feature that really needs to make a comeback, and the use of e-ink is promising: It's what makes looking at a Kindle e-reader much easier on the eyes than looking at a computer screen. ■ The pitch seems oriented towards people who are looking for a way to moderate their own smartphone usage, but the real market is likely to be with users who would carry it as a second phone, probably as a primary work phone to be carried beside a personal phone with the usual bells and whistles. The tactile keyboard and minimalist interface seem like they are under-appreciated sources of value for people who need mostly to communicate messages rather than to consume content. ■ Some product like this is destined to catch on sooner or later. Particularly as security consciousness is either developed organically or is thrust upon us (probably by some pretty bad events), people are going to be forced to assess the need for multiple devices. The mixing of personal and business devices with lots of capacity and countless ways to be compromised by malicious outsiders has put an unbelievable number of vital systems at risk. CISA has hinted at just how many ways millions of American enterprises are falling short. ■ If the Minimal Co. really can deliver a utilitarian smartphone for power users at a $350 price point, then that might be just the right device at just the right time. Security may well be a much more valuable selling point than self-control.

An unconscionable waste of life in a completely immoral war

The Economist: "The data suggest that more than 1% of all Russian men aged between 20 and 50 could have either been killed or severely wounded in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war."

A local government legitimacy crisis with global implications

Until good governance comes to the West Bank and Gaza, it's hard to conceive of a peaceful future

Learning from the skies over Ukraine

The United States has held on to a well-earned reputation for air power supremacy since World War II. Control of the skies has proven itself again and again to be a necessary (though not always sufficient) condition for victory in combat. In Dwight Eisenhower's words, "[W]hile air power alone might not win a victory, no great victory is possible without air superiority." ■ But what was good enough up until less than a decade ago may well be dangerously inadequate now, having been rendered obsolete by the extremely fast evolution of fighting conditions in Ukraine, where large volumes of relatively low-cost drones have redefined what "control of the skies" really means. ■ The space the drones occupy has been dubbed the "air littoral" -- derived from the name used for waters that transition into seashore. The air littoral is in the sky, but not very far -- mostly below the space where combat aircraft with human pilots aboard dominate the sky. ■ In the air littoral, high performance is less important than persistence and scale. What has always mattered in air warfare is the capacity to inflict damage upon the enemy and to guarantee the security of allies below. Again, in the words of Eisenhower, "For the delivery, in a single blow, of a vast tonnage of explosives upon a given area, the power of the air force is unique." ■ What has changed -- seemingly overnight -- is that drones have become sufficiently precise at very low relative cost to become effective weapons. It takes a long time to train a professional pilot. It takes far less to train someone to pilot a drone, especially with the help of autonomous flight tools. And when those drones fly both figuratively and literally under the radar, it becomes extremely difficult to stop them. ■ Whether the United States is ready, willing, and able to pivot quickly enough to match the changes being wrought by the war in Ukraine is an extremely important question. The lessons being learned there won't stay within tidy national boundaries -- they're coming at full speed for the very next armed conflict. Surrendering the air dominance characteristics of the past would be imprudent, but we can't take the risk of failing to adapt to the new rules, either.

Iowa is the #11 state for honey production

North Dakota, of all places, comes in first -- and it's not even close, with 28% of the entire national output. Meanwhile, Utah, which has a beehive on its state flag, doesn't even produce enough to show up in the USDA reports.

March 14, 2024

Artistic impression

For Americans, the go-to question for making small talk is "What do you do?", as in, "What is your occupation?". It's generally inoffensive, and it's common enough that everyone has a ready answer (including, most of the time, some means of gently pivoting the question to another subject). ■ We might be a more interesting culture, though, if we asked a less obvious question, but one with much richer potential: "What is your art?" Humans are far from being the only animals who make art: There have been some famous examples of animals creating art in captivity, but there are even examples of birds and fish apparently creating aesthetic works intentionally and with no evidence of meaningful reward other than internal satisfaction. ■ Every well-rounded person is at least a consumer of some form of art, if not also a producer. Some collect paintings, others attend concerts, and still others become movie buffs. But, particularly with the recent -- and in some ways stunning -- emergence of computer-aided art, it's almost difficult to avoid creating some kind of art from time to time. ■ Commercial interests are encouraging people to explore in ways that go far beyond selling paint-by-numbers kits. Samsung is touting smartphone photos taken from the edge of space. Lego sells user-generated portraits as brick mosaics. Event spaces where people gather to drink and paint with friends are franchised nationwide. ■ And given the rapidly-improving capabilities of artificial intelligence tools to make original music and create lavish digital images from words, it's almost impossible to escape the impression that we are on the verge of being immersed in literally as much art as we can handle. Just buy a dual-use television set/picture frame and the family room becomes an art gallery. ■ None of this displaces old ways of creating art, either; anyone can still make analog art from needlepoint to elaborate baked goods. Perhaps, then, it is past time to begin assuming that the art we create (or simply appreciate) is a better starting point for conversation than what we are paid to do.

March 12, 2024

Saving the wisdom of grandmothers

Grandmothers occupy an iconic place in many, if not most, of the world's cultures. It's a role often revered for its care and warmth. But we also ought to consider whether it's a role that has gone under-appreciated as a source of wisdom, too. ■ It's no secret that men's voices have occupied much more than half of the space in recorded history: There are just three books of the Bible named for women out of dozens, no matter which canon you use. Well-educated people can name dozens of Founding Fathers and ancient Greek philosophers, but almost none of those names will belong to women. ■ This presents a giant gap in civilization's knowledge of itself. Backfilling the parts from the ancient past is next to impossible -- aside from some rare exceptions like the letters of Abigail Adams (who served an outsized role as a grandmother), we don't have much primary source material to recover from the grandmothers of the past. ■ But that should compel us now to re-assess and value the wisdom of grandmothers living today. The "tend and befriend" theory suggests that women may live longer than men because they often take a different approach to stress than the "fight or flight" reactions so often associated with males. ■ Maternal grandmothers, especially, have an especially strong anthropological connection to their grandchildren: A very small (but non-zero) number of men unwittingly raise children who aren't genetically their own. But a biological mother knows for certain who mothered her children, and she knows without a doubt who mothered her daughter's children, as well. ■ This is almost certainly why maternal grandmothers tend to exhibit bias favoring their grandchildren, and why proximity to grandmothers has evolutionary effects. This actually confers a sort of unique biological imperative for grandmothers to see the best survival advice make its way to their descendants. Some of the advice will be bad, and some grandmothers are fools. But far too little of their judgment has been intentionally preserved over the centuries. ■ If the median age of an American mother at the birth of her first child is 27.3 years, then it's probably fair to assume that age 55 is a reasonably close guess at the median age of a first-time American grandmother. Based upon average remaining life expectancy for a woman of that age, average grandmother-hood should last around 28 years for the women who follow that path in life. ■ That's a lot of time over which to cultivate "grandmotherly wisdom". And it's also a lot of time over which to capture and record it. Grandmothers should be more than a source of cookbooks. We have more capacity than ever to record, document, and disseminate what grandmas know. Civilization would be stronger if we'd set about doing it.

March 10, 2024

Awards night in America

The most predictable aspect about coverage of the Academy Awards is the commentary about which films and performers were snubbed for well-deserved Oscars. Sometimes the criticisms are nothing more than matters of taste. Sometimes they are justifiable critiques of double standards. ■ Almost every industry has institutions that confer awards. And those awards matter in proportion to the amount they are taken seriously by the industry at large, and by the amount they matter to the recipients. Sally Field's unconventional Oscar acceptance speech in 1985 remains one of the finest examples of the latter. ■ It ought to be a lesson to such a public-facing industry as Hollywood that it still so often appears to miss the mark on the former count -- or, perhaps more precisely, that its own internal sense of worthiness still so frequently falls short of standards that seem patently obvious to so many members of the public. ■ Regardless of the merit of the final award-winners, the pipeline to some of the highest-profile awards still seems altogether too narrow. That's an upstream problem for the film industry, probably in much greater measure than it is downstream (at awards season). ■ The public has a say in those industry awards, in the same sense that the people have a say under an absolute monarchy: Nobody counts their votes, but at some point or another, they can withdraw their consent and de-legitimize the institution. Nobody forces America to watch the red-carpet coverage. The People's Choice Awards, for instance, could be more prestigious than the Oscars, should it emerge that the newer awards mean more to the recipients -- and the industry -- than the older. ■ If the criticism of the latest awards lands anywhere, it ought to first land with scriptwriters who need to commit energy and creativity to imagining stories that look like America as it is today, rather than its past or an alternate reality. And, of course, the stories have to be put into motion by producers who can appreciate the vision. That's a necessary, though far from sufficient, condition for ensuring that the awards handed out today continue to mean something tomorrow.

March 9, 2024

A change of mind could do you good

Abraham Lincoln, the most consequential Republican President of all time, was a Whig longer than he was a Republican. Winston Churchill, who led his country through World War II as leader of the Conservative Party, spent 20 years in the Liberal Party. Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the 20th Century GOP, was a long-time labor union president and made many self-deprecating jokes about his many years as a Democrat. ■ Wisdom sometimes consists of changing one's mind. New evidence, changed circumstances, and better reasoning can all lead us to better places than where we started. ■ But in the digital age, it's a lot easier to find people who want to put a spotlight on their unwavering consistency than those who are pleased to explain when and why their minds were changed. Social media in particular has driven the phrase "upon further reflection" almost completely out of use, and that's a bad thing -- if we really value intellectual honesty. ■ It isn't always necessary to be the first to make a claim, or the boldest, or the loudest. The temptation to weigh in on every "trending" issue -- or to demand that others do the same or else be accuse of complicity -- eviscerates the ground for people to give matters an oft-needed second thought. ■ It's only useful to admit to a change of mind, though, if the audience is itself intellectually honest enough to appraise the authenticity of a change of heart. Sometimes people really change their minds. Sometimes they're only faking it. Skepticism is fair game. Cynicism, though, is not. ■ Cynicism says that everyone who ever identified with the "other" party is forever in the wrong. Cynicism says that the indiscreet utterances of youth are a permanent stain on character. Cynicism says that 80% agreement is outweighed by 20% disagreement. ■ Minds should be changed from time to time, for reasons imposed by external forces and for inexplicable interior changes of heart. We ought to embrace them publicly and often, not because consistency doesn't also have its place (it surely does), but because a person so consistent that they could just as easily be chiseled in stone is a person whose mind really hasn't been engaged.

March 8, 2024

NATO gets bigger and better

Sweden has joined the NATO alliance, which is a welcome step forward for global security. NATO doesn't start fights; its existence precludes them.

March 8, 2024

NATO gets bigger and better

Sweden has joined the NATO alliance, which is a welcome step forward for global security. It's unfortunate that a defensive treaty alliance like NATO remains necessary, especially so long after the original circumstances that brought it into being had changed. The Cold War was over when the USSR threw in the towel in 1991. ■ But the world still contains heavily-armed countries led by unstable autocrats. And the truly regrettable fact is that, no matter how stable and well-ordered we think they will be in the future, the dangers posed by sinister leaders will always be fast-moving. Much too fast-moving for anyone to spin up a thoughtfully-crafted countervailing coalition. ■ NATO doesn't start fights; its existence precludes them. An agreement to come to mutual aid in a time of trouble is also a commitment not to come to blows within the club over matters that can be resolved in more genteel ways. And it quite obviously has the effect of raising the expected cost and difficulty for any external power that tries to do a member wrong. ■ The alliance has always benefitted the United States. That is has never done so exclusively is the dead giveaway that it serves a constraining role in the world, and one worth sustaining unless someone supplies a compelling counter-argument.

March 4, 2024

Must everything stem from a diagnosis?

A Twitter user whose profile touts their status as a "neurodivergent blogger/author" submits the observation that "ADHD-ers usually have an interest-based nervous system. Meaning that a task needs either novelty, urgency, competition or interest for them to be motivated or focused. Learning this and adapting boring, everyday tasks to fit into one of these categories can be life-changing." A fine enough observation, perhaps, but what on Earth makes that an observation specific to a clinical diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder? ■ Strip away the para-scientific prelude sentence, and it describes most anyone with consciousness and sentience. Nobody enjoys "boring, everyday tasks" -- by definition! That's the literal purpose of the word "boring". Finding tricks to make boring tasks seem more interesting is probably productive for people with ADHD. It's also probably productive for most people without ADHD, as well. ■ Little passages like this one wouldn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, if it weren't for the insidious way in which they encourage people to think of perfectly normal stimulus responses as being symptoms of "neurodivergence" -- or to think that whatever makes them different also makes them unknowable to others. ■ Worse, it may well give people a permission structure to self-diagnose (and, worryingly, to self-medicate), rather than to pursue a documented opinion from a qualified professional. People are self-medicating with powerful prescription drugs, and the lack of clinical supervision can be dangerous. Even more dangerous is the emergence of black-market drug exchanges accessible via mainstream social-media tools. ■ There's nothing wrong with people offering personal testimony online; authenticity is widely sought, after all. But there are just so many examples of people touting their amateur observations as pseudo-professional claims that they cannot be divorced from the many worrying examples of unqualified, unsupervised, and underaged people convincing themselves that they can self-diagnose rather than getting real help. ■ And with contaminated and counterfeit drugs flooding the market, it's not out of line to call out the hazards early in the chain of events. People of goodwill shouldn't be comfortable with the trivialization of mental wellness into the province of self-appointed influencers.

March 3, 2024

You can't buy time

Long before Thorsten Veblen deposited the idea of "conspicuous consumption" into circulation, Benjamin Franklin had already identified the merit in keeping his head down: "In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary. I drest plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion. I never went out a fishing or shooting", he wrote in his autobiography. ■ By any reasonable standard, the basic material standard of living for any middle-class American today would run laps around the standard of living in Franklin's day. Running water, household electricity, fluoridated toothpaste, frozen foods, and flu shots couldn't be purchased at any price in his time. But the value of time hasn't changed one bit. ■ What's strange, though, is how much time and energy are spent on talking about ways to pass time. Aspiring "influencers" covet the profits of the "attention economy" while streaming services try to perfect the science of getting viewers to spend incrementally more minutes with their screens. ■ With our fantastically improved standards of living, one might expect the value of time -- to be "seen at no places of idle diversion" -- to have permeated our culture far more than in the 1700s. And yet it seems time itself is rarely valued. Only the occasional word of advice from someone who's vastly richer than everyone else even breaks through, as when Warren Buffett advised, "I can buy anything I want, basically -- but I can't buy time." ■ Lots of what makes our lives materially better is manifested in time savings, of course (there are countless ways to prepare high-quality family dinners in 30 minutes or less), so perhaps we're also so much "time-wealthier" than our predecessors that there's a temptation to value each minute less than they did. But we should beware the temptation to trivialize time until there is too little of it left.

March 1, 2024

Everyone's bearing something

To the dedicated observer, human nature barely changes over time. To observe and acknowledge that isn't a matter of fatalism, either: It's hopeful. A staggering amount of time and emotional energy are lost to the illusion that much of anything truly meaningful in life is really new and novel. ■ That matters because, if a person really likes their fellow human beings, they ought not want to see people extend or exacerbate their own unhappiness when there are so many good examples available of other people who have struggled with similar (or even identical) problems before. ■ One can barely look anywhere without seeing commentary about problems like social isolation or despair -- or seeing persuasive real evidence of them. But it seems too easy to convince ourselves that there are institutional answers to those problems. History doesn't bear that out. ■ An epidemic of unwillingness to consult history is in the air. And it's leading at least some people to believe the most extreme interpretation of events. If events seem extreme, then people sense justification in responding in extreme ways. Rarely does that end well. ■ But we should indeed consult history. The Talmud, for instance, offers this advice, many centuries old: "Blessed is he who meekly bears his trials, of which everyone has his share." The "meekly" part may be a religious judgment, but the "everyone has a share" part is merely human nature. ■ People often frame the advice, "You don't know what someone else is going through" as a call to kindness, which one might suppose it is. But even more than that, it's really a call to have humility and a sense of perspective. ■ Kindness mostly faces outward. Humility starts and mostly faces inward. We're all imperfect, and our actions imperfectly work to bring us closer to better things, if we're trying hard enough and with the right sense of goodwill toward the world. People who insist on perfection might put on displays of outward kindness, but if the kindness isn't matched by humility, they might just make themselves (and others) miserable along the way. ■ Everyone is "going through" something. Everyone has always been "going through" something. Embracing that fact gives us license to accept and accommodate human struggles instead of lamenting that the world isn't a utopia.

CDC to roll Covid-19 guidance together with flu and RSV

The respiratory diseases will all be lumped together for most intents and purposes

How warm was February 2024 in Iowa?

Enough so that the mean daily high was at the far tail end of the historical normal distribution for daily highs. In other words, the average day was a statistical outlier.

Nuclear power sector anticipates growth, but can't find workers

One part of the problem? People fail to think of nuclear power as being a "green" industry.

Cybersecurity breach affects 90% of US pharmacies

Ransomware once again on the attack

February 28, 2024

The Irish have been readers a lot longer than you'd think

Ireland has made a big deal out of its disproportionate impact on the world of literature in modern centuries, but there's also reason to believe it's been a literate culture for a lot longer than might be obvious -- as in, back to the days before Christianity came to its shores. Some are concerned that illiteracy in the modern day is holding the country back far more than is right.

More decent than a hedge fund

There's something truly wicked about institutions that charge premium fees for financial performance that's worse than what ordinary investors could have obtained with no real effort at all. Roger Lowenstein writes: "They regard investors not as partners but as pigeons. They practice their own form of socialism (socialism to benefit the privileged, mind you), extracting a tax on the owners of capital."

All lives have value

It would be wrong for a person to sacrifice another person's life as an act of political protest. It strains all reason to believe that it is any less wrong for a person to sacrifice their own life in the same way. Attempts to valorize a self-immolation are dangerous, but widespread.

February 27, 2024

Would you Bing that?

Microsoft apparently offered to sell the Bing search engine to Apple for use effectively as a private-label search tool, but Apple never took them up on the offer. The decision may have hurt at the time, after Microsoft had invested a fortune in Bing and never gotten really anywhere against Google. ■ But concerns are growing that Google's search results are deteriorating in quality because of the complex encroachment of artificial intelligence tools both within the search experience and as a major polluter of the content being searched. And it's difficult to see how Google will be able to successfully navigate those troubled waters without attracting lots of unwanted attention from regulators in the United States and abroad. ■ Being the dominant incumbent in a market is usually fun while it lasts, but no such quasi-monopoly lasts forever (just ask fallen legends like Netscape Navigator, which once had a 90% market share for web browsers, or Sears, Roebuck & Co., which was once so big it could move GDP figures). How a company manages the arrival of new competitors in a changed market determines how well (and whether) it survives. ■ The advent of mass-scale artificial intelligence may be that turning point in the search-engine market. Microsoft or some other competitor may be able to finally break off a piece of Google's massive 82% share of the pie. With the terms of the competition under such significant pressure to change, it may well turn out to be Microsoft's lucky break that it never managed to unload Bing when it wanted to.

Modern satellite imagery is a marvel

Satellite views of the continental United States are granular enough to catch the minute-by-minute eruption of grass fires

Don't fall for the "chemtrail" nonsense

An otherwise sensible observer in Central Iowa wants to know why he's seeing dark shadows below the vapor trails visible behind high-flying aircraft, musing aloud (to the Internet) that he thinks something is suspicious about what he's seeing. ■ The phenomenon is easy to explain without the aid of any conspiracy theories. Airplanes quite frequently travel at altitudes of 35,000 feet and even higher. There are always a few overhead. And when wispy cirrus clouds form at lower altitudes (like 25,000 feet, where clouds were overhead all morning in the region), then the contrails formed at 35,000 feet simply cast shadows on the clouds 10,000 feet below them. No need to believe in conspiracy theories over "chemtrails" or any other such nonsense: It's just the Sun and the clouds. ■ There is no shortage of people who are willing and eager to presume that the contrails formed behind high-altitude aircraft are evidence of something sinister. The problem with letting it go on is that self-government depends quite heavily on the judgment of ordinary people. We don't have to be experts, but we do need to know how to evaluate evidence and apply sound reasoning. An unattended gullibility that opens the door to wild conspiracy theories is a dangerous social weakness, because it invites bad actors to introduce malicious misdirection into the public mind.

February 26, 2024

A live look at the nation's electrical grids

Amazing, really, that an up-to-the-hour look at demand is always within reach

Who wants to buy a frat house?

A fraternity house at the University of Northern Iowa is on the market for $1.3 million. There's a good chance the buyer will need to replace the carpets.

Petitions against the Electoral College are laughably useless

Anyone who thinks they're really accomplishing anything to affect the outcome of the 2024 election by signing an online petition to "end the Electoral College" is painfully naive. Above and beyond any other consideration, the Electoral College is a feature of the Constitution, and changing it requires a Constitutional amendment -- which takes a great deal more actual organizational effort than publishing a digital petition. It's a slow, methodical process, and certainly not one that will have any outcomes before November. ■ Furthermore, online "petitions" are really nothing more than open letters with lots of co-signatories. Maybe that's the kind of performative behavior that satisfies some people -- there's nothing wrong with co-signing an open letter. But it's a far cry from doing anything with binding legal effect. Real petitions have to be signed, delivered, and validated to local authorities. ■ The Electoral College has deficiencies, to be sure. But even if there were an expedited process for jettisoning it, the process is hardly the core problem. It goes too often without notice that certain characteristics made the Electoral College work when the Constitution was new and the country suffered from a deficit of good communication. It took quite a while for news to make its way from one end to the other: The state of Georgia, for instance, was removed by about two or three weeks of travel from New York City in 1800. There were no telegraph cables, high-speed trains, seafaring steamships, or even Pony Express carriers available. ■ Sending elected delegates rather than couriers with vote totals may not have ultimately led to the sort of selection by the best and brightest that the Framers may have intended, but it did reduce the odds that someone could cause mayhem along the way. A set of elected delegates (each of whom would have faced prosecution if they had lied about their credentials) form a much harder device to counterfeit or corrupt than a lone carrier bearing a certificate with a vote count. ■ Today, we neither rely on the wisdom of those individual electors, nor do we need their physical presence to know who won from state to state. But the process of making the Presidential election a state-by-state event does still serve a useful purpose (beyond the original Federalist intent of protecting small states from being overwhelmed by big ones): It helps to compartmentalize shortcomings in local vote counts or disputes over electoral processes. ■ Dumping all votes together into a common national popular vote would raise the stakes for disputing vote totals to a level that could invite legal disputes that could prove terminal to the process. Votes with margins measured in the thousands would open the door to disputes and recounts in virtually unlimited numbers of jurisdictions. ■ The Electoral College, even with its shortcomings, still serves to compartmentalize results -- acting like watertight compartments aboard a ship, so that the damage done by a failure in one state is contained to only that state. That also sharpens the accountability of the officials responsible for the process. Florida made a mess of the 2000 election, and the state immediately undertook corrective reforms to avoid repeating the "hanging chad" nightmare. Georgia became an important battleground state in 2020, but despite extraordinary (and probably illegal) pressure, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger maintained his integrity, under the knowledge that "We've got to follow the law, follow the Constitution; we follow the numbers." ■ Any system that would pivot to a national popular vote would necessarily have to empower a bureaucracy at a national scale to oversee the count, and probably to harmonize details like ballot designs and counting procedures. Every state can issue its own drivers' licenses, but all Americans traveling overseas end up with the same style of passport. Imagine, then, if a national voting agency were to impose a badly designed ballot or to be managed by a political appointee more susceptible to pressure than Brad Raffensperger. The consequences of nationalizing the vote would mean much higher stakes than under the Electoral College. As has often been said, sometimes a cure is worse than the disease.

February 25, 2024

The long road to becoming Churchill

By the time he became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill had seen it all. He was 65 years old, had served in Parliament intermittently for 40 years, and had served as an officer on the Western Front of the First World War, as head of the Royal Navy, and as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The circumstances of his selection as Prime Minister reflected the extraordinary peril of the war and the need to bring together a national unity government. ■ Sometimes a community needs an extraordinary leader, but it should never count on the right individual rising to the occasion. What every community needs -- all of the time -- is a set of dependable institutions that store the right lessons from the past and cultivate the individual leaders needed in the future. ■ Institutional inertia is always a hazard; sometimes an institution perpetuates itself merely for the benefit of the people inside it. That is all too often the case with bureaucratic creep: Rare is the bureaucracy like the Civil Aeronautics Board, which put itself right out of business. ■ But a functional civilization has to depend upon a broad-based range of institutions across the public, private, and public-interest sectors, all of which need to be forever interested in reforming themselves. The institution that fails to constantly reform itself -- and be seen to be reforming -- leaves itself open to challengers who demand disruption. ■ The problem with disruption (as a substitute for reform) is that it tends to reward the loudest promoters with the boldest claims -- not the people best prepared to lead. An outside perspective shouldn't be dismissed arbitrarily; lots of institutions can gain from the perspective of outsiders and ought to be open to fresh ideas. But those ideas need to prove themselves better than what came before. ■ Good institutions form the people inside them and make them better people. When people and their institutions learn together, the people gain useful experience and the institutions capture useful institutional memory. Churchill had shameful failures in his past, from which both he and his institutions learned. It was because both he and the institutions learned that he was prepared to become such a pivotal figure in achieving Allied success in the Second World War. ■ When we choose leaders, we choose institutions -- and when we form institutions, we form leaders. When we turn to disruptors, we risk losing the sorting and forming processes that deliver the greats.

February 24, 2024

Five essential items of advice from Warren Buffett

The 2023 annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders contains Warren Buffett's latest set of observations and advice to his fellow investors -- but they are freely available to anyone. He begins with a heartfelt tribute to Charlie Munger, who was Buffett's brilliant lieutenant for more than half a century. The letter continues with words that sound especially consistent with a thinker who wants to draw a heavy line underneath his most consistent and enduring opinions. ■ Buffett on the 2008 financial panic: "We did not predict the time of an economic paralysis but we were always prepared for one." ■ It seems funny to see a current-day reference to an event which is now a decade and a half in the rear-view mirror. But it is the unusual quality of the reference which makes it so important. Buffett knows that there have been panics in the past, and there will be panics again. And the farther we get from the last one, the greater the risk that its lessons will have been largely forgotten now. It isn't fashionable for a company to keep an unfathomable amount of ready money on its balance sheet: Buffett is acknowledging that Berkshire's more than $160 billion in cash (and cash-like Treasury bills) looks excessive by popular standards. But some businesses are more than just machines for generating short-term profit; in this case, Buffett views Berkshire as an intrinsically valuable national asset to America, and its capacity to weather even the worst conceivable economic storms is what keeps it safe. ■ Buffett on being wary of people with the wrong incentives: "Wall Street -- to use the term in its figurative sense -- would like its customers to make money, but what truly causes its denizens' juices to flow is feverish activity. At such times, whatever foolishness can be marketed will be vigorously marketed -- not by everyone but always by someone." ■ It isn't fair to call the financial industry "crooked": There are crooked participants, of course, but the industry itself is heavily regulated in order to discourage outright theft and fraud. But the behavior of the financial sector is all too often directed by wicked incentives. One of those wicked incentives is the fact that, almost always, people working in the financial sector benefit from increased activity (via commissions, spreads, and other forms of payment), while personal investors are the ones who pay the price. "Buy and hold" isn't the right decision 100% of the time, but it's the right decision the vast preponderance of the time. But "buy and hold" investors don't pay for skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. ■ Buffett on the nation's energy infrastructure: "When the dust settles, America's power needs and the consequent capital expenditure will be staggering. I did not anticipate or even consider the adverse developments in regulatory returns and, along with Berkshire's two partners at BHE [Berkshire Hathaway Energy], I made a costly mistake in not doing so." ■ Berkshire's investment in the utility sector is nothing new; it's a quarter of a century old. And it has a reputation for good behavior so strong that politicians expressly invite them to come to their markets. So when that kind of experienced, reputable company looks at the regulatory environment and warns that conditions are developing that will stand in the way of keeping up with the country's energy demand, which is rising mildly but shifting in constitution from coal-heavy to natural-gas-led with a growing blend of renewables, it calls for attention. A robust, low-cost supply of energy is one of the most useful things a society can have at its disposal. What stands in the way of that supply could end up limiting future economic and technological choices. ■ Buffett on share repurchases by publicly-traded companies: "All stock repurchases should be price-dependent. What is sensible at a discount to business-value becomes stupid if done at a premium." ■ Share repurchases (or stock buybacks) should be evaluated just like any other investment: If the market price is higher than the intrinsic value, it's a bad investment. If the intrinsic value is higher, then it may be a good investment (depending on what other choices are available). If a company buys back shares in itself at good investment prices, then it's doing right by its shareholders. But if it's buying the shares at bad prices -- perhaps with the intention of increasing the market price by stimulating demand -- then then the company's management is decreasing the company's intrinsic value, just as it would be if it were buying overpriced real estate or wasting money on a frivolous rebranding. ■ Buffett on stock markets and the people who make them: "Though the stock market is massively larger than it was in our early years, today's active participants are neither more emotionally stable nor better taught than when I was in school." ■ No single lesson is more applicable to every aspect of life than the one behind Buffett's loving critique of the stock markets. He is merely offering an investing-specific observation that human nature doesn't really change. Circumstances and conditions change, but people in this generation are motivated by the same emotions and instincts that drove our ancestors a thousand years ago. Speed and greed drive many a speculator. Those who can apply patience, detachment, and a sound evaluation of price versus value are the ones who do best in the long term.

Fast flights

265-mph tailwinds translate to extremely fast ground speeds

The teammates we want and need

In the future, books will be written about how the Ukrainian armed forces learned to do so much, so fast, on such a relative shoestring budget. In the words of analyst Molly McKew, "Ukrainians secured a shipping lane without any jets/long range anything & have basically dismantled the Black Sea Fleet without a navy[.] So maybe we should help them defeat Russia faster so their expertise/capacity can help solve other security challenges". ■ Something is terribly wrong with anyone who fails to see the tremendous value in finding and helping allies like Ukraine.

A 57° swing

Current models forecast a drop from a 72° high on Monday afternoon in Des Moines to a 15° low on Wednesday morning.

New rules

New rule: If you find yourself typing the letters "IYKYK" ("If You Know, You Know"), delete your draft and throw your phone into a pot of boiling soup or under the tires of the nearest cement truck. The only thing accomplished by any post containing "IYKYK" is to irritate the people who don't know what you're talking about. The people who do know don't need to be told that they know the secret code...they already know!

Where the wind blows softly across the plain

Some of the residents of Adams County think there are too many wind turbines in southwest Iowa already. But this is really at the heart of the issue: The chair of the county's board of supervisors "said that the population of Adams County has decreased by 42% since the 1970 census." Wind turbines create substantial value (including taxes!) for places that have been de-populating -- and where raising taxes on local farmers is unlikely to go over well. That's a major net social good.

February 23, 2024

Don't pet the engineers

The Portland District of the US Army Corps of Engineers shares this delightful take: "This week is National Engineers Week. Make sure to show your appreciation by spontaneously running up and hugging all your engineer friends. They'll love it." Those who have observed the long-standing advice "Don't pet the engineers" will be delighted with the correction.

The classic stadium-hostage gambit

Jerry Reinsdorf has started threatening the City of Chicago that he'll posthumously yank the White Sox from town if he doesn't get public funding for a new baseball stadium. ■ It's all fun and games until some dupe decides to trot out a design based on the Metrodome to host the Bears and the Sox together. (All bad ideas make their comebacks.)

The saddest, truest fact

Tymofiy Mylovanov writes: "Russia has only one specific military advantage at this time - the complete disregard for human life [Russian and Ukrainian]. Constant human meat assaults prove this". If only he were wrong.

That's why dematerialization sticks

A paperback only available for $97.64 on Amazon can be downloaded to a Kindle for 99 cents. For that kind of difference, one could buy a used Kindle and the digital download and still come out ahead.

Back to the wrong future

Less 1982, more 1992 -- please. The return of all too many artifacts of the late Cold War is depressing. At least Leonid Brezhnev had the decency to drop dead after 18 years running the Kremlin.

February 22, 2024

Taxing math

There is no such thing as a sales tax that only affects the seller. No matter how it is collected, or who cuts the check to the government, any tax on the sale of a good or a service is paid by the buyer and the seller alike. ■ How much is paid by which party depends mainly on who wants the exchange to happen more. Economists will call this elasticity, and the resulting distribution of who pays how much goes by the name of tax incidence. ■ But because any sales-related tax raises the price at which an exchange takes place, we can draw a tidy little graph to illustrate that both buyer and seller contribute to the ultimate cost of the tax. Nobody pays it all; nobody gets away without paying some. ■ Cutting the check isn't the same as paying the price. This fact is essential for anyone to understand before they try to engage in anything remotely close to economic analysis. Yet there are those talk as if only someone else pays for tariffs. This is not just nonsense, but actively malicious misdirection. ■ Tariffs are, after all, sales taxes imposed on imported goods. They are just as subject to the laws of economics as any other taxes -- which means that tariffs, too, are paid in some proportion each by both buyers and sellers. So when someone loudly floats a proposal for a 60% tariff as though it would be paid entirely by people living across the ocean, that reveals them to be either irredeemably dishonest or inexcusably ignorant.

February 21, 2024

Repression and civilizational consequences

Foreign Policy editor James Palmer muses, "[I]t's remarkable how little art and culture we get out of modern China proportional to its size and wealth, and it isn't for a lack of creativity or intelligence on the part of the people there"; "Never underestimate how all-pervasive, self-protective, and petty censorship becomes in authoritarian regimes." ■ Arts, letters, and culture on many historical occasions have emerged or endured, whether taken underground or carried out as acts of resistance against oppression imposed by others. The spiritual songs of enslaved people in the American South are a widely-known example. Jewish art under tsarist Russia and the Korean Language Society formed under Japanese occupation serve to illustrate the universality of the phenomenon. ■ A people living under occupation can turn to their arts as a means of finding unity: Bonding under stress is what drives prisoners of war to tap in code through prison walls to one another. But the quashing effect seems to be more pronounced when the repression comes from what seems like "within": When oppressor and oppressed start from the same cultural background, it's harder to distinguish one from the other. ■ And it is impossible as a result to know just how much potential cultural output is being lost because of self-censorship under the Chinese Communist Party, for one example. We know that artists are punished, even for the mildest of transgressions against a hyper-sensitive state: Exile seems to be the only source of freedom. The number of movies un-filmed, songs un-recorded, canvases un-painted, and books un-written under the CCP is flatly unquantifiable. ■ Domestic censorship and repression have civilizational consequences. The entire world is made poorer when the humanities are silenced within any culture. We learn from each other, influence other styles, and blend unexpectedly as we share. That colossal self-censorship is taking place among two out of every eleven people living now on planet Earth, all because of an inflexible and hyper-sensitive regime, ought to be a cause for alarm to us all.

February 20, 2024

The spirit of resistance

Yulia Navalnaya promises to carry on in the spirit of her husband, killed (whether directly or indirectly) by the Kremlin regime

February 19, 2024

Stop ranking the Presidents

Presidents' Day is a popular holiday on which to engage in the particularly frivolous game of "Rank the Presidents", and 2024 is no exception. Another ranking of the Presidents has been published, and all of the predictable reaction is easy to find in all of the usual places. ■ This isn't to say that Presidents are all the same. America has been blessed with some exceptional leaders (almost everyone rates Washington and Lincoln as the two most deserving of praise), and we've had some terrible ones (James Buchanan, for instance, is an undisputed failure). But the notion that there is some kind of effective transitive property of Presidential quality is awfully misleading. ■ What matters most in leadership -- whether at the Presidential level or at the local PTA -- is the momentum of the leadership being applied. Is the leader moving things, insofar as they are capable, in a positive direction or a negative one? ■ The Executive Branch under James Madison wasn't the same as it was under Ulysses S. Grant, which wasn't the same as the one led by Herbert Hoover, which was utterly transformed by the time George H. W. Bush was Chief Executive. The roles are almost entirely beyond apples-to-apples comparison with one another, to say nothing of the environment in which the different Presidents acted. ■ Moreover, the subjectivity of comparative Presidential ratings is redoubled by the consequences no President can control. Should James Madison be rated based upon circumstances he alone could control, or by what he did in the face of what was thrust upon him (like the War of 1812)? Is it fair to rank him based upon his Presidency alone, or do we consider related contributions like Fathering the Constitution (in other words, is it like an award for Best Actor, or for Lifetime Achievement)? Do we vote based solely upon the consequences of what happened, or do we consider the opportunity costs of paths not taken (a measure by which all of the first fifteen Presidents would deserve some rebuke for failing to end slavery)? By how much should those opportunity costs be weighted? ■ And how far do they deserve credit or blame for the consequences of their choices? If no statute of limitations applies, then Woodrow Wilson's score faces ever-larger deductions with every passing day, for giving institutional power to his personal racism and injuring the appropriate balance of Constitutional powers. Both failures impose compounding costs even today. ■ Presidents come in all grades of quality, but pretending as though we can differentiate between the #21 and #22 Presidents is like speculating whether John Quincy Adams would have been a bigger motorhead than Joe Biden, or whether Millard Fillmore would have been a better audiobook narrator than Bill Clinton. These things are strictly unknowable in empirical terms, and trying to present them with a veneer of quasi-scientific legitimacy is a mistake bound only to sow divisions.

"Fisk" is worth watching

Australia exports a lot of things, but TV comedy so dry the viewer practically needs to hydrate along the way is one of the best

February 18, 2024

Never, never, never give up

Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference: "Do not ask Ukraine when the war will end. Ask yourself: Why is Putin still able to continue it?"